STOKE-ON-TRENT, Staffordshire – A few hours before the polls closed in Stoke-on-Trent Central on Thursday night, Neil Mason and his son Tom stepped out of the Bentilee Neighbourhood Centre into the icy darkness, having just voted for UKIP.
“We need somebody on our side again, somebody working-class,” Mason, a builder, said. And Paul Nuttall, he thought, could be that politician.
It didn’t bother him that Nuttall’s campaign had been tarnished by a succession of careless blunders: registering his candidacy at a house he’d never lived in, falsely claiming on his website that close friends had died at Hillsborough, and failing, when put on the spot, to name the six towns that make up the city of Stoke-on-Trent.
That was just the rough-and-tumble of politics. Other leaders had been worse. “He’s worth a go,” Mason said.
Mason’s family had traditionally supported Labour, but he’d grown tired of the main parties in Westminster not paying attention to people struggling to make ends meet in areas like this. Immigration was his main concern: “We should be looking after our own,” instead of letting foreigners crowd already-strained public services, he said.
He wasn’t alone. Gary Parton and his wife Andrea also voted for UKIP. “Immigration only, one reason,” Gary explained brusquely when asked why. The Partons, too, had been Labour voters most of their lives, but didn’t think the party had done enough to improve living standards for local people in the decades they’d held the seat.
Across the city, more than 300 UKIP activists were trying to persuade others to venture out in the grim conditions – Stoke was, at the time, being lashed by Storm Doris – to vote for their party leader. And with voting soon to close, they were hopeful of pulling off a stunning victory that would eject Labour from a seat it has held since 1950, sending Nuttall to Westminster as UKIP’s second MP.
“Things are likely to be very, very close,” one Nuttall staffer said.
But on rival campaigns, aides told a different story.
Throughout the day, sources in the Liberal Democrats were hearing from their people on the ground that Labour would win relatively comfortably, with Nuttall a distant second. The real question, they said, was not whether Nuttall would challenge Labour for the victory, but whether he would be overtaken by the Conservatives and pushed into third place.
Their forecasts turned out to be accurate.
At just after 2am on Friday morning, officials in the community sports centre where the ballots were tallied announced that Nuttall had lost by more than 2,600 votes. Despite everything the party had thrown into the contest in the last six weeks, he managed to increase UKIP's share of the vote by only 2% from its result at the 2015 general election.
Gareth Snell, a 31-year-old Labour councillor, won the seat with 7,854 votes (37%) to Nuttall's 5,233 (25%).
On paper, Stoke had seemed wide open for UKIP to win: a constituency where nearly 70% voted to leave the European Union last summer, with a high proportion of working-class families who feel like they’ve been left behind by globalisation.
Labour had held the seat since it was formed in 1950, but was already losing its grip before Brexit. Tristram Hunt, whose decision to quit in January to run the V&A Museum in London triggered the by-election, saw his margin at the 2015 general election narrow to 5,179. Many voters were so disgruntled with Labour they simply didn't turn up to the polls: Turnout in 2015 was less than 50%, the lowest in the country.
After Brexit, and with Labour growing increasingly weak and distracted under Jeremy Corbyn, Nuttall figured Stoke would be a golden opportunity to seize a foothold in Labour’s industrial heartland. Win Stoke and he would increase the party's presence in Westminster and cement his own personal credibility. More than that, it would prove UKIP had lasting mainstream appeal beyond Brexit and Nigel Farage.
It didn't happen. And as they picked over the results in the early hours of Friday morning, campaign insiders and political pundits laid some of the blame for the comprehensive defeat on Nuttall himself.
The UKIP leader’s campaign gambled that he could win over voters with his personal appeal as a sort of cheerful, patriotic everyman. Instead, his character became a central issue, due to his blunders. Questions about Hillsborough dogged his campaign until the end.
"The whole Hillsborough issue wasn’t an issue on the doorstep here,” Nuttall told journalists shortly after the result, but conversations with voters outside polling stations suggested that it did raise questions about whether he could be trusted.
Some voters may have rejected Nuttall because they concluded he was an outsider who didn’t know or care much about the city and wanted to use it as a quick route to Westminster. “He’s not even from Stoke. He’s just an opportunist,” said Tim Dale, a Labour voter, who spoke to BuzzFeed News outside the polling station at Bentilee Neighbourhood Centre, situated in one of the city's more deprived areas, where the party was expected to thrive.
It wasn’t just the candidate, though, campaign insiders said. UKIP’s operation on the ground in Stoke wasn’t nearly as good as that of the larger political parties, even though it was more professional than during previous by-elections.
Hundreds of volunteers canvassed door-to-door, handing out leaflets – one voter said there was hardly a day he didn’t come home from work and find a “sorry we missed you” card from UKIP waiting – but Labour was simply better at getting out its vote, observers said.
Anecdotally, according to campaign operatives, turnout was relatively high in parts of the city where there were large numbers of students and ethnic minorities – voters thought unlikely to have backed UKIP. In the predominantly working-class areas, however, turnout was said to be poor, suggesting that for all its efforts UKIP had not motivated many of those it was targeting.
That’s not to say Labour’s campaign was flawless. Its candidate, Snell, was also the subject of negative media attention for past statements. He was forced to apologise for old tweets in which he'd made offensive remarks about women.
His description of Brexit as a "pile of shit" seemed remarkably indiscreet for a politician aspiring to represent a mainly Eurosceptic city. That Labour's share of the vote slipped by 2% from the last general election suggests voters' loyalty to the party is still on the wane, despite holding the seat.
It helped Labour that the Eurosceptic vote was split almost evenly between UKIP and the Conservatives. Jack Brereton, the Tories’ 25-year-old candidate, received 5,154 votes, or 24%. His tally combined with that of Nuttall amounted to just under half the votes cast, compared with Snell’s 37%.
That underlines the party’s existential dilemma: With the Conservative government charting a course for a full break from the European Union, UKIP has been pushed to the margins politically, marginalised on its core issue.
“This is the death knell for UKIP,” Sal Brinton, the Liberal Democrats' president, told BuzzFeed News after the result on Friday morning.
The immediate questions were about the party leader's future.
Nuttall arrived at the counting venue at about 1:30am on Friday morning and tried to appear breezy even as it became clear Labour was on track to hold the seat. As the results were read, he smiled phlegmatically, but his fingers twitched anxiously. When Snell took the podium to give his acceptance speech, dozens of journalists and cameras thronged around Nuttall, scrutinising his expression.
“I’m going nowhere,” Nuttall said, when pressed on whether he will stand down.
Aides and security guards then bundled him out of a side door into the car park, pursued by a scrum of journalists. Nuttall drove off, escorted by police. Inside the hall, UKIP chairman Paul Oakden seemed flustered and unsettled as he strode down the corridor talking loudly to a colleague on a mobile phone.
He won’t be the only one in the party who feels that way. This was a “crunch test” for UKIP, said Matthew Goodwin, a professor at the University of Kent, and they flunked it. “Put simply, if UKIP cannot win Stoke Central amid a Labour party in meltdown, then what can they win?”