BRUTAL ENDINGS: Andy Street out, Richard Parker in after day of drama
The race for mayor is all over. What happens now?
Dear Friends,
Welcome to this bonus edition of Inside Birmingham with Jane Haynes, which marks the end of the beginning. The election of the next mayor of the West Midlands is done. Next stop, the General Election.
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Inside a fraught election count
At Birmingham’s ICC, just after 9pm last night, the delays and recounts were finally over. Andy Street is OUT and Richard Parker is IN.
Squeaky Brum Time, yelled the Mirror’s front page today. They were not wrong.
I’ve covered a lot of election counts, from local to general, and it was the most exciting, tense and unpredictable day I’ve observed. From arriving at 9.30am to a quietly productive counting hall to leaving at 10pm, there was drama at every turn. Never have so many journalists, few of us renowned for our maths abilities, been seen huddled over calculators trying to make sense of margins and vote shares. Nor have the nerves of all the key actors been so tangible.
Jess Phillips was breaking the mould, doing Jess, touring the press gallery, calling it for Parker, her smile wide and her enthusiasm infectious. But the numbers didn’t seem to add up.
Conservative Northfield MP Gary Sambrook and Birmingham Conservatives group leader Robert Alden proved decent barometers of the mood inside the Tory camp - their mood switching from a jovial morning calm to afternoon frustration. At one point in the late afternoon, Alden burst across the counting floor to demand we report how Labour were blocking calls for a full recount of the Birmingham vote. Independent Akhmed Yakoob joined in. A bundle of votes had been left ‘unattended’ on a table, they claimed. Someone mentioned the possibility of ‘cheating’. “We demand a recount!”
The large Labour gathering grinned at the silliness of it. It was all stuff and nonsense, as returning officer Robert Connelly made clear - only he has the power to decide if a result is valid, whatever the claims to the contrary - but not before some tweets had gone out elsewhere repeating the angry demand.
Elaine Williams for Reform UK, Siobhan Harper-Nunes, the Green candidate, and Sunny Virk, the Lib Dem, stood around in small huddles with their supporters in big rosettes. They knew their place as mere extras in the drama unfolding.
Akhmed Yakoob made his presence felt, his entourage flanking him as he strolled around the ICC hall in his tinted glasses, his Palestine scarf draped around his neck. At one point he was stood with his team on one side of the hall while Ladywood MP Shabana Mahmood talked on the other side. She is his next target in his quest to bring a ‘political earthquake’ to Birmingham.
In the media gallery upstairs, there were flurries of intense activity, interspersed with runs to Subway and cries of ‘how much longer…’. With live blogs and social media threads to deliver, there was not much rest.
At different points, the counters and invigilators in all of the seven counting halls (one for each local authority area) were asked to make ‘bundle checks’ - a way of checking for any major discrepancies if the result is close. Invigilators had to add up the bundles allocated to each candidate, and flick through them to check for errant votes, under the tense gaze of agents for each party. In Coventry one such check triggered a full recount.
The yellow t-shirted election aides who were keeping the media informed got short shrift when they delivered the Cov update - it meant a two hour or more delay, just as news crews were prepping for live evening broadcasts and we were all wondering if we’d make it to the pub before closing.
But in the end, just after 9pm, the result was done. It marked a brutal end for a decent man.
Though his record on delivery was undeniably flawed, the way Andy Street went about his role as an ambassador and a voice for the region has been hailed by friends and foes alike.
Ultimately, he paid the price for being a poster boy for a party now too frequently lacking in humanity and bloated by an excess of ridiculous ideas and awful people. As one commentator deftly summarised it: “The race being close was credit to him. The loss though was down to the political company he keeps.”
As earlier readers of Inside Birmingham will know, I was calling the result over a week ago, declaring that Parker would win ‘by a margin’. It was on the cards, I felt, despite posturing to the contrary, and despite the Street effect.
This is a ‘Labour region’ in reality, a red wall with Birmingham at its centre. That it had not held the mayoralty since it came into being in 2017 was wholly down to Street, really, though each time Labour failed to make its case. This time he knew the cards were stacked against him.
But even Richard Parker had bought into the loser narrative, telling me he had only written a losing speech, so certain was he of defeat. Some frustrated Labour insiders seemed to agree it was over, sending me angry messages highlighting where the party’s campaign had gone wrong and highlighting who was to blame.
It was too close for comfort really in the end. Out of a potential electorate of just over 2 million, there were just 1,508 votes in it. It will be a vote recalled for years to come by anyone trying to make a case against apathy, and why using the ballot box to bring change is still the best tool we have.
Street polled 224,082 votes to Parker’s 225,590, and told his sympathetic audience: “It has of course been my honour to serve and to lead this place for the last seven years, I hope I’ve done it with dignity and integrity, and I hope I’ve bequeathed to Richard a combined authority and indeed a role which young aspiring leaders will want to aspire one day.”
Andrew Mitchell, the Foreign Office minister and MP for Sutton Coldfield, spoke of him glowingly: “Andy has been the most brilliant mayor. The West Midlands has changed for the better under his leadership. He’s brought in so much investment and has dignified politics and public service. He leaves some very big shoes to be filled.”
Those big shoes of Street’s will be walking boots by tomorrow - he told us he was hiking up Cader Idris, escaping to the Welsh hills he adores to draw breath and relax. He will be back though. I’d stake my hat on it.
