THE last time a Conservative won in Hartlepool was 1959, and perhaps he secured his slender 182 vote victory through a little skulduggery on the cinema screen. He was Lieutenant-Commander John Kerans, who had no connection with the town that is currently the scene of one of the most important by-elections in the country for decades. But he was the “hero of the Amethyst”, perhaps Britain’s last great boy’s own naval hero, with his daring exploits being made into a popular action adventure movie. However, early in his career, the Irishman was regarded by his superiors as too much of a brash maverick to really do a disciplined job for the Royal Navy and so, in the late 1940s, he was appointed assistant naval attaché in Nanking, in China, on the Yangtze river.