Good morning. While you were sleeping, the Conservative party was having another meltdown. As was widely predicted, it lost two previously safe seats to Labour after yesterday’s byelections, with thumping majorities overturned in Wellingborough and Kingswood and an ominous showing from the Tories’ rightwing challengers, Reform UK.
Byelection defeats for governing parties are pretty normal – but it is the scale of the swing away from the Conservatives that makes such bleak reading for Rishi Sunak: in Wellingborough, the biggest such swing since the second world war. You can follow live coverage of the reaction here. For today’s newsletter, with the help of political correspondent Kiran Stacey and on-the-ground reporters Steven Morris and Sammy Gecsoyler, we’ll run through the results and what they mean. Here are the headlines.
