Good morning, and good grief, that is quite an astonishing result: Boris Johnson has suffered two devastating byelection defeats that will once again put his leadership of the Conservative party under intense scrutiny.
It was rough enough to lose Wakefield, a red wall seat which the Tories took in 2019, to Labour again, by a margin of 4,925 votes – a result that could plausibly be explained as an ordinary mid-term bloody nose for the governing party. But the real marmalade-dropper was the loss of the Devon constituency of Tiverton and Honiton to the Lib Dems by 6,144 votes: the loss of a 24,000 majority, the biggest byelection reversal in history.
