Residents of Grimsby and Cleethorpes are no strangers to ministerial visits. This is the place Michael Gove chose to launch the Conservatives' Levelling Up plan back in 2022. Almost everyone, from Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson, to Jeremy Corbyn and Sir Keir Starmer have in recent years paid these towns a visit. On Thursday, it was the turn of Ed Miliband. Like those who came before him, the shadow climate change secretary was acutely aware of their growing strategic importance.
The electoral battle in Grimsby and Cleethorpes, Sky News' Target Towns, will be fierce. Labour will need an 11.7 point swing to win this newly-merged constituency back from the Conservatives. In 2019, residents in Grimsby voted Tory for the first time since the end of the Second World War. The old Cleethorpes constituency was always more of a bellwether, having voted Conservative since 2010. However, it has shed some of its rural, Conservative voting residents in the merger. In both these towns, residents were won over by the Conservatives' promises of levelling u