Labour will need the stay-at-home voters who swung last week’s byelections

Keir Starmer joins the newly-elected MP Sarah Edwards and Labour party supporters at a byelection victory event at Tamworth football stadium. Photograph: Toby Melville/Reuters

I see that Keir Starmer has said that Labour is “redrawing the political map” (Report, 20 October); I am not so sure. In Tamworth, Labour’s Sarah Edwards got barely 800 more votes than the Labour candidate in 2019; and in Mid Bedfordshire, Alistair Strathern got fewer votes than the Labour candidate last time round. This scarcely suggests that Keir Starmer’s “five missions” are energising voters more than Rishi Sunak’s “five promises”.

In both seats, the Labour vote is of a piece with last time round, and the turnout went down by nearly 30% in Mid Bedfordshire and nearly 40% in Tamworth. Nadine Dorries’ share of the vote in 2019, around 38,700, isn’t far off the total number of last Thursday’s votes for all the candidates put together, around 40,700.