Byelection slaughter: Yeah, so it turns out the Tories are screwed after all

Nine thoughts on another night of Conservative electoral slaughter.

Photo by Pablo Heimplatz on Unsplash

Morning! Up and at them tiger! There's joy in the air. The sound of birdsong fills the trees. The world thrums to your melody and bursts with the possibilities of human endeavour. The Tories are getting utterly cunted. What bliss it is to be alive. 

After two byelections results overnight, Labour gained Wellingborough on a preposterous 28.6 point swing and Kingswood on a 16.3 point swing. Some thoughts below.

1. Heh. 

2. Two weeks of remorselessly negative headlines about Keir Starmer and it didn't make the blindest bit of difference. Didn't even touch the sides. The average swing to Labour matches what we saw in the Autumn. For all the talk of a tightening of the polls in the new year, for all the frenzied attention on one unusual Savanta poll this week, for all the eager mutterings about the ineptitude of the Labour leader - none of it changed a thing. We're in the same place we were a few months back and which, in all likelihood, we'll be in in a few months time: Terrible slaughterhouse horror for the government. Labour doing very well indeed. That 28% swing in Wellingborough is the biggest of any byelection in this parliament. The worst you can say about the party is that the Kingswood 10-point majority is lower than under New Labour. But then, New Labour is a pretty high bar. As far as caveats go, it isn't much of one. 

3. The Conservative party is holistically fucked. It’s fucked across the spectrum, along the full dynamic range of political possibilities. It declined 37.1 points in Wellingborough - the largest fall in the post-war period. They've now suffered more by-election losses in a single parliament than any government since the 1960s. They're basically getting their goddamn arses spanked off. The honest truth of the matter is this: Voters made their mind up about the party after the double-whammy of Partygate and Liz Truss. Two mad, high salience events, which could be quickly and readily comprehended, conducted in bright primary colours, corroborating a pre-existing perception. Since then, nothing has really changed. What was the case a year ago remains the case today. The funny thing is, it's not even technically correct. Truss did not single-handedly destroy the country's economy. Many of these factors contributing to the recession are genuinely international. But the visceral nature of her time in office, the impact it had on people's minds, means that all economic damage is now seen through the prism of Tory mismanagement. Is it strictly fair? No. But given that this week we watched Jeremy Hunt prepare to make imaginary future spending cuts which can never be delivered just so that he can save his electoral skin with irresponsible tax cuts, I'm not going to cry any tears for them. 

4. If there is hope for the Conservatives, it lies with the 'don't knows'. Turnout was low in both byelections - under 40%. It'll be much higher in the general election. One of the main groups who are not voting now but might still vote then are those who answer 'don't know' in polls. Best for Britain dug into their views last October. It found they break Tory and that they are actually really rather likely to vote at the next election. Would it be enough to for Rishi Sunak to win a majority? No. That hope is almost certainly gone now. Could it potentially result in a hung parliament? Yes. It's unlikely. But it could.

   

   

5. Reform is doing… OK? It got 13% in Wellingborough and 10.4% in Kingswood. There's now a big game of expectation management. Reform itself is talking absolute horseshit about how it blocked a Tory win in Kingswood (it did not). Other parties are obviously very keen to downplay it - it damages the Tory leadership and doesn't play into Labour's narrative. But the reality is - surprise, surprise - somewhere in the middle. On the one hand, they've demonstrated the ability to turn their polling numbers into concrete votes at the ballot box. On the other, it's on the lower end of expectations. Wellingborough had a strong Leave vote in 2016. The byelection followed the departure of ousted Tory Peter Bone and the inexplicable decision to replace him with his girlfriend Helen Harrison as the party candidate. Reform threw its deputy leader Ben Habib at the seat to much fanfare. Given the context, the result really isn't that impressive. So where does that leave us? In the obvious place really. The party can prevent the Tories winning a few dozen seats at an election. It's not necessarily decisive, especially given how badly the Tories are doing, but it's the last thing the party needs. This matters, because Conservative backbenchers will use Reform to pull the party ever further to the right. Fine - go for it. But for the record, there are a damn sight more seats to win by fighting Labour in the centre. Still. You do you.

6. People do not want Labour to have an easy time. They do not want an easy race. It's just too boring. The plain fact is that the election was almost certainly settled in the weeks after Kwasi Kwarteng's mini-Budget. Everything else is details. But there's so much time to kill before an election that it simply becomes very boring to repeatedly tell people that it looks like Labour is going to win. Reporters for right-wing newspapers obviously want Labour to lose. But independent non-partisan reporters also want a more exciting contest. And you can see the reality of that in the coverage of the last fortnight - the eagerness with which they pounced on Labour's travails. The same is true, by the way, for pollsters. Savanta released a poll this week showing a seven-point drop in the Labour lead. Whenever you see that kind of poll, with a finding that is way out of expectation and is not reflected by other firms working in the same period, you stop and wait. The bigger the change it implies, the longer you wait - the more polls you need to confirm it. The company's political research director did issue those warnings, perfectly properly, and then seemed to veer completely off-piste. "My main reflection is that if Labour's decision making is this poor and its support is as brittle as this (one) poll implies," he said, "it doesn't feel like they're ready for the scrutiny of an actual general election campaign." Really? Just straight up political commentary, from a senior figure in the polling company itself, on the basis of what could be, and likely is, an outlier. That kind of thing then gets turned into raw flesh for the right-wing tabloids to get their teeth into. The Express headline was: "Labour meltdown as lead over Tories plummets by 'significant drop' in new poll nightmare". You can see how this dynamic works: Bored pollsters and journalists trying to find a story that isn't plain old 'Labour winning', eagerly stripped of caveat and boosted by the right-wing press, in an attempt to create a doom narrative around the party. There'll be a lot more of this in the year ahead.

7. Labour therefore needs to do better than it has the last couple of weeks. People want them to fail. They want them to make it interesting. Labour should not assist with that process. It should not be U-turning on popular policies. If it is going to U-turn on popular policies, it should not do so after weeks of leaks and counter-briefing. It needs to be even more prompt dealing with misbehaviour by candidates. This is all obvious, but bears repeating.

8. All that should be kept in perspective. Today is not just about a continuation of Labour's existing performance. It is actually much more encouraging for the party than that. It shows that even after a really stinking few weeks, their performance stays rock-solid. People say the Labour lead is brittle and indeed it probably is. The party has not given people much to vote for and that which it did give them it is now taking away in a fit of cowardice. But the dislike for the Tory party is not brittle. It’s encased in iron. They're triple cunt-fucked. And as everyone knows, you can't extract yourself from a triple cunt-fuck. It's unheard of. 

9. Quick final thought about Gen Kitchen, the new 28-year-old Labour MP for Wellingborough. She did an interview with Sky after the results were announced which provided a much-needed breath of fresh air. Asked to comment on Reform, she said: "They ran a very slick campaign… I commend them on their campaign." Asked to comment on the Tories selecting Bone's girlfriend, she said: "I'm not one to judge someone by who she ties herself to and I think Helen is very competent in her own right." None of the cynical brutality we've seen from party leaders recently. None of the tribal vitriol. Just an old-fashioned decent minded respect for her opponents. More like this please.