What an epically horrible night for the Conservative part, one of the worst in the party’s long and storied history. Tamworth and Mid-Bedfordshire, before yesterday the 57th and 98th safest Tory seats in the country respectively, fell to the Labour party. As if that weren’t enough, these by-elections also revealed that Rishi Sunak is in an even worse position than the current polls suggest – and the current polls suggest something approaching electoral apocalypse for the Prime Minister.
The Lib Dems in Mid-Bedfordshire claim that they helped Labour win the seat yesterday. The theory they have posited is that, with their tireless campaigning in the more rural portions of the seat, they helped flip a score of people who were previously solid Tory voters. These would have been people annoyed at this government, but who for various reasons would never vote Labour. In other words, the Lib Dems are saying that they acted as a repository for Conservative voters to register a protest vote.
To lose two previously safe seats, even with all the caveats, is a disaster for Sunak
Now, this could very well be Lib Dem spin. Simply a way to explain away the fact that they had stuck their neck way out in Mid-Bedfordshire, declaring themselves the front-runners amongst the opposition in the by-election early on, only to come not particularly close to winning the seat in the end. Perhaps. Then again, if the Mid-Bedfordshire Lib Dems are onto something here, it suggests a massive problem for the Tories.
If the Liberal Democrats can act, not as a party that splits the left-wing vote across the country but rather as a ‘none of the above’ receptacle for angry Tories, then the governing party could be in line to lose scores of seats to Labour at the general election that no one would have figured even might be in play. The Tories have been somewhat banking on the idea that the Lib Dems could get in Labour’s way in a lot of places. If instead they help Labour out with their presence, that will pose a huge, unsolvable problem for Sunak.
If this theory holds, we could see constituencies in the south-east of England, in the ‘blue wall’, go Labour as Tory voters either don’t turn out – or do and vote Lib Dem in protest at the current state of the country. Not enough of this category would vote Liberal Democrat for the party to gain seats in significant numbers, but they would be aiding and abetting a huge Labour majority.
Worse for the Tories, the two by-elections have thrown up have another issue for them to deal with. In both Tamworth and Mid-Beds, the Reform vote wasn’t large – but it was bigger than the Labour majority. If every Reform vote from yesterday was given to the Tories, the governing party would have won both seats. This suggests that the previous assumption that Reform would play no big part in the general election – that Sunak had successfully bought off right-wing voters with red meat on immigration and other issues – was incorrect.
Before to last night, it had been assumed by many political pundits that the Lib Dems might harm Labour, splitting the progressive vote in places around England and Wales and allowing the Tories through the middle sufficiently to stay competitive in the general election overall. It was also taken for granted that the right-wing protest vote wouldn’t be a numerically significant issue for the Conservative party. It appears that both of those assumptions can no longer be taken for granted by No. 10.
Worse, there is nothing Sunak can do to wriggle out of this mess. If he tries to head to the right to appease the people going to Reform as a protest, he risks losing even more people to the Lib Dems. If he tries to give the ‘Lib Dem protest vote’ something to keep them happy, he could be providing even more material to Nigel Farage and Richard Tice, allowing them to pick off voters on their other flank. It’s a nightmare situation for the Prime Minister.
I wanted to finish this article with something positive to say for Rishi Sunak and his party. I wanted to find some small ray of hope to which the Conservatives could cling. But I have nothing to offer. To lose two previously safe seats, even with all the caveats that these were by-elections at a difficult time, is a disaster for Sunak.
It’s hard to see where he goes from here. If the Lib Dems take votes off the Tories in much greater numbers than they steal from Labour, with a further drag on the Conservative vote coming from Reform, the next general election could be truly catastrophic for the Tories. If Tamworth and Mid-Bedfordshire are harbingers of what is to come, following the general election, Keir Starmer could be prime minister for the next decade at least.
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