There were endless predictions before Thursday’s twin byelections, all with their own potential political messages. But as it turns out, Rishi Sunak wakes up on his trip to the Middle East facing the simplest, and for him, worst of them all: a double Labour victory. Governments often get a pounding from voters and the Conservatives had heavily managed expectations in advance, briefing in particular that they fully expected to lose their near-20,000 majority in Tamworth. But even though Tory aides will point to the murky circumstances in which the incumbents in both Tamworth and Mid Bedfordshire, Chris Pincher and Nadine Dorries, departed their seats, Labour’s success will send a chill through the spines of Conservative MPs for several reasons. The first is the sheer scale of the losses. The byelection record tables for swings and biggest majorities overturned are becoming increasingly filled with votes that took place since 2019, and there is now another one to be added.
Dorries’ 24,664 Conservative majority was the biggest numerically to be lost in a byelection at least since 1945, potentially ever, as Labour’s Alistair Strathern won a majority of 1,192. While Tamworth involved a slightly smaller majority, the swing to Labour’s second new MP, Sarah Edwards, of 23.9 percentage points to her party from the Tories, was even greater than the 23.7 percentage point swing in July’s Selby and Ainsty byelection.
The second reason for Labour joy and Conservative jitters is the way that Labour pushed their way to a win in Mid Bedfordshire despite a full-on parallel effort from the fearsome Liberal Democrat byelection machine, one which has delivered four massive wins since 2021.
The Lib Dems had insisted that in the mainly rural seat only they could tempt enough Conservative votes to switch to them. In the end, their vote tally rose, but even they were steamrollered by a Labour machine clearly motivated by the prospect of government. The Mid Beds result also carries another bad omen for Sunak and his party: the way that English voters are becoming increasingly good at deciding who 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 of voters to coalesce more around Labour as it became clear they had the better chance shows an arguably new level of focus in anti-Conservative voting. Yet another reason for Conservatives to worry is the way all this has largely happened through a collapse in their vote, a product of dissatisfaction with the government and the departing MPs, and also the evaporation of the party’s ground troops, something much remarked on by local Tories.
Turnout in byelections is always lower, but the Tory vote was strikingly smaller in both areas as thousands of supporters stayed at home. In Tamworth, Labour’s Edwards won fewer than 1,000 more votes than her party managed in 2019, but the Conservative candidate, Andrew Cooper, took 10,403, virtually a third of Pincher’s tally.
All this, of course, leads to the final reason for Conservative strategists and MPs to sigh in despair as they see the results: the timing. It is only just over a fortnight since Sunak’s Tory conference speech in Manchester, where he sought to revive the party’s fortunes with a self-reinvention as the only party leader who could change the political landscape. It was an arguably bold vision for the fifth prime minister in 13 years of continuous Tory rule, but it was perhaps the party’s only hope. And now voters in two very different, and traditionally very Conservative areas have delivered their verdicts.