I know very little about Blackpool except for distant memories of Reginald Dixon and the Blackpool Tower organ and some miserable trips to Bloomfield Road when my team were playing the Tangerines.
I dimly recall that there were donkeys plodding along the sands and aggressive seaside landladies who featured in Les Dawson sketches.
However, my eyes are now drawn again to the Lancashire coast and to Marton ward in particular.
Last Thursday – October 3 – there was a council byelection because of a Labour Councillor, Sarah Smith, being elected as an MP in neighbouring Hyndburn.
Hers was a very strong Labour ward and I rather suspect that the local party was confident of retaining the seat.
What happened last Thursday may possibly be described as something of an earthquake at the seaside.
The Labour vote plummeted down by 23 per cent and the Tories plunged by 18 per cent.
Reform UK rose by 29.3 per cent to take the seat comfortably.
The local spinners will, as sure as eggs is eggs, be pointing out that the council now has 27 Labour and 14 Conservative members so the lone Reformer will be as a voice crying in the wilderness.
This interpretation rather misses the point.
However you slice and dice it, the rise of Reform is now a reality and the only crumb of comfort for the traditional parties is that Reform does seem to do extremely well in seaside towns like Clacton and Great Yarmouth but only in the inland constituencies where you have a character like Lee Anderson standing.
One of the iron laws of politics is that success breeds success.
The Liberal Democrats may have given little to our national politics apart from adding to the gaiety of the nation with their bizarre stunts but they have perfected the art of the doughnut.
This process involves a huge effort to gain one council seat and then using that as a springboard to attack the surrounding areas.
Once they have secured the ring, they move on to the wider franchise and, ultimately, the parliamentary seat.
Although I’ve shared more than a few pints with Lee Anderson, I have no knowledge of the battle plans or strategic thinking of Reform UK but I would be more than surprised if they were not now gazing at the sands, streets and boarding houses of Blackpool with a mean and hungry look.
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If the Labour victory in July 2024 can be described as a loveless landslide with a voter base that was wide but shallow, then the millions of votes piled up by Reform, with a very poor return in terms of seats won, has been described as similarly spread thin and not deep.
That is what the conventional wisdom tells us but maybe there is different mood music emerging from the Blackpool Tower organ. Returning for a minute – and most reluctantly – to the Liberal Democrats, we are reminded that one of their devious and sneaky tricks was to extrapolate the result of a parish council and seek to claim that Westminster was now within their grasp.
That technique is, of course, nonsensical as there is no clear read across from a few hundred votes for a parish councillor and bodies on the green benches in SW1.
Why Blackpool gives us pause for thought is the sheer extent of the increase of the Reform UK vote – up by 29.3 per cent – that certainly sends a shiver down the spine of Labour and Conservatives alike.
Let’s not get carried away by Marton and let’s see what a few more byelections tell us. Let us indeed keep a weather eye on the slew of local authority seats to be contested early next year but let no one be in any doubt that if Marton was an outlier and not an aberration then the sands are certainly shifting – and not only on the Blackpool beach.