MICHAEL FALLON was in gently reflective mood when he visited The Northern Echo’s offices this week, remembering how Quakers goalkeeper Fred Barber had saved his penalty in a charity shoot-out and how Tony Blair had saved his best line to last in a debate in 1988.

The debate, chaired by the then Echo editor Allan Prosser, had been about the controversial community charge, and Mr Fallon recalled, approvingly I think, how Mr Blair had finished his peroration by saying: “There is only one other country in the world with a poll tax, and that’s Papua New Guinea, and they are about to abolish it.”

Mr Fallon also recalled his first stab at the Darlington seat in early 1983, caused by the death of the long-standing Labour MP Ted Fletcher. In those days, in a local tradition, politicians stood on soapboxes around the Market Place, desperately trying to attract an audience with their rhetoric.

That by-election was seen as crucial. A couple of weeks earlier, Labour, led by left-winger Michael Foot, had lost the Bermondsey by-election to the Liberals with a 44 per cent swing – the largest British by-election swing. It was thought that Foot could not withstand another battering and the SDP/Liberal candidate in Darlington, Tyne Tees TV presenter Tony Cook, was the early favourite.

Labour’s candidate was local councillor Ossie O’Brien, whose father had been disabled during the First World War and whose mother had been a Peases’ mill girl. He had lost the selection process to Fletcher by just one vote 20 years earlier and Jack Cunningham, the Copeland MP who came from Durham, was sent to manage the campaign that would give him a belated shot at a Parliamentary career.

The eyes of the nation were on the town. It regularly featured on the national nine o’clock news, and in the TV spotlight, Cook, the TV presenter, quickly fell away. In the bitterly cold Darlington spring, it became a two-cornered soapbox showdown: O’Brien versus Fallon in the market place.

Snow fell on polling day, March 24, and O’Brien won, by 2,414 votes. It was a profound victory.

It killed the momentum of the newly formed SDP/Liberal alliance, and when Cunningham arrived in triumph with O’Brien at the House of Commons, a senior Labour figure snarled at him: “You bastard, you’ve saved Foot.”

O’Brien was sworn in on March 29. He made his maiden speech on April 14. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher dissolved the House on May 13, calling a general election for June 9. She had been very unpopular, but the Falklands War and the improving economy had boosted her ratings – and O’Brien’s victory had left Labour fighting under a left-wing leader who had no hope of winning over the middle ground.

Foot’s manifesto has been described as “the longest suicide note in political history”. Thatcher won a 144-seat landslide, and O’Brien was one of those who was swept away, losing to Fallon in the Darlington re-run by 3,438 votes.

O’Brien’s time in Parliament had lasted just 45 days – the sixth shortest Parliamentary career in history. He is, perhaps, a Foot-note.

There are, of course, echoes today: a female leader proud of her strength on the international stage against a Labour Party on the left. Does history repeat itself, or does the narrowing of the polls suggest that history never repeats itself?