Tell me that you are one of those people who think that byelection results don’t really matter and I will know for a fact that you are not Sir Keir Starmer. He understands from bruising personal experience how much they can set the mood music of politics and drive its narratives, give momentum to a leader or place them in peril.
I say this because the first byelection of his time leading Labour was a job-menacing disaster. It was May 2021, the rollout of protection against Covid was rewarding the government with a “vaccine bounce” and Labour was limping behind the Conservatives in the polls. The Tories inflicted a morale-crushing defeat on Labour at the Hartlepool byelection. To rub it in, Boris Johnson celebrated by appearing in the constituency alongside a giant inflatable blimp of himself. Corbynistas and Blairites found something they could agree on, which was that Sir Keir was a dreadful disappointment. His friends became acutely anxious that he was in mortal peril of losing his job and sighed with relief when Labour just squeaked a hold at the Batley & Spen contest eight weeks later. One of his allies describes this grim period as a “near-death experience” for the Labour leader.
The thought that those dark days are well behind him added extra exhilaration to his victory laps in Bedfordshire and Staffordshire to celebrate Labour’s double-whammy of byelection victories over the Tories in middle England. The tang of success is the sweeter for having previously tasted the ashes of defeat. By any measure, these were stunning outcomes with the swing from the Tories to Labour exceeding 20 points in both seats.
The triumph in Tamworth, the second largest Tory-Labour swing in a bellwether seat since 1945, has historical resonances. It is reminiscent of the epic byelection wins – one of them by a very similar swing in almost exactly the same area – that Tony Blair bagged on the way to his landslide victory at the 1997 election.
The swing to Labour was a shade lower in Mid-Bedfordshire, but I’d say that this was an even more noteworthy result. This was an exceedingly safe seat which had been represented by Tory MPs for nearly a century. At the outset of campaigning on village greens, in parish halls and on the doorsteps of thatched cottages, there were voices saying Labour was wasting its resources and risked looking foolish by trying to be competitive in such an archetypally Conservative constituency. The Lib Dems argued that they were the specialists at taking rural seats off the Tories at byelections, Labour could not possibly win here and Sir Keir’s party should step aside to concentrate on Tamworth. A vicious war of words erupted between the two opposition parties during which each accused the other of dirty tricks. At one point, Labour was even threatening to go to the police with allegations of breaches of electoral law by the Lib Dems. Victory here is a handsome vindication of the decision to show that no part of the country is a “no-go” area for Labour. It is also testimony to the energy of the party’s candidate, Alistair Strathern, and to the shrewd way the campaign was run by Peter Kyle, the shadow cabinet member in charge. The Lib Dems, who won almost a quarter of the count, are trying to steal a bit of the glory by claiming they peeled off some Tory voters, giving an assist to Labour. “Horseshit,” says Mr Kyle, who points out that, to the very end, Lib Dem leaflets devoted as much space to trying to undermine Labour as they did to attacking the Tories.
The one consolation that some Conservatives are clinging to is that these byelections are evidence of alienation from them, but not attraction to Labour. In Tamworth, the Labour vote rose by less than a thousand. They won because the Tory vote collapsed by more than 20,000. In Mid-Beds, the Labour vote was slightly down on the 2019 election. They won because the Conservative vote imploded by more than 26,000. The obvious point is that many usually Tory voters aren’t turning out because they are so angry with the government. “Our vote is on strike,” says one senior Conservative. “And you can’t really blame them.” The other factor, which is highly scary for the Tories if it also happens at the general election, is that their vote couldn’t be motivated to turn out to stop Labour. Among Team Starmer, this is taken as confirmation that the focus on “de-risking” the idea of a Labour government is working. Sir Keir would like more Tory voters to switch all the way over to Labour, but Tory abstainers help him too.
You will note that I have not applied the label “upset” or “shock” to these byelections. For a year now, the opinion polls have been telling us that the government is profoundly unpopular. So it is not so surprising that devastating defeats for the Tories at byelections are becoming routine. They have lost eight since the summer of 2021, four apiece to Labour and the Lib Dems, another echo of what happened to them in the 1990s at the fag end of a long period of Tory rule. Next up is a likely byelection in Blackpool South. Its Conservative MP, Scott Benton, is awaiting sentencing by the standards committee over a lobbying scandal. Also on the watchlist is Wellingborough following a parliamentary watchdog’s verdict that Peter Bone “committed many varied acts of bullying and one act of sexual misconduct” against a staff member. The Tory party is reaping what it has sown.
Unless there is a highly dramatic shift in the political weather, the byelections confirm the message of the polls that the Conservatives are heading for the exit and Labour towards government. Rishi Sunak promised his party that he could alter this trajectory. He’s approaching the first anniversary of his time at Number 10 having failed. Initially, he presented himself to the country as the fixer who could sort out Britain’s many problems. That strategy has unravelled because those problems are so palpably unfixed.
None of the five pledges that he made at the beginning of the year have been fulfilled and he’s going backwards on the commitment to bring down NHS waiting lists. Crumbling concrete was found in more schools in the runup to these contests. It was revealed that prisons in England and Wales are so rammed that judges have been told to delay the sentencing of people convicted of serious crimes and to spare lesser offenders from jail time. The chancellor prepared his colleagues for disappointment in next month’s financial statement by telling them that the public finances are far too dire to think about any tax cuts.
The prime minister’s attempt to relaunch the government and rebrand himself at the Tory conference in Manchester has flopped. Presenting himself as “the change” that Britain needs after what he called 30 years of failure has succeeded in aggravating every living former Conservative prime minister from John Major onwards. What it has not done is persuade voters to change their view of him and his party.
Labour will lean harder into one of its favoured narratives about Mr Sunak, which is that he is a leader without a mandate and a serial loser who flunks every electoral test that he is set. He couldn’t beat Liz Truss in a leadership contest. His party was routed at the local government elections in May.
He has lost a clutch of byelections. Only one has been won by the Tories on his watch. That was Uxbridge, where the result was driven by hostility to Ulez, not positivity towards him. Labour will increase the volume of its calls for a general election sooner rather than later to terminate a zombie government and put the country out of its misery. Labour people will make this demand not with any expectation that it will be heeded by Mr Sunak, but to spread the impression that he is an unelected, illegitimate prime minister who is terrified of facing the verdict of the voters.
Whenever they get into trouble as terrible as this, the Tories have a traditional remedy. That is to dethrone the leader. While these byelection defeats have thickened their despair and triggered another bout of Tory hair-pulling, there is no serious agitation to topple Mr Sunak. Replacing him would mean installing their fourth leader since the last election. This is surely too preposterous even for the Conservative party. The Tory leader is in a deep, deep hole and they are all stuck down there with him in the inspissated gloom.
• Andrew Rawnsley is the Chief political Commentator of the Observer
