Alex Massie Alex Massie

The joy of Boris’s bungled by-election

A North Shropshire by-election campaign placard for Tory candidate Neil Shastri-Hurst lays broken on the ground (Getty images)

By any reasonable standard the result in the North Shropshire by-election must be reckoned the funniest in years. Perhaps even decades. All governments need checking from time to time and desserts are always served justly. So this is a welcome result and not just because it is, viewed objectively, hilarious.

Nevertheless, it is quite an achievement to lose a seat held by the Conservatives, in one shape of another, for 120 years. To do so just two years after winning more than 60 per cent of the vote and a majority of almost 23,000 votes is quite something. To do so to the Liberal Democrats, who took just ten per cent of the vote in 2019, is really quite something.

The pandemic has exposed Johnson’s limitations and once seen such things are not easily forgotten

But who can doubt it is a thoroughly deserved kind of disaster for the Conservative party? In the first place, this was a by-election the government brought upon itself. There should have been no need for it but Boris Johnson and his chums created the circumstances in which it became unavoidable. Had Owen Paterson puckered-up and accepted the censure of the parliamentary standards committee he would have served a 30 day suspension and returned to the House of Commons, um, today.

Paterson’s disinclination to accept the committee’s unanimous verdict that he had abused his position and acted as a paid advocate was one thing; the government’s attempt to subvert or defang or otherwise nobble the standards committee was quite another. A low moment, even for this wretched ministry. Rules that apply to others should not apply to sound chaps and certainly not to a fine fellow such as Mr Paterson. One of us, you know.

That proved a typically thoughtless, if grotesque, miscalculation and the surprise was less that the government thought it could get away with this chicanery than that, on this occasion, it could not.

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