Nothing feels as good as winning. It’s been a long time since Labour enjoyed a victory as thumping as the one it scored this week in Selby and Ainsty, a once solidly Conservative patch of rural Yorkshire, and Keir Starmer deserves to savour the moment. In little over three years, he has transformed a defeated and despairing party into a government in waiting. There have been some deeply painful compromises along the way, but finally he can argue that they are starting to pay off.
Ed Davey is equally entitled to be gleeful about recapturing Somerton and Frome for the Lib Dems, confirming that his party is well and truly back from the wilderness. The scale of tactical voting in both contests suggests that an iron resolve is forming among anti-Tory voters to do whatever it takes. Where they can run as insurgents against an unpopular government, progressives are riding high. But what happened in Uxbridge and South Ruislip suggests limits to that approach.