As Sir Keir Starmer held court before the TV cameras, describing the West Midlands mayoralty win as ‘a defining victory’ for Labour, the man of the moment Richard Parker had become a bystander, craning to hear his leader’s words of wisdom.
Subsumed into a crowd of Labour councillors and MPs, party activists and staff holding up placards declaring ‘Britain’s Future’ with varying degrees of conviction, a clearly exhausted Parker looked oddly forlorn.
It struck me in that moment of great triumph that Parker will need an iron will to avoid becoming the party’s man in the West Midlands, a spur to the Government-in-waiting down in Westminster. If Andy Street’s legacy is anything, it’s that the region needs its own independent voice, able to lean in to those in power but also confident enough to push back when it’s needed and draw a line of place before party.
He’d been a bundle of nerves all day. While Street and his team kept their counsel out of sight, Parker paced and fretted his way around the ICC. Team Labour was there in force - local councillors, the city’s MPs, backroom staff and members ready to wrap Parker up in an embrace of sympathy. Few expected to be celebrating.
Parker himself admitted struggling with sleepless nights in the run up to last night’s result. He is likely to endure a few more at the enormity of his task.
As he prepares to enter the West Midlands Combined Authority on Tuesday as its symbolic leader, he might be tempted to start with little symbols - by getting National Express to make the Number 11 bus a circular again, for example, to appease those longing for its return, despite the congestion that forced it to be halved in 2021.
But he’d do better to work out how to fix much bigger problems. The city council’s Labour group is still in a mess, no matter the show put on of unity. The council’s finances remain in disarray.
Parker also needs to help find a way to connect with and understand the inner city areas of the region. Nearly 70,000 of them had been left feeling so deprived and alienated that they were ready to coalesce around a disruptive TikTok lawyer. Parker needs to come up with a better way of working across the region to give voice to those who have been ignored.
At least those Yakoob backers voted. 71% of potential voters decided not to bother, so unmoved by the prospect of backing this candidate or that one. Back to Jess again, who says most people in her constituency of Yardley feel they are utterly unaffected by who is mayor. “He’s just someone they see pop up on the telly now and again,” was her cynical take.
There will be transformation behind the scenes under Parker, no doubt. An overhaul of the region's buses, a hotdesk in Government, a skills revolution to create much needed jobs and a radical revamp of the way business is done with councils and communities are all on the cards.
When I met Richard on the Lickey Hills some weeks ago, while mention of his name was still greeted with ‘Richard who?’ he set out his vision for the mayoralty. The first council he pledged he would visit when elected would be Conservative Solihull and the likes of Dudley and Walsall. "I will need to work together on issues around public transport, skills and jobs, housing and increased prosperity for all of the region, and they are things those councils will want to deliver too.
"My style of leadership is to support and respect them and be an advocate for them in their places. If I am helping young people in north Solihull get access to jobs in the town centre (as part of the bus franchising model he will press for), I am sure Ian Courts (Solihull council leader) would be happy."
It's jobs and apprenticeships for the young that he says is the single ‘passion project’ for him. "As a small example, our region is short of 800 welders, that’s the kind of job that young people could be encouraged to consider, a great trade for life," he said, setting out a way of bringing FE and higher education settings, councils, businesses and the authority together to work more closely to find and train up the right kids.
He’s got plans for the high streets, including encouraging more street markets, for bus franchising and for pressing for the expansion of free school meals, among other things.
But he doesn’t think Street had put in place the right ways of doing business. "I will be looking to overhaul the constitution and its governance. We need to get leaders of the council much more involved in this project - this should not be all about the mayor. This is a collective venture."
He says he would discard the portfolio system currently used within the authority, where different senior councillors are assigned different briefs. "It is not working. They are pseudo roles that tie up leaders in work they don’t have time to do. There are also weighty documents being produced, often running to 3-400 pages at a time.
“I read a set, to help me appreciate what was being asked of these people, and it took me four to five hours. These leaders have their own councils to run. I highlighted 10-11 paragraphs that were really important for them to see and consider. Overwhelming already busy people is not the way to engage with people effectively."
He added: "We have got to create something that is far more collaborative. It is about having a shared mission and project here, that recognises the differences across the region in terms of prosperity and opportunity. The region is so big that you cannot make an impact without working with and through others.
"Success here has often been hailed as an Andy Street success. I believe there are times to lead from the front and times to lead from behind and they are both equally important."
He also pledged to drive through decision-making more quickly. “It is taking far too long to see action.”
With the city council in the doldrums, and a General Election looming, success for Parker here has undoubtedly given Labour a huge fillip. Now all eyes will be on him to become an arbiter of hope for the whole region. The West Midlands expects, Mr Parker. No pressure.
A very good piece. I didn't much like Street. He did far more talking than walking and although when push came to shove he picked party before region, he did feel different to the Westminster Tory party.
I thought the Labour campaign was weak and lacked messaging beyond "we aren't Tories, your vote please". I have a little hope in Parker. I have been unimpressed by what little he has shown and he will be a loyal lap dog of a party leadership that almost zero understanding of the countries (and regions) problems or how to improve things for the vast majority of its citizens.
I do hope you enjoy catching up with the telly and your sleep, Jane!
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