The one crumb of comfort the Tories are trying to take from the North Shropshire result is that Labour didn’t win the seat. Keir Starmer’s party came third with just under 10 per cent of the vote, a fall of 12 per cent from the 2019 result. Tory party chairman Oliver Dowden has been touring the broadcast studios today saying ‘there is no love lost for the Labour party — they should have been surging ahead and in fact they were sinking’.
Is this really true? The fear in progressive circles was that voters switching from the Tories would end up being split between Labour and the Liberal Democrats, thus meaning Boris Johnson’s party could have held the seat. This was a particular risk in North Shropshire given the Conservatives have held it for two centuries, meaning there is no history of tactical voting in the area. Perhaps Labour-inclined voters did grasp that the Lib Dems had a better chance of winning, and thus backed them over Starmer’s lot. Or perhaps the Lib Dems had a more attractive prospectus, which is what they are naturally arguing. There was also not a huge effort from the Labour party national machine in the seat, unlike the Lib Dems who rolled out their well-oiled by-election infrastructure. Tories returning from the seat said Labour seemed invisible, while the Lib Dems were all over the place like a rash. Either way, it’s not clear from this result that Labour are ‘sinking’, especially given their current national poll lead.
What is cheering those around Starmer is that Tory sleaze and incompetence has been a line they’ve been pursuing for well over a year now. There have been doubts at times that this was really the way to go: after the party failed to hold Hartlepool, for instance, some strategists felt it was time to turn away from the sleaze stories. But now this by-election result shows that it was right to build up all the little complaints about Conservative behaviour into a great sand dune that seems to be engulfing Boris Johnson.
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