The Conservatives Have Won In Copeland To Take A Seat Labour Has Held Since 1935

    Two by-elections were held on Thursday in Labour seats – with the party holding Stoke-on-Trent Central but losing Copeland.

    The Conservatives have scored a historic by-election victory in Copeland, winning a constituency that had been held by Labour since 1935 – on the same night that UKIP failed to take Stoke-on-Trent Central following a series of embarrassing mistakes by their candidate and party leader Paul Nuttall.

    Tory candidate Trudy Harrison won Copeland with 13,748 votes to Labour's 11,601, overturning a healthy majority in a historically Labour seat by focusing relentlessly on Jeremy Corbyn's historic opposition to nuclear power.

    Anti-Corbyn Labour MPs immediately jumped on the result as evidence the party is struggling. Labour candidate Gill Troughton was chased out of the hall by reporters, while an onlooker heckled "sack Corbyn".

    "The area has been ignored by 82 years of Labour neglect," the newly elected Conservative MP told BuzzFeed News in the early hours of Friday morning. "Tonight we made history but what I'm excited about is making progress."

    Harrison's campaign saw prime minister Theresa May make a personal visit ahead of the vote, which saw UKIP's local vote collapse as they finished in a distant fourth place behind the Lib Dems.

    At the by-election count in Whitehaven, both Tory and Labour campaign sources said the deciding factor in the contest had been the Labour leader's historic opposition to the nuclear industry, which provides thousands of well-paid jobs in the constituency. In one earlier interview Corbyn repeatedly failed to give a firm commitment to building a new nuclear power station in the constituency at Moorside, which could provide 20,000 jobs.

    Andrew Gwynne MP, Labour's campaign manager, was visibly upset after the result was announced. He had spent six weeks fighting to maintain Labour control of the constituency with a campaign focused on saving maternity services in the local NHS hospital.

    "We did not get the message across that the Labour party was pro–civil nuclear," he said afterwards.

    Meanwhile, fellow Labour MP Cat Smith suggested the result was a relatively good performance given the party's dire ratings at a national level.

    Labour's Cat Smith just told me "to be 15-18 points behind in the polls & to push the Tories within 2000 votes is an incredible achievement"

    It is incredibly rare for a governing political party to gain a seat in a by-election – the most recent example was in 1982, although arguably the last time a comparative gain was made was in 1878.

    Labour fared better in Stoke-on-Trent, where UKIP leader Paul Nuttall suffered an embarrassing defeat, dashing his party's ambitions to seize a foothold in Labour's old industrial heartland.

    Nuttall, who became UKIP leader in November, targeted the working-class constituency in a bid to become the party's second MP in Westminster, betting that an electorate that voted overwhelmingly for Brexit last summer were ready to abandon Labour.

    But he was instead facing questions about his future last night after falling more than 2,600 votes short of winning a seat that, weeks earlier, had seemed within UKIP's grasp.

    Instead Labour's Gareth Snell, a 31-year-old local councillor, held on to the seat vacated by Tristram Hunt in January, with 7,853 votes.

    Nuttall finished second with 5,233 votes. Although UKIP's share of the vote increased slightly from the 2015 general election, it was a disappointing return given the effort the party had made to win in Stoke.

    The Conservative candidate, Jack Brereton, 25, was only narrowly behind Nuttall in third, with 5,154 votes.

    Turnout was higher than many expected at 38%, despite heavy winds from Storm Doris battering the city throughout Thursday.

    The Stoke seat, which Labour has held since it was established in 1950, became vacant after Tristram Hunt resigned from parliament in January. Hunt, Labour's former shadow education secretary, was once considered a potential party leader but fell out of favour and quit to run the V&A Museum in London instead.

    UKIP were confident that Hunt's majority of 5,000 at the 2015 general election was vulnerable given Stoke's vote to leave the European Union and Labour's recent struggles.

    In an acceptance speech in the early hours of Friday morning, Snell had an emphatic message for the rival he defeated after an acrimonious campaign. "You have failed," he said, while Nuttall watched awkwardly.

    Nuttall was hustled out of the conference venue by security guards and campaign aides followed by a scrum of journalists and cameras. He brushed off questions about his future and was driven away with a police escort.

    Nuttall's campaign was marred by a succession of blunders, particularly his admission in a local radio interview that he had not lost close friends in the 1989 Hillsborough tragedy, as his website had claimed. Nuttall apologised, but questions about his honesty continued to surround the campaign.

    Snell's campaign was also marred by embarrassing public pronouncements. He apologised after it emerged that he had published offensive tweets about women on several television programmes and called Brexit a "pile of shit". But it is him, not Nuttall, who will now be heading to parliament.