Sir Keir Starmer faces onslaught from both sides of Labour after Hartlepool defeat

Sir Keir Starmer is facing an onslaught from both sides of Labour over its devastating by-election defeat in Hartlepool, as the Left mocked his "flag-waving and suit-wearing" and moderates demanded he talk more about aspiration.

Heavy criticism was heaped on leader on Friday morning after the party lost Hartlepool to the Conservatives for the first time since the seat's creation in 1974.

Disappointment over the 16 per cent swing to the Tories in the constituency was compounded by a series of council seats flipping from red to blue across Labour's former heartlands in the Midlands and the North.

Early results in the local election contests revealed that the Conservatives have seized Redditch, plus Nuneaton and Bedworth, both councils in the Midlands, along with Harlow, in Essex, and Northumberland.

Left-wing MPs ridiculed Sir Keir over his bid to project a patriotic attitude and his smart personal appearance, tools he has used to differentiate himself from Jeremy Corbyn, whose trademark shabbiness and perceived ambivalence towards Britain was seen as off-putting to voters.

As the defeat in the County Durham seat was confirmed, the Corbynite Labour MP Lloyd Russell-Moyle tweeted: "Good to see valueless flag-waving and suit-wearing working so well... or not?"

He urged the Labour leader to emulate Joe Biden, the US president, who "speaks for woke liberals and [the] blue collar Left at the same time". When Mr Biden entered the White House, "the Left was brought into top table, not pilloried", he added.

Diane Abbott, who served as Mr Corbyn's shadow home secretary, said on social media: "Crushing defeat for Labour in Hartlepool. Not possible to blame Jeremy Corbyn for this result. Labour won the seat twice under his leadership. Keir Starmer must think again about his strategy."

Momentum, the pressure group that sprang out of Mr Corbyn's original leadership campaign, said the "disaster" in Hartlepool showed that the party had "gone backwards" during the last year. It called on Sir Keir to "build a coalition with the Left on transformative policy" and emphasise community organising.

The Labour leader was also lambasted by centrists. The arch-Europhile Lord Adonis, who backed Sir Keir for the Labour leadership, suggested he was incapable of winning an election.

Stressing the importance of the party leader in winning over voters, the peer warned that a reshuffle of the shadow cabinet would only amount to "displacement activity".

He described Sir Keir as a "transitional figure – a nice man and a good human rights lawyer, but without political skills or antennae" in a withering article for The Times.

A senior Labour moderate told The Telegraph Sir Keir needed to be "more confident on crime and security issues" and "willing to talk about aspiration, people want to have their own businesses, nice detached houses with nice cars. There’s nothing wrong with that".

The source added: "We have to react to what the voters have been saying for a while now. We've got to be more professional internally. We've got to be better at our campaigns.

"We've been doing the same old campaign for the past 10 years about the 'same old Tories'. The country has changed, the Tories have changed – our campaign needs to change."

Dismissing the argument made by the Left, the insider added: "People don't vote Tory if they want a more Left-wing Labour Party."

Other critics focused on missteps made during the by-election campaign, rather than the party's wider strategy and message to the public.

One shadow cabinet minister said picking a Remainer candidate for a vehemently pro-Leave constituency "underlined that we hadn't quite got the point about Brexit".

The frontbencher said: "That sealed our fate. We had nothing to say on the doorstep... We had nothing to say about Covid and nothing to say about the post-Covid future. We've gone down in Sunderland, we've gone down in Nuneaton and Harlow. Nuneaton is where we lost the 2015 election."

Allies of Sir Keir defended his approach. Steve Reed, the shadow communities secretary, admitted the Hartlepool result was "absolutely shattering" and represented another brick in the party's once impregnable "Red Wall" crumbling.

However, Mr Reed insisted the party should double down on the more centrist approach taken over the past 12 months.

"What this shows is that, although we have started to change since the cataclysm of the last general election, that change has clearly not gone far enough in order to win back the trust of the voters," he told BBC Breakfast.