Brutal as they were, the twin byelection losses in Tamworth and Mid Bedfordshire did not necessarily change the plight faced by the Conservatives. What they did was shine so bright a beam on the situation that even the most self-deluding Tory MP can no longer pretend. It was just three months ago that a narrow victory in Boris Johnson’s old Uxbridge seat gave the Tories a sudden sugar rush of hope, with Rishi Sunak saying it meant the next general election was “not a done deal”. But Thursday’s results suggest the modest 6.7 percentage point swing in Uxbridge from the Conservatives to Labour was a outlier, apparently led by discontent in the outer London seat over the expansion of the city’s ultra-low emission zone (Ulez). Far more pertinent in retrospect was the Selby and Ainsty byelection on the same day, where Labour took the seat from the government with a 23.7-point shift – remarkably similar to the 23.9 swing in Tamworth, another leave-voting Tory stronghold. Mid Bedfordshire saw a slimmer swing, 20.5 points, but Labour overturned a Conservative majority of 24,664, the biggest such margin in postwar byelection history.
Conservative ministers spent Friday loudly proclaiming that all this was typical end-of-term government blues, involving habitual Tory voters staying at home rather than a mass of enthusiasm for Keir Starmer’s party. The latter point is arguably correct in part: Labour’s overall vote in Tamworth rose by less than 1,000 from 2019, and in Mid Bedfordshire it fell, albeit both on much lower turnouts. There are two rejoinders. The first is that even were you to argue that voters are yet to fall in political love with Starmer, if Thursday’s results were replicated in a general election he could probably live with that, given it would shrivel the Tories to a rump of about 130 MPs. The second point to note is that even aside from Labour, every augury from the two byelections spelled bad news for Sunak. To take one example, after the Uxbridge win the prime minister took the disquiet at Ulez as a sign to pivot further right on culture war issues and away from environmental policies, announcing a watering down of green targets. At the Conservative party conference in Manchester less than a fortnight ago, ministers peppered their speeches with conspiracy theory-tinged ideas about 15-minutes cities, as well as invented Labour plans to tax meat and some fairly brutal language on transgender issues. All this was done in the knowledge that though it could further put off more liberal-minded Conservative supporters in so-called blue wall commuter belt seats, it could shore up the base and prevent a drift towards the Nigel Farage-founded Reform UK. If Thursday is a good guide, Sunak is left with the worst all these worlds. As well as Tory voters staying at home en masse, in both seats Reform UK racked up vote tallies greater than the eventual Labour majority. In Tamworth, Reform UK held its deposit, winning 5.4% of the vote to come third. The Conservatives’ 2019 campaign was helped by Farage not standing candidates in any Tory-held seats, a Brexit-based truce that is very unlikely to be repeated. In fact, if you were a Conservative MP who felt a hollow pit in your stomach after checking the results on Friday morning, the closer you look, the worse things get. Mid Bedfordshire in particular demonstrated the sheer vigour and scope of the Labour ground campaign, overcoming not just a massive Conservative majority in a home counties seat but also seeing off a determined effort from those byelection specialists, the Liberal Democrats. For years, Tory constituency chiefs have privately warned that the party’s contingent of activists is ageing and shrinking. Those stay-at-home voters will not return by magic at a general election. Someone has to go out and persuade them. In another grim omen for Sunak, the Mid Bedfordshire win seemed to also show that voters are becoming increasingly good at deciding how they need to club together tactically to unseat the Conservatives. This is always harder to do amid the noise of a general election, but the decision to coalesce around Labour after it became clear it had a better chance than the Lib Dems showed an arguably new level of focus. There are, as ever, caveats. A general election could be as long as 14 months away if Sunak takes it to the wire. Much can happen. Starmer has not sealed the deal. But ultimately, this is a government that is consistently polling 20 points behind its rivals. And it shows.