It was a bad night for the Conservative Party as it lost two important by-elections, both of them in Tory safe seats.
In a historic victory in Nadine Dorries’s former seat of Mid Bedfordshire, Labour managed to overturn a 24,664 Tory majority with a swing of 20.5 per cent.
In Tamworth, the disgraced MP Chris Pincher’s former seat, Labour’s Sarah Edwards claimed a 23.9 per cent swing.
Labour leader Keir Starmer insisted that his party’s victories were proof of Labour “redrawing the political map”. Alistair Strathearn, a former teacher and winning candidate in Mid Beds said: “Tonight residents across Mid Bedfordshire have made history, after decades of being taken for granted, feeling left behind, being underrepresented, they made a decision it was time for a change.”
Mid Beds has never before been held by Labour in its century existence.
Tory party chair Greg Hands admitted that it was a poor night but maintained that voters stayed at home.
Indeed, in Tamworth Labour claimed 45.8 per cent share of the vote, up 22.1 per cent, but the Tories were relatively close behind with 40.7 per cent of the vote which was down a whopping 25.7 per cent.
The story is yet starker in Mid Beds where the Tories were only 3 per cent behind Labour in share of the vote but were down 28.7 per cent from the 2019 result.
Despite a sizeable chunk of the Tory vote abstaining, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak will be dismayed that he has failed his first post-conference test. In the last round of by-elections, the Tories lost the safe seat of Selby to Labour, Somerton and Frome to the Lib Dems but managed to cling onto Boris Johnson’s former seat of Uxbridge.
But there was no such hope of claiming the Ulez rebellion vote this time. Polling guru John Curtice said the results were indicative of a Labour victory in next year’s general election that could surpass Blair’s 1997 landslide: “The Conservative Party faces the serious prospect of losing the next general heavily, maybe more heavily than they did in 1997.”
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