By-election results: The Tories are finished

These kinds of swings are indicative of one thing and one thing only: a massive Labour majority at the next election.

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

These are not normal results. They're batshit: the kinds of outcome that indicates the arrival of a biblical political flood. Mid Bedfordshire and Tamworth have fallen to Labour. 

The simple scale of it is enough to defeat any kind of psephological restraint. The swing in Tamworth was 23.9%, overturning a 19,634 Tory majority. The swing in Mid Bedfordshire was 20.5%, overturning a 24,664 Tory majority. These are just silly numbers. Brazenly preposterous. They just don't happen. 

Mid Beds has been Conservative since Ramsay MacDonald was prime minister. Its never had a Labour MP. It's the biggest majority overturned in modern byelection history.

Indeed, this is all so silly it needs to be put in some sort of context, so here are the caveats. 

Firstly, Mid Beds is an unusual seat which makes it hard to project out to a national level. It's been shaved a bit in the recent boundary review in a way that arguably made it easier for Labour to win. 

Honestly, there's no way it'll remain Labour at the next general election. There's just no way. In a by-election, parties can direct all of their resources into a seat without having to worry about the national campaign. Once you start spreading yourself more thinly, the dynamics change. 

Look at the turnout - 44% in Mid Beds was better than most predicted, but lower than you'd expect at a general election. That increased turnout next year will probably switch the seat back to blue. 

In the long run, this result is arguably better for the Conservatives than the alternative. If the government had won, it would have made the Lib Dems and Labour smarten up about the handful of seats in which they're both viable competitors. But with this kind of result, there'll be no need to for that kind of soul searching. That means that a handful of seats will likely return Tory MPs at the general election because of the two parties cannibalising the anti-Conservative vote.

In both these seats we're also certainly seeing some element of protest voting. Tamworth's Chris Pincher accidentally brought down Boris Johnson's government over his appointment as deputy chief whip after allegations of sexual misconduct. He was subsequently suspended from the House for eight weeks following an investigation by the standards committee, at which point he resigned. 

Mid Bed's Nadine Dorries delivered one of the most graceless departures from British politics we've ever seen. She announced that she would quit as an MP on June 9th in a fit of pique over not being given a peerage, then failed to actually step down until August 29th. But in reality, she's been absent for much longer than that. She hasn't said a word in the Commons since June 2022, nor, as far as we can tell, engaged in any meaningful constituency case work. Instead, she seems to have used the time to write a conspiracy theory polemic called The Plot about a shadowy force which removed Johnson as prime minister. 

In both cases, constituents have been completely betrayed - ignored, taken for granted, left politically unrepresented by people whose primary concern was their own career. That'll naturally prompt a backlash and last night provided it. By autumn 2024, when the general election is likely to take place, this locally specific element will probably have faded.

But honestly, these caveats are small fry in the light of what has happened here. These kinds of swings are indicative of one thing and one thing only: a massive Labour majority at the next election. A really big, crushing, era-defining majority. 

It's not just the swing itself. Look beyond the result to what is happening to other anti-Tory parties. The Greens were down 0.4% in Tamworth. The Lib Dems were down 3.6%. In Mid Beds the Greens were down 2%. And even in this seat, in a contest which was defined by Labour and the Lib Dems running against each other, the Lib Dem vote was actually relatively subdued - only up 10.5%.

Is that because people are turning against the Greens and Lib Dems? No. It's because Labour is squeezing other anti-Tory parties as voters search for the most likely vehicle to hurt the government.

Take a good look at that shit, because that's what an efficient vote looks like. It's precisely what we saw in the local elections and now we're seeing it again, sustained across multiple by-elections. People are voting tactically, to damage the Tories, just as they did in 1997. They'll take anyone, they really don't seem to care who it is. They just want a clear sense of what the most effective way to do it is. And even where they're not given it, as in Mid Beds, they're showing they're able to assess the problem accurately and secure the result they want.

There's only one really compelling conclusion to draw from all this. It's that the Tories are buggered. Properly, existentially, historically buggered. The polls will presumably narrow at some point. But the scale of the swings we're seeing and the quality of the voting breakdown means it's really very hard - borderline impossible - to imagine a way in which they can avoid defeat.

And what, realistically, can they do? They can't change leader again, that would be too absurd even for them. And Rishi Sunak quite evidently does not have anything approximating the political ingenuity to correct the situation. I mean, his last big idea was to cancel HS2, ban smoking and reform A-Levels - like a pick and mix bag of disconnected half-arsed bullshit.

No, they're doomed. They're done. 

It's game over, man. Game over.