In a way, it was most beneficial that we got the sole parliamentary contest taking place on Super Thursday over and done with at the outset.  Experience in covering local elections tends to reinforce the national media's innate desire to see everything through the single prism of party political Westminster fortunes and its fixation with how polls would translate at constituency level at the next general election.

So the storming of Hartlepool - the former seat of New Labour's prince of darkness Lord Mandleson and once led locally as directly-elected mayor by one H'Angus the Monkey, otherwise known in human form as Stuart Drummond – deepens the breach of the red wall from the 2019 general election.