A Clown

called Malice:

The Dimming

of Ben Houchen’s



Election Prospects

Tees Valley mayor, Ben Houchen

Scott Hunter

19 March 2024

If press reports are to be taken at face value, Conservative MPs now divide into three groups. In ascending order: Sunak loyalists, plotters and backstabbers, and those who have lost the will to live. All are braced for the next bout of humiliation – the party’s annihilation in the local council elections on 2 May.

But the scripts for the day after that drubbing have already been written: governing parties always do badly in local elections, say the Sunak loyalists; Sunak has to go, say the plotters and backstabbers; while group three will just quietly carry on as before, trying not to be noticed, waiting for it all to end. A contest that is, in reality, no contest at all will not be the final nail in the government’s coffin.

On the same day, metro mayors of the devolved authorities will also be up for reelection, but most of those are Labour, so there’s no contest there either. That leaves only the two Tory mayors – Andy Street and Ben Houchen. In these two candidates, as the embodiment of devolution and of levelling up, the government has a lot to lose. And of the two, recently ennobled, Ben Houchen has the higher profile, despite presiding over the England’s smallest devolved authority.

So, what are Houchen’s chances?

When he last stood for reelection, in 2021, he polled 73% of the vote. That’s a strong starting position, especially given that that election was held against a backdrop of the criticism of the government’s handling of Covid and emerging evidence both of cronyism in the award of PPE contracts and of equipment supplied not being fit for purpose. The first domino to fall in that scandal, Owen Paterson MP, had to resign later in the year. But in May, Houchen’s victory was in tandem with the Conservative Police and Crime Commissioner, Steve Turner, and a win against the odds for Jill Mortimer in the Hartlepool by election. A clean sweep for the Tories and Houchen’s popularity undimmed by concerns about the government in Westminster.

Helping him to victory were an upbeat message about Tees Valley regeneration from a very well-oiled PR machine, a very pliant local press, and the enduring popularity of his policy of bringing Teesside Airport back into public ownership.  He barely acknowledged the existence of his main rival in the contest.

So, what has changed since then? A recent poll put Houchen on a mere 19% of the vote. But the accuracy of that poll has since been called into question. And rumours abound. One of them being that it was his own team that was behind it. While this may seem unlikely, it would mean that he can present himself as an insurgent, something which is otherwise difficult when you are the incumbent who has coincidentally recently been elevated to the House of Lords.

Fighting the election on his track record

As in 2021, Houchen can remain aloof from government’s record. He need deal only with his own. It is wholly unclear at this point, however, just how tarnished his reputation has become in the past three years. There are definitely some negatives. And all of them are big.

In July 2021, Stobart Aviation, erstwhile joint venture partners in the airport, announced they were quitting, giving no reason for doing so. The aviation side of the airport’s enterprise has been in decline ever since.

At the beginning of October, shellfish started to wash up around the coast in vast numbers. Local fishers won widespread sympathy over the devastation this caused to their industry, and the refusal of Defra either to countenance that this may have been the result of pollution from the Teesworks site, or to compensate them for the loss of income. Houchen, meanwhile, sided resolutely with Defra, as well he might as it was shielding Teesworks from accusations of culpability in the disaster.

When we reported, in December 2021, that GE Renewables plans to build a mega-factory at Teesworks on ice, Houchen angrily denied it, and continued to do so until GE finally confirmed that they would not be coming at all. Houchen was scathing about GE at that point, as he told the Northern Echo,

“GE have been dragging their feet for some time now. We’ve pushed and we’re ready to go to build the facility. At my last meeting with GE I informed them that due to the massive interest from multiple would-be investors they need to hurry up as we're ready to go and if you snooze, you lose.”

It is not clear at this point the extent to which the public at large are aware that the ‘massive interest from multiple would-be investors’ has not materialized. Or that his management of the project may be a decisive factor in their unwillingness to invest.

In November 2021, developers Corney and Musgrave were handed an additional 40% shareholding in Teesworks, bringing their total shareholding to 90%. When this reached the press at the beginning of 2022, there were accusations that Houchen was allowing the developers to profit from the public money that was being put into the remediation of the site.

The suspicion that the developers were making vast profits while putting none of their own money into the project persisted, culminating, in 2023, in the launching of a review of the governance of the scheme in the wake of allegations of corruption. That report, while providing Houchen’s supporters with the headline that the review panel had ‘found no evidence of corruption’ was somewhat more thorough than the mayor might have hoped for. Go beyond the breezy Executive Summary, and the report is relentlessly critical of the way Houchen and his entourage manage the STDC project.

But then who reads the middle bits of a report like this (apart from potential investors in Teesworks doing due diligence before parting with their money)? Is the ‘no evidence of corruption’ line enough to calm voters’ suspicions that things are not as rosy as Houchen would have us believe?

Campaign launched, and launched again, and again

Houchen launched his reelection campaign on 6 January, then on the eighth, then again on the fifteenth. Given his PR in the past, one thing is noticeably muted in all three events, which is that there is little talk of jobs. Many of his previous good news press releases, dutifully regurgitated by the local press, have been to do with the forthcoming jobs bonanza in the Tees Valley, yet there was little talk of this in his election events. In fact, Teesside Airport and Teesworks were barely mentioned. Instead, for two weeks in January, he bombarded us with brand new big ticket items.

