As Keir Starmer embarked on a triumphant victory dash, first to Bedfordshire then to Tamworth in Staffordshire on Friday morning, Tory MPs sitting at home digesting the bombshell byelection news had hit rock bottom. Having pulled off two sensational wins overnight in previously safe Tory-held seats, the Labour leader was rubbing salt into their wounds. Starmer was obviously ecstatic, though straining to strike the right balance between expressions of elation and the necessary caution. “You smashed it,” he told party workers in Tamworth, while his aides frantically briefed that while the results were fantastic, there was much more work still to be done.
Conservatives, by contrast, felt only despair. Whereas the Tories had conquered the “red wall” in 2019, Labour was now taking previously impregnable blue seats almost every time they fell vacant. One Tory MP with a majority over Labour of almost 20,000 in his partly rural, partly urban seat in south-east England, said that virtually every Conservative-held area – however secure at elections past – was now up for grabs. “You can’t put any other gloss on it other than that it is bloody awful,” he said. “The vast majority of us [in safe seats] are now in play: there may be colleagues who are in play who don’t yet realise they are. There will be people in the stockbroker belt who could be at risk. I think I have got a fighting chance, but I won’t be shocked if I don’t win.” Any hope of a Conservative election victory now rested on a miracle, on unforeseen events beyond anyone’s control, he said. Another Tory backbencher with a big majority in his northern seat was just as downcast: “There is nothing Rishi can really do now other than try to look competent and hope for the best. You can’t admit that it is now just about minimising losses … you can’t go out and say that, but that is where we are.” Less than a month ago, the Tory party conference in Manchester had been billed as the occasion for a Sunak reset, before the run-in to a general election some time next year. The prime minister, after almost 12 months in office, would define himself more clearly as the candidate of “change”, and it would be game on, or so his team of Downing Street strategists claimed. HS2 from Birmingham to Manchester was axed, green policies were downgraded. There was more of Sunak’s thinking in speeches, new pro-car-driver and anti-smoking policies to promote. “Stand up and fight, stand up and fight!” Penny Mordaunt, the leader of the Commons, had shouted to a two-thirds full conference hall over and over again in a closing appeal to the rank and file.
But to no avail. The Tory fight has gone. At least that is what most MPs at Westminster now draw from Friday morning’s results in the Mid Bedfordshire and Tamworth byelections – both triggered by unseemly controversies involving their former Tory MPs, Nadine Dorries and Chris Pincher. The voters’ verdicts were disastrous for Sunak and his party. Labour’s win by just over 1,000 votes in Mid Bedfordshire saw its candidate Alistair Strathern overturn a bigger majority – 24,664 – than any other candidate since 1945. Just as momentous, in Tamworth, a swing of almost 24% to Labour from the Tories, which saw Sarah Edwards take the seat, was the second-biggest such switch of its kind since the second world war. Tory seats were transferring straight to Labour. The Liberal Democrats, who hoped to take Mid Bedfordshire had come a disappointing third. The political map, Starmer asserted, was being redrawn. The Tories’ official attempts to explain away the results were unconvincing and limp, to say the least. Ministers could merely offer that these had been “protest votes” and that all would be different at a general election, while others pointed to low turnout and said there had been “no great love” for Keir Starmer on the doorstep. Gavin Barwell, former chief of staff to Theresa May, had an entirely different and far more negative assessment of his party’s performance, saying the Tories were now in “deep, deep trouble in terms of the [general] election.” Barwell’s view was that much of the electorate made up its mind some time ago: “Whatever one thinks about Sunak’s year as prime minister, the trouble now is that it is not about him, it is about what happened before,” he said. “The damage was done under Johnson and particularly Liz Truss. Anyone who has stood as a Conservative candidate for elected office at any level will know that the existential deal on which the entire edifice sits is economic competence. Liz Truss attacked that fundamental support structure of the appeal of the Conservative party.” As for the idea that Starmer was not loved, and lacked the kind of appeal that Tony Blair had before the 1997 election, this, Barwell argued, was to miss the point. Starmer and Labour had worked successfully to make themselves look solid, reliable, and in no way risky, after Johnson and Truss, fiscally or otherwise. “If people have decided they want change, as long as they are not outright scared of the change, they don’t actually have to be hugely enthused by him [Starmer],” he said. Labour strategists point to other factors. One