The rout of the Tories gallops on across the country, as yesterday the voters of Wellingborough and Kingswood stampeded away from them in yet more home-turf byelections – their ninth and 10th losses, more than any government in more than 50 years. The size of these Labour victories is becoming so routine that there’s a risk of people growing blase. Anything less would have been headlined a disaster, even in seats never in Labour’s sights: a swing of 16.4% in the South Gloucestershire seat was good, but the 28.5% swing in the North Northamptonshire seat was the second biggest flight from Tory to Labour since the second world war. Pause here to relish for a few moments the delightful factoid that a swing like that repeated everywhere at the general election would, according to some calculations, leave only four Tory seats.
The Tories could hardly have had a worse day, as the Office for National Statistics revealed the country had fallen into recession as voters went to the polls in the rain. Only a “technical recession”, they kept saying, the official definition of two consecutive quarters of declining GDP: I doubt anyone’s bank manager would be any more impressed than voters by a claim that your bank account was only suffering a “technical overdraft”. Confirmation from the statistics was hardly needed, as voters told canvassers they could feel the recession in their pockets after seven quarters of falling real living standards, the worst since 1955. The Tory die is cast, just as it was in 1997, when even a rapidly improving economy cut no mustard with voters who had made up their minds on previous economic mismanagement.
