Labour fell into third position in the North Shropshire byelection, losing vote share compared with 2019 rather than gaining ground. But those around Keir Starmer are not downhearted, they say, because it illustrates the depth of unhappiness with Boris Johnson’s administration. “It proves the polls are right. It is showing the mud is beginning to stick,” says one of them. Labour takes comfort partly from the fact it expended little effort or money on the seat, allowing the Lib Dems to declare themselves in the best position to challenge the Tories. And partly it is encouraged because it shows Johnson is not all-conquering even in Brexitland, with scandals from the Owen Paterson lobbying affair to the lockdown-busting parties in No 10 finally having the prized quality of “cut-through” to the electorate. One senior Labour source explains: “The party’s resource and staffing is really limited at the moment so we can’t just throw money at these things. It was obvious that neither Bexley or North Shropshire were winnable so we basically decided to hold back, particularly in the latter. “It also shows that the push on Tory sleaze, competence and the ‘one rule for them’ stuff has been an incredible success. Don’t forget – after Hartlepool and success of initial vaccine effort, there were siren voices saying that it had all been a misstep. But over the past 18 months we’ve done enormous damage to both Boris Johnson and the Tory brand more widely.”
While victory and celebration belong to the Liberal Democrats, Labour is claiming credit for the success of its mantra that it is “one rule for them and another rule for everyone else”. This significance of this sentence uttered by a voter was first spotted by Starmer’s former communications director Ben Nunn, following Dominic Cummings’s bending of the rules for a trip to Barnard Castle. Since then, Labour has hammered it home relentlessly and believes it has stuck, with it appearing on both the Sun and Mail front pages in recent days. The party is also pleased by the sense that voters in leave-backing North Shropshire were able to put Brexit behind them in endorsing the pro-remain Lib Dems, with one Labour aide saying it was like Johnson had been “trapped by his own slogan” of claiming to have “got Brexit done”. Starmer and his team are “under no illusions there is loads more work that needs to be done”, the senior source says. But they remain buoyed up by Labour’s successive poll leads and believe North Shropshire shows potential for anti-Johnson feeling rather than being a meaningful sign of the opposition’s failure to exploit it. James Morris, a former Labour polling adviser, agreed that the key takeaway from the byelection for the party was the sense that Starmer had the opportunity to position himself as competent versus a chaotic governing party. “Labour has been trying to rebuild trust in its capability to manage a government since 2007,” he said. “This result opens up more political space for Labour to finally make progress on that goal. By adding to the sense that the Conservative party is chaotic, it creates room for Labour to position itself as the competent capable party that’s fit for government.” The two recent byelection successes for the Lib Dems – in Chesham and Amersham as well as North Shropshire – have also revived serious discussion of a potential post-election partnership with Labour. The Lib Dems have long been thinking of such an option, although it does not suit their strategy of appealing to soft Tories to be too explicit about such an aim. Some within Labour are also open to such an idea.
Andrew Harrop, the general secretary of the Fabian Society, says North Shropshire was “basically, really good news” and believes Labour’s prospects at the next election will be “massively increased, if the Lib Dems do well and pick up 20 or 30 Conservative seats”. The Labour thinktank has identified 25 Tory-held seats that the Lib Dems could target with a Labour vote of more than 5,000 to squeeze, mostly in the south of England, from Chippenham to Witney. “It’s completely obvious whether you should vote Liberal Democrat or Labour in almost every seat in England and Wales the Conservatives might plausibly lose,” he says, arguing this means there is no need for a formal alliance where one party agrees to stand down. “For non-Conservative parties to do well, Labour and the Lib Dems both need to scoop up a whole load of seats and probably the best outcome Labour can reasonably expect at the next election is a partnership with the Liberal Democrats of some sort,” he said. “It would be great if the party got the 123 seats needed to win a majority but it’s a very big ask. However if the Lib Dems got 20-odd more seats then you could start to think about Labour reaching 300 MPs and not having to work with the SNP.” That view is not universally held in Labour though, with some on the left believing North Shropshire shows Starmer’s weakness, while a few on the right of the party believe he could have made more of an effort to show he was not writing off a “middle England” seat. One Labour MP on the left of the party said it was “problematic for Labour with our vote collapsing from second to third place from a practical point of view”. “This is a seat that we on paper should have been telling others to stand down in,” the MP said. “Despite the Brylcreem and flag-shagging we are not winning back the Tory switchers coming to us. I fear this means we are just going to double down on what we are seeing.”