senior source said that it “was incredible just how badly Sunak personally has screwed things up over recent months”. The source said Sunak had a decent strategy initially “around the idea that I’m the steady guy after Truss” but then took the risk of devising five targets, including ones on the economy and immigration, which he was struggling to meet. Worse still, after three byelections were held in July – in which Labour took Selby and Ainsty, the Lib Dems seized Somerton and Frome, and the Tories held on to Uxbridge and South Ruislip, where the London ultra-low emission zone extension appeared to be a huge issue, Labour believes Sunak made the huge error of drawing conclusions only from their Uxbridge hold, not their other appalling losses. On the basis of the Uxbridge result alone, they decided Sunak should become the candidate of “change” nationally, including on green issues, backing away from previous environmental targets and policies which they believed would mean hitting people too hard in their pockets. “All of a sudden Sunak was the change guy and he had trashed his brand as the steady guy,” said the Labour insider. Peter Kyle, the shadow science minister who ran the Mid Bedfordshire campaign for Labour, said the Tories’ collapse there had been primarily due to former Conservative voters completely losing their faith in the belief that the party any longer represented their values. “The fundamental reason that the Tory vote collapsed was that the Conservative party no longer bore resemblance to what most who live in this country assume as their values. Law and order, knowing the difference between right and wrong, being kind and inclusive, these sorts of things, patriotism, respect for institutions.
“Quite small-c Conservative things. Now they have been wrenched away. Law and order? You have got Tory prime ministers breaking the law. Knowing difference between right and wrong? You have got Partygate, you have got the breaking of the ministerial code. That is why this community went straight from Tory to Labour.” Kyle added that on doorsteps, people wanted to engage with Labour. “They wanted a conversation with Labour. There was no door-slamming. Just very focused engagement and very civilised conversations with us. It was very exhilarating.” Labour is now understood to be widening the number of seats it is considering as options to put on its target list. Officials say these will now include more seats in the central belt of Scotland, after the party’s recent byelection victory over the SNP in Rutherglen and Hamilton West, and more in England and Wales where it is second to the Tories, including some with large rural electorates. “We are winning support in farming communities,” said an insider. With the economy still bumping along the bottom, inflation stubbornly high and the issue of small boats far from sorted, Tory MPs are now looking for further changes of direction and new policies, more in the hope that these might help them hold their own seats than that they might win the next election. Another issue causing them headaches – particularly in red-wall seats and on the right of the party – is the success of Reform UK, the successor to the Brexit party. Senior figures on the right are pointing out that the share of the vote secured by Reform, which campaigns on “doing Brexit properly”, was bigger than the Labour majority in both polls on Thursday. They are using this as the reason to call for more action on both tax cuts and immigration – a further push to the right. “If you’re elected as Conservatives, the people elected you expecting you to do Conservative things,” said a former minister. “Just at the moment, it [our offer] doesn’t look particularly Conservative, especially in terms of the tax burden.” These MPs fear Reform’s presence could mean “total wipeout” as the party would reduce the Tory vote across the country. One senior Tory said the appeal of Reform could widen: “I have a suspicion that [Nigel] Farage may well enter the fray sometime in the spring next year.” But while the right pushes for action on tax, the Treasury warns that there is no room to deliver. The problem for Sunak is that if he grants the right of his party what it wants on tax, he runs into more trouble in honouring his five pledges. “He is trapped,” said a senior Tory aide. “He can’t deliver.” Last week the Institute for Fiscal Studies said the dire state of the public finances meant that attention-grabbing tax cuts risked stoking inflation, leading to higher interest rates and a lengthy recession. For the Conservatives, there is no remotely easy way forward to avoid what looks likely to be a general election defeat. Talk of a leadership challenge to Sunak is dismissed as ridiculous, even by most of his sternest critics. As another senior MP put it: “If there was a solution that might work we would have thought of it by now. He thought of being the change candidate and that failed. All we can do now is just hope for the best.” • This article was amended on 24 October 2023. The constituency won by the Liberal Democrats in July is Somerton and Frome. An earlier version referred to “Somerset and Frome”.