The records continue to fall for Labour. The result in the Wellingborough byelection, in which the party achieved a 28.5 percentage-point swing from the Conservatives, was the biggest Labour victory over the Tories since 1994 and the second biggest since the war.
Along with the victory in Kingswood, the party has now made six byelection gains since 2019 – the most it has made in a single parliament. The Conservatives have lost 10 byelections in that time – the most they have ever lost in a single parliament.
Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, called the results “fantastic”, adding: “By winning in these Tory strongholds, we can confidently say that Labour is back in the service of working people and we will work tirelessly to deliver for them.”
Labour’s swing in both seats was large enough that if repeated at a general election, the party would easily secure a majority.
On a swing of 16.4 points, as seen in Kingswood, South Gloucestershire, Labour would have a majority of about 60 seats. If the result in Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, was repeated nationally, it would be apocalyptic for the Conservatives. On one calculation it would give them just four seats in a general election.
John Curtice, a professor of politics at Strathclyde University, wrote on Friday morning: “These two results suggest the Conservatives still have a mountain to climb. Indeed, at the moment, they still seem to be struggling to get even so far as base camp.”
For Starmer, the results are a welcome relief after a month dominated by headlines first about his U-turn on his green investment plans and then the controversy surrounding two of its candidates in the north-west who were recorded making derogatory remarks about Israel.
Labour officials, however, will be slightly concerned that the Wellingborough result is an anomaly, given that the Tory’s candidate was Helen Harrison, the partner of the constituency’s former MP, Peter Bone, who was recalled after being found to have bullied a staff member.
One Tory activist said: “None of us wanted to campaign in Wellingborough, we just couldn’t face having to justify our choice of candidate.”
If Kingswood is more representative of national opinion, it suggests the Labour lead is softening slightly after three byelections last year where the swing was more than 20 points on each occasion.
Recent polls suggest the party has dropped in the polls since Starmer’s decision to scrap his £28bn-a-year green spending plans – though none have been conducted since Thursday’s announcement that the country entered a recession at the end of last year.
The Tories tried to put a gloss on the defeats on Friday, highlighting the low turnout in both seats.
Just 37% of voters turned out in Kingswood, and 38% in Wellingborough – below the mid-40s seen in recent byelections in Mid Bedfordshire, Somerton and Frome, and Selby and Ainsty. In both seats, the increase in Labour support was just half the drop in the Conservatives’ vote, suggesting that the opposition party is not fully capitalising on the government’s unpopularity.
If the Conservatives can persuade their voters to come out at a general election, party officials have said, they can still keep hold of power. Some are also keen to point out the success of Reform UK at both byelections, securing more than 10% of the vote in each.
“We have fought robust campaigns on the ground in both of these seats with local candidates,” said a Tory official. “But these byelections were always going to be hard. The government of the day rarely win byelections.”
The former cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg said: “I certainly thought this result would be worse … If we can reunite the right in politics there’s a real opportunity for us.”
Rees-Mogg has been at the forefront of efforts by Tory backbenchers to get the prime minister to tack to the right to claw back voters from Reform. Responding to Thursday’s economic data, one Conservative MP said Sunak should “cut business and personal taxes, reduce immigration, adopt radical measures to increase the size of the indigenous workforce”.
Sunak’s problem, however, is that he is losing votes on both sides and that any move to the right risks losing support, especially in the southern suburban seats being targeted by the Liberal Democrats.
Labour’s concern, however, is one identified by Starmer at the beginning of the year: that voters are not really moving their way but are instead so disillusioned with politics that they are staying at home. “The message on the doorstep was the same everywhere I went,” said one Labour activist. “Voters hate all of us.”
