Helen Hurford, the Tory candidate in Tiverton and Honiton, reportedly reacted to her humiliating byelection defeat by locking herself in a room and refusing to speak to the media. About 4,000 miles away in Kigali, Boris Johnson could be forgiven for wanting to do exactly the same. Thursday’s double byelection loss, taking in defeat to Labour in Wakefield and a particularly astonishing capitulation to the Lib Dems in Tiverton and Honiton, is likely to prompt similar feelings of anguish among Conservative MPs.
Uppermost on Johnson’s mind as he awakes in Rwanda, where he is attending a Commonwealth summit, is whether this is sufficient to spark renewed moves to oust him, or whether the resignation of Tory co-chair Oliver Dowden is viewed as sacrifice enough. The loss of Wakefield, a “red wall” seat snatched from Labour only in 2019, was widely expected, while the recent run of Lib Dem byelection wins meant many Tories would have been braced for a repeat in Tiverton and Honiton. But if you set aside the inevitable expectation management, even for an embattled prime minister leading an unpopular party in its 12th year of rule, this was a pretty dire pair of results. Labour’s win in Wakefield, where Simon Lightwood took almost 48% of the vote, is a significant boost to Keir Starmer, even if some of his more entrenched critics will inevitably grumble that the margin of victory could have been higher.
There are unlikely to be any such gripes for Ed Davey. On election day in Tiverton and Honiton, Lib Dem activists were no more than cautiously hopeful about overturning a 24,000-plus Conservative majority in a seat that, in various incarnations, has been completely Tory for about 130 years. To achieve this, the largest numerical majority ever overturned in a byelection, is a stunning success. To do this fairly easily, with a majority of more than 6,000 votes, was beyond their most fevered dreams.
Conservative officials might point to the circumstances behind the byelections – the sitting MP Imran Ahmad Khan stepped down in Wakefield after being convicted of sexually assaulting a teenage boy, while Neil Parish quit in Tiverton and Honiton over watching pornography in the Commons. They might also privately note the vulnerabilities of their candidates. Hurford struggled with questions about Johnson’s character, while in Wakefield, Nadeem Ahmed apologised for drawing a convoluted parallel between disgraced MPs and the mass-murdering GP Harold Shipman.
But two areas in particular should gravely worry them. One is the scale of tactical voting, which saw Labour and the Lib Dems unofficially divide the seats between them, a message clearly heard by locals. Such unspoken pacts are notably harder to pull off amid the white noise of a general election, but Conservative MPs face a pincer movement from a resurgent Labour in red wall seats, and from Lib Dem challengers both in the “blue wall” of commuter belt constituencies, and in some rural areas. The other concern, one which will particularly strike Johnson, is the apparent failure of his policy reset since narrowly winning a confidence vote of Tory MPs at the start of this month. No 10’s focus has been so-called wedge issues, including the deportation of asylum seekers to Rwanda, a pledge to change human rights laws, and blaming rail strikes on Labour. Voters in both West Yorkshire and Devon seemed notably unmoved, instead expressing scepticism about a government whose sole defining focus appears to be nothing more than keeping Johnson in power for as long as possible. Johnson is not due back in London for another week, with the G7 gathering in Germany and then a Nato summit in Spain after Rwanda, and the opportunity for his MPs to plot will be curtailed by the long summer Commons recess, starting next month.
Tory rebels had already earmarked the autumn as the earliest expected date for a renewed challenge. The results are unlikely to make this happen sooner, but do make it notably more likely. Johnson’s sell to his party was always based on the fact he was an election winner, something he came good on in 2019. That election win was billed as a new era for the Tories and a reset for British politics. To many Conservative MPs on Friday morning, it might just appear a fluke.