What led to Labour’s historic loss in Hartlepool will no doubt be argued over by Corbynites and the Shadow Cabinet for the next few weeks in terms of policy and national strategy – as they are already doing this morning. Guido suspects insufficient time will be dedicated to examining just how poor was Labour’s candidate choice for the by-election: Dr. Paul Williams. Co-conspirators knew the obvious all along…

Given how precarious the electoral landscape was for Labour in Hartlepool, with a huge Brexit Party vote ripe for the Tories to win over, it was obvious from the start that selecting a Remainer like Williams was Labour taking the area for granted. Shortly after Guido first broke the news of incumbent Mike Hill’s resignation, Williams was spotted deleting pro-People’s Vote tweets. A sure sign he was about to try for the candidacy.

A day later, Guido exclusively revealed Labour was about to stitch the process up for Williams, compiling a shortlist of one and admitting to local activists both he and the party “aren’t quite as well informed as we’d like them to be re the town and our electorate”. LabourList editor Sienna Rodgers claims her B’nB host raised the stitch-up with her when she arrived in the town, despite not knowing she was there for the by-election.

Deleted tweets made headlines once again when it was discovered Williams had once posted about “Tory MILFs”. It wasn’t long before Guido unearthed more posts from him joking about the size of his manhood. Keir Starmer then fell flat on his face after wrongly claiming his candidate had deleted both the MILFs tweet, and posts in which he sucked up the Saudi regime after they paid for a junket to Saudi when he was an MP.

Locally the biggest scandal surrounding Williams erupted when Guido revealed he personally had been jointly responsible for a commissioning report that removed local hospital services from Hartlepool. It was Hartlepool TV what won it…

The icing on the cake finally came when Guido unearthed a deleted tweet from Williams in which he boasted about jetting off to Paris to eat foie gras – putting Peter Mandelson’s infamous ‘mushy peas’ story to shame.

This woeful campaign finally culminated in a car crash interview with Victoria Derbyshire, in which he was confronted about his MILFs tweet, his role in the hospital closure, and his Remainer beliefs – something he claimed the people of Hartlepool didn’t care about. This morning’s result shows how wrong he, and Labour, were…