On the face of it, the Caerphilly by-election result is a disaster, a drubbing and a humiliation for Keir Starmer’s Labour party. A once secure bastion of the Welsh Labour heartlands fell without a squeak from the governing party. Their vote collapsed to a miserable 11 per cent, while Plaid Cymru won with 47 per cent and Reform surged to second place with 36 per cent. The result suggests Labour is on course to surrender a boatload of seats at the 2029 general election, both to Reform and to whatever protest party is best suited to beat the government around the head – be it Plaid, the Greens, the Corbynites, the Islamist independents or the SNP.
But I wonder whether hidden within is good news for the Prime Minister. The result was a very disappointing one for Reform, who were optimistic about winning the seat and justifying their polling status as favourites to win the Welsh elections in May. Over breakfast I ran into both a major player from No. 10 and a senior figure in Reform. The former was sanguine: ‘It’s not as if we expected to win.’ The latter was chastened, saying he was ‘recovering’ from the result.
The reason is that there seems to have been a colossal amount of tactical voting. Turnout in Caerphilly was over 50 per cent, far higher than usual in the seat or in by-elections more generally. The most recent poll gave Reform a 4 point lead over Plaid. Reform’s 36 per cent was 6 points lower than that poll had suggested. It seems on the face of it that voters turned out to stop the Farage bandwagon.
‘It shows that Reform are the likely opponents at the next election and that the more it looks like they might win, the more people will try to stop them,’ a Labour source says. And if that is replicated in 2029, Starmer’s huge majority would evaporate, but his chances of remaining in government in tandem with an alliance of progressive parties would go up. If the next election is a referendum on Starmer, that could be bad news for Labour. If it is a referendum on Farage, that could play into Starmer’s hands.
The immediate consequence of this by-election is that it is likely to persuade Farage and his team that they need to work harder to present themselves as a constructive alternative to Labour, rather than as a boilerplate party of the alt-right. Farage plans a speech on the economy on 3 November which is designed to show he would not frighten the horses as much as his 2024 manifesto with its £90 billion of spending pledges. It also perhaps means a quest to broaden out Reform’s political interests beyond migration and crime to public services is needed to reduce the fear factor which fuels tactical voting.
The Caerphilly result is also likely to strengthen the hand of those in No. 10 who want Starmer to pay greater heed to winning back voters on Labour’s left flank (a strategy that seemed to gather pace at Labour’s party conference) than those whose focus has been on shoring up the working class vote leeching to Reform.
The caveat, as always, is that by-elections are snapshots and often mean little more than to capture the feeling in one place at one time. The streets of Westminster are paved with the corpses of politicians and journalists who insist on reading too much into by-elections. But just sometimes they reveal a direction of travel or a tendency which can have longer lasting implications.
The faces I saw over breakfast make me think both key Labour and Reform insiders believe this may be one of those occasions.
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