In recent years, the voters of Keighley have always elected an MP of the winning party so, given the latest polls, Labour’s man faces an uphill battle. But there are factors in his favour

Tucked away along the banks of the Pennine river Worth in the heart of Brontë country, Keighley is an unlikely barometer of British political life. Its stone chapels, Victorian terraces and old mills speak of socialism and Methodism, not the language of focus groups and spin doctors. But over many decades, “Keethli” (as it is pronounced) has sent an MP of the majority party to Westminster. Whoever wins here usually wins the country.

The constituency uneasily yokes a working-class textiles and engineering town to its well-heeled neighbour over t’moor in Wharfedale: Ilkley, where Bradford wool money migrated in the nineteenth century. This patchwork quilt of West Yorkshire is the north in miniature. Like two political plates grinding together, it has wealth and poverty: houses costing more than £1 million and crumbling back-to-backs at less than a tenth of that. It has rich farmers, but hundreds using food banks and a thousand claiming Jobseeker’s Allowance.

Theresa May’s snap poll caught the constituency by surprise, like everywhere else. The incumbent Tory seeking re-election, Kris Hopkins, is a serial non-rebel whose squaddie physique reminds us of his time as a private in the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment.