When Tess Seddon first heard of the Yorkshire party, which launched in 2014, she thought it was a joke. Despite being a Yorkshire lass herself, brought up in the market town of Ilkley, she found the concept hilarious. “Why, when you have all the causes in the world, why would you choose to fight for a Yorkshire parliament?”
It is all the more surprising, then, that come June 2017, the writer and director ended up standing in the general election as Yorkshire party candidate, complete with a homemade rosette, mini-manifesto and barnstorming stump speech, demanding an end to two-party politics. “Imagine you could only ever listen to Ed Sheeran or Cliff Richard,” she told one hustings. “You’d stop listening to music, wouldn’t you? Why, then, do we have that system in politics?”
Almost three years on, Seddon has written a musical about the whole surreal experience. Say Yes to Tess, opening shortly at the Leeds Playhouse, follows her journey from sneering ironicist to paid-up political reformer as she found meaning in joining an arguably hopeless fight for a different future.
Seddon, now 33, stars in and directs the show, which tells the true story of her attempt to make political history in the constituency of Leeds North East. Standing for MP had never been in her life plan. Originally, she just wanted to write a play about “these crazy amateur politicians” who had their eyes on a very niche goal: the annexing of God’s own country from the rest of England.
Things changed when she went “undercover” at the Yorkshire party’s political conference. She was soon rumbled as an interloper when asked what her favourite Yorkshire film was and said Kes. Apparently, Ken Loach’s rather bleak tale of a bullied boy and his kestrel best friend was not the right answer for a movement celebrating the majesty rather than misery of the historic county: “They went nuts.”
She had spent much of the morning “sniggering” with an undercover reporter from Buzzfeed. But, come the afternoon, in a session about policymaking, something changed. “Suddenly I was like: look at all these disparate people coming together figuring out how they would run the world! I felt really moved. Half of me was like: this is completely stupid, they are never going to be in power. But then I looked at myself and thought: what am I doing to change things?”
Seddon developed the play on-and-off until April 2017, when Theresa May called a snap general election and she spotted a tweet from the Yorkshire party asking for candidates. “And I thought that was really funny. What political party gets candidates by just doing an open call? So I tweeted: ‘Go on, stand!’ as a joke to my followers. Then the party immediately messaged me saying: ‘We’d love you to stand.’”
She met party hacks at a cafe in Leeds and told them that, actually, her plan was to write a play about other people throwing their hat in the ring. “But then they said. ‘Well, why don’t you stand?’ And they said, ‘Do you feel represented in the current political system?’ And I said no.”
They told her: “You can do as much or as little campaigning as you like. We just want a name on the ballot.” As a Labour supporter, she worried about spitting the vote: “I said, ‘Well, I wouldn’t want to get 50 votes and then Labour lost by 50 votes.’ But the Yorkshire party said, ‘That won’t happen because no one will vote for you. No one wastes their vote in the general election.’” She laughs. “Then I went away and thought, ‘What an amazing, mad opportunity.’ And I thought, ‘Why not?”
It wasn’t long before she wondered if she was making a terrible mistake. She received an email from Daniel Gascoigne, whom she calls “the Justin Bieber of the Yorkshire party. I think he was about 19 and standing in Pontefract, helped by his nan. He said he got an email from the campaign manager of Labour in my area, asking me to drop out.”
Ukip had announced it wouldn’t contest Leeds North East, prompting Labour to panic that Ukip’s votes would all go to the Conservatives. This would imperil Labour’s Fabian Hamilton, who had been the constituency’s MP since the Blair landslide of 1997.
“So suddenly I was thinking, ‘Oh my gosh, what have I done?’” But she was at the point of no return. The Yorkshire party had paid her £500 deposit and she was on the ballot. She considered putting out a flyer saying, “Don’t vote for me!” but decided to carry on. “I thought, ‘Right, well, I’d rather do something hopeful and actually figure what I stand for and what I want from the world.”
The party partnered her with its “best door-knocker”, a physics teacher and railway enthusiast called Dr Bob Buxton. “He knocks on, like, 200 a day and his wife meets him with a sandwich halfway through.” Then she got the courage up to go out alone – and was astonished by the reaction. “I’d ask people, ‘Do you feel represented by Westminster?’ And every single person said no.” No one was rude to her and one woman even offered her a fiver. “I think she felt sorry for me. She thought I was very brave having my face on a flyer.”
The campaign quickly took on meaning: “It started becoming this real, galvanising thing. Suddenly, from being fairly apathetic, I started believing in my power to change things and, actually, everybody’s power to take part and participate in our democracy, for all its flaws.”
The only sinister moment came after a hustings. A man came up to her and said: “Very well done, but you better not be taking Fabian’s votes.” She told him: “Actually, I don’t really believe anyone owns anyone’s votes.” Then, she claims, he leaned into her and whispered: “We know where you live.”
There is no suggestion that this person was a Labour official and, in the end, Hamilton increased his majority to almost 17,000. Seddon polled 303 votes, better than the Alliance for Green Socialism and the Christian People’s Alliance.
Was it worth it? “I still don’t know. I think it’s more a question for audiences to go home and think about. But I think the lesson I learned was that the most hopeful thing you can do is take part.”
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