The biggest question in British politics at the moment is whether the massive poll leads Labour has over the Conservative party will hold. With Labour polling as high as 51 per cent and the Tories as low as 21 per cent in the past month, the next election could see a 1997 style result – or even worse, from a Conservative perspective. The prospect of existential oblivion can’t be totally discounted.
That’s what makes yesterday’s City of Chester by-election so interesting. It was Sunak’s first electoral contest as prime minister. A chance to see if he could beat the bad news expressed in every national survey of voting intent. A moment for him to show that things aren’t as bad for the Conservatives as they seem.
The answer from Chester was brutal for the Tories and their leader. A thumping victory for the Labour party. If the by-election result had reflected the national polls, Labour should have won 62-26. They actually won by 61 per cent to 22 per cent. Labour have gone from a six thousand majority to an eleven thousand majority. In a place where the Tories should be seeing signs of life if they are to have any chance of being competitive at the next general election, they were totally crushed.
It is genuinely difficult to convey how terrible a result this was for the Conservative party
Chester was in fact a Tory seat for 87 straight years, from when Robert Armstrong Yerburgh won it off the Liberals in 1910 until it was caught up in the Labour landslide of 1997. It went Tory again in 2010, before Labour won it back in 2015 – by a mere 93 votes. It’s been held with reasonably comfortable majorities by Labour at the last two general elections, yet the fact remains that Chester is a swing seat these days. The sort of place that should tell us the national weather.
A complicating factoring here is why Chester was having a by-election in the first place. Chris Matheson, who was the MP for Chester until very recently, was suspended from the House for four weeks following allegations of sexual misconduct toward a junior member of staff. While denying the allegations, Matheson chose to step down from parliament. What’s interesting is that in recent by-elections that the Tories have lost, usually to the Liberal Democrats, the idea of ‘Tory sleaze’ has been a large factor. Westminster pundits were eager to see how much a ‘Labour sleaze’ factor might have been at play in the Chester by-election.
From the looks of things, it didn’t affect the outcome at all. Or if it did, the Tories are in even bigger trouble than any of us imagine. It is genuinely difficult to convey how terrible a result this was for the Conservative party. A lot of Westminster pundits will skim over this, saying that it was a Labour seat already, and given the situation in the polls, Labour was always going to win. Nothing to see here. Except that, Chester is exactly the sort of bellwether seat that the Tories should either win or be extremely competitive in if they hold any chance of winning the next election. Add to that the fact that the only reason we were having this by-election in the first place is because the Labour MP who won in 2019 had to step down in unfortunate circumstances. Yes, I agree, the Tories were never going to win this one. Not with the way the polls are now. But they should have run it close. A lot closer that 10,974 votes.
The Chester by-election result should mark the official end of Rishi Sunak’s honeymoon. It is clear now that he has not been able to rescue his party’s electoral fortunes and defeat at the next general election looks all but certain, barring some huge, unforeseen event, either domestically or internationally. The only comfort for the Tories is that it is highly unlikely that anyone else available to be leader could have done a better job. I have supreme difficulty imagining Penny Mordaunt could have magically rescued the Tories’ fortunes; bringing back Boris Johnson would have brought with it huge problems of its own. No, Sunak was still the best bet – the depressing thing for the Tories is that things really are this bad. The brand appears to be horribly tarnished. The desire for change amongst the electorate is becoming palpable. People want something different.
This is all before the full impact of the politically toxic combination of tax rises and public spending cuts to try and balance the books Sunak and Hunt have implemented hit people in the pocket. Or before Nigel Farage has made a comeback to electoral politics. In other words, and to paraphrase New Labour, things can only get worse. At least if you are a Tory.
Yesterday was a stinging inditement of Sunak’s leadership. It’s not his fault that his party are in the hole they are in, but it’s now his responsibility to get them out of it. Chester is an apt demonstration of how far he is from turning the boat around.
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