It was a bad by-election night last night for the Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. Under his leadership the Conservatives lost two seats, one to Labour and one to the Liberal Democrats and only managed to hold onto another by the skin of their teeth.

In Selby and Ainsty the Labour Party won the seat from the Tories on a massive 23.7% swing sending 25 year old Keir Mather to the Commons. This loss is particularly bad for the Tories because this seat has been Tory since it was created in 2010. It’s a seat that a more competent and less tainted Tory party should have held. According to press reports and Wiki the turn out was pretty abysmal with a drop of 22,500 in the turnout when compared to the 2019 General Election. Apparently this is the largest swing that has ever been seen in a by-election, which is not the sort of record breaking performance that a political leader on the losing side would want to brag about.

In Somerton and Frome we had something a little more usual for a by-election which is the appearance of a protest vote against the government. In this case it was the Liberal Democrats who took the seat although this not a revolutionary occurrence as the Lib Dems have occupied this seat earlier in this century. This contest had all the ingredients necessary for a Lib Dem victory such as the previous MP being enmeshed in scandal and negative gossip, a deeply troubled national Tory government along with a constituency and local government political culture that has been steadily rejecting the Tories. It will be interesting to see if this seat swings back to the Tories at the next General Election but whether this occurs is almost entirely down to how the national government performs. If the government continues to drift and behave policy-wise as if they were Lib Dems then the Tories chances of retaking this seat are slim, after all why bother to vote Tory if the Tories you are being offered are little better than someone from the Illiberal Undemocrat Party?

The only bright spot for the Conservatives was to be found in Uxbridge. They clung on there with an exceptionally small majority of just under 500 votes. Unfortunately for the Tories this win doesn’t seem to be related to the popularity of the party or its policies and much more to do with electors choosing to vote for what appears the least worst option. People voted against Labour in my view in large part because Labour is the party most closely associated with Sadiq Khan and his increasingly hated ULEZ policy. Voters knew that expanding the ULEZ area will impoverish drivers in outer London to a similar extent as it has impoverished those currently within the current ULEZ area which is inside the North and South Circular Roads. The Tories also benefited I believe from the votes of aspirational Asian voters, of which there are a lot in this area, who have no truck with Labour’s metro-left socialism.

For Rishi Sunak’s Conservative Party to lose two out of three by-elections is pretty bad although not altogether disastrous. It’s to be somewhat expected that a Government whose party is in power would have at least one big loss to the Lib Dems, especially when the Lib Dems have held this seat before. However to have the loss of relatively safe seats like Selby and to only scrape through in Uxbridge where Labour are generally in bad odour, doesn’t bode well. I tend to believe that it’s a harbinger of electoral disaster. This is because what appears to have happened in all three contests is that the Tory vote stayed at home. Natural, long term and committed Tory voters may well have looked at the messes that the Tories have either created or exacerbated and decided that they could not in all good conscience turned out to vote for what the Tories have become.

The Tories could turn this around before the next General Election but it will need to involve a radical shake up of Tory party policy. It will need the Tories to grow some spine and drop the vast majority of costly and inefficient green policies most of which only end up helping various climate grifters and the Chinese. It will have to involve reorienting the economy to focus on getting more growth along with actually proving to the people that they are controlling excessive levels and inappropriate types of immigration. A turnaround will require fighting the culture war that is being waged against us and making the State more fiscally and operationally efficient. Unfortunately these are all things that should have been done in 2015 by a Conservative government but were not and it might be too late for the Tories to start fighting these overdue battles now. Even if the Tories do change and by some miracle become more recognisably conservative again there’s the question of whether the voters will believe them next time? Those of us who have voted Conservative in the past have had 13 years of the Tories failing to be conservative to look back on and we will carry these experiences in our minds when we come to vote in the General Election. The Tories could be in the dodgy position of changing their policies in order to win back the voters they’ve lost only to find that these lost voters no longer have any confidence that the Tories would behave like conservatives should they be elected.

I would not want to be Rishi Sunak this morning and looking at the votes and realising that his party’s core voters, a group who have been quite frankly abandoned by the Tories, have decided to abandon the party. The Prime Minister might be hoping that come General Election time that these core voters will come back, but what if they don’t? They might indeed come back because of the threat of Labour but without the Tories offering any policies that distinguish them from either Labour or the Lib Dems that hope might end up being very vain indeed.

No matter how the Tories spin these results or talk up the Uxbridge win it’s clear to see that the government is in political trouble. This is the electoral disaster for Rishi Sunak that it deserves to be and it’s not the opposition that has brought this about, it’s the Tories that have done this to themselves.

POSTSCRIPT

I wanted to do something more detailed on the outcomes of these by-elections with respect to the smaller or minor parties as what has happened here is interesting. Unfortunately I’m incredibly busy with other stuff at the moment both writing/research related and family/DIY/poultry related stuff which means I’m not going to get this done today and as tomorrow is generally a no politics day for me that means I’m not likely to be able to get my head around this piece until Sunday morning at the earliest.