The 6 January launch concerned his promise to bring steelmaking back to Teesside. ( This was to have been a major part of the election campaign that had to be cancelled in 2020. By the time the election actually took place in 2021, Liberty Steel, who were the steelmakers in question, were embroiled in scandal and all their plans were abandoned).

The only problem with Houchen’s new plan was that the return of steelmaking manifestly has little to do with him. Steelmaker Jingye is preparing to create an electric arc furnace on its own land at Lackenby, next to the beam mill. This is not something brokered by Houchen and is not on the Teesworks site.

Two days later, he relaunched, this time with a promise to build a new hospital to replace North Tees. This tested even the grovelling loyalty of the Northern Echo, as health is not a devolved responsibility, so it is not within his gift to commission the build (we suspect that well-connected Houchen has got wind of the fact that a replacement for North Tees has been signed off in the relevant government department, and he has got in quick to claim it his own initiative. But, to be fair, it’s speculation at this point).

A week later, it’s launch number three. This time the announcement is of how he plans to spend a £1 billion windfall that has come his way as a result of the government cancelling HS2. Lots of big transport projects in the pipeline – roads, railway stations, town centre trams.

So, the election platform with the billion pound wow factor safely delivered before the arrival of the Tees Valley Review of governance (and mismanagement) at Teesworks, and shortly afterwards a court judgement against STDC and Teesworks in a dispute with PD Ports. Both were predictably damaging.

The dispute with PD Ports exposes Teesworks as an aggressive organization, prepared to try to bully its neighbours, and use public money to do so. PD Ports’ representatives have described the dispute as one whose outcome was a foregone conclusion, but one on which large amounts of public money have been squandered. And, as a major employer in the region, PD Ports’ opinion carries weight.

As for the Tees Valley Review, it delivered what Houchen most keenly avoids – scrutiny by the press. In an interview on Newsnight, he squirmed as Victoria Derbyshire exposed the lies he has told about how the developers operate at Teesworks, and how they take profits while investing nothing in the project. Newsnight may have a fairly niche audience, but the interview was brutal and damaging, revealing Houchen the charlatan to the wider public.

Having done the penance, it was time to strike back.

Houchen’s Supporters Disrupt Labour’s Campaign Launch

As Labour Party candidate for Tees Valley mayor, Chris McEwan, launched his election campaign on 16 February, a group of protesters gathered outside. Eleven in all, it took nine of them to hold up an enormous banner for the benefit of the waiting Northern Echo photographer. The legend:

“Stop Peel’s Candidate 

“Labour’s mayoral candidate proposed building 350 homes on our airport.

Don’t give Labour another chance to destroy our airport”

The protest by the incensed eleven was, it has to be said, less than spontaneous, as well as less than original. The banner was commercially produced, would have cost up to £200, and would probably have taken a week to deliver. On the other hand, there can be no denying that it was a publicity coup, wholly unexpected by McEwan, and covered extensively in the press.

When we spoke to Chris McEwan a few days later, he seemed a little vexed that his campaign launch had been upstaged in this way. And although he didn’t mention it specifically, he may have been equally vexed by the coverage the event got in the local papers, the Northen Echo in particular.

Was this because the fate of Teesside Airport is Labour’s Achilles’ heel? After all, it is widely accepted that it was Houchen’s pledge to bring Teesside Airport back into public ownership that won him the first mayoral election contest in 2017. Once in office, he duly did so. Now he wishes to make capital out of the fact that Chris McEwan was one of the councillors who, in early 2017, approved an earlier plan to allow a part of the airport site to be sold off for housing.

Does that mean that the airport is an issue that McEwan and other challengers for the mayoralty should be fighting shy of? Well actually, no.   Quite the opposite, in fact.

Teesside Airport: Still an Electoral Asset?

Time was when Teesside Airport seemed to have the capacity to generate endless headlines in the local press. In the autumn of 2020, we reported the Northern Echo publishing no less than twelve articles about it in the space of three weeks. None of them contained news as such. It was all just feel good factoring on the back of Houchen’s ‘ten year turnaround plan’ for the airport.

Reports nowadays are only occasional, such as, for example, the news recently that Fedex is to expand its operation there. Which is commercially significant, but, especially during an election cycle, lacks the glitter of new flight destinations to major holiday resorts. And one such announcement recently didn’t even make it into the papers. The following appeared on Houchen’s Facebook page in February:

Given that the airport is a private company, the promise of flights to these destinations should come from them, not from the mayor. It is more than crass to suggest that a commercial negotiation such as this should be the result of a mayoral election.



But whether Houchen has really had a hand in this or not, the fact that is plain for all to see is that the airport’s performance over the past three years has been lacklustre. Flights are relatively expensive, few destinations are served, domestic flights have all but ceased, and all in all the airport has not maintained the growth is saw while Stobart Aviation was airport operator.

In the meantime, Houchen’s ‘rescuing’ of the airport from Peel has become yesterday’s news. But the ultras have splashed out on the banner, so they’re going to have to get their money’s worth out of it unless it’s to end up like Ed Miliband’s tablet of stone at the 2015 election.

Houchen has fallen silent about the ten-year turnaround plan. So, there remains an issue about its future But also one about its past - why did Stobart really quit?

Did they jump or were they pushed?

More to follow …