In politics, small differences in outcome tend often to be over-interpreted, both by the parties and the press. A couple of fractions of a percentage point from the ONS is the difference between delivering growth or a recession; 495 votes (the Conservative margin of victory in Uxbridge and South Ruislip last year) enough to turn a narrative of total rout into one where maybe the Government is recovering.
This morning’s results from Kingswood and Wellingborough do not cloud the signal with any such comforting noise. Labour won both seats at a canter – in the latter, which the Tories have held since 2005, the Opposition secured their largest by-election swing since 1994.
Of course, there will be local factors at play. In Kingswood, where Chris Skidmore did not depart under the cloud of misconduct allegations, the drubbing was less severe. But overall, the picture is unremittingly bleak. The question is what lessons CCHQ draws from it.
Much attention will doubtless be paid to Reform UK, which managed in both seats to post a double-digit share of the vote; in Kingswood, its vote was (just) larger than Labour’s margin of victory. This will encourage the tendency of parts of the party to fixate on re-uniting the right ahead of the election.
Having a viable challenger to their right is definitely an uncomfortable strategic problem for the Conservatives, and these by-elections are the first sign we’ve had that Reform UK is capable of actually translating its notional national share into actual votes (outside the very outsider-friendly context of European elections).
But one can still, I suspect, read too much into two results. By-elections might not be quite as favourable to smaller parties as the Euros, but they still allow them to concentrate their resources on a contest which typically sees both lower turnout and voters more happy to give the Government a kicking than they might be at a general election.
Whilst the spectre of Canada ’93 has started to be evoked in the media, Reform UK are still some way from being in a position to replicate that sort of extinction event for our Tories. The doomed Progressive Conservatives faced not one but two insurgent parties (the Reform Party of Canada and newly-formed Bloc Québécois) each of which had the essential ingredient of a snap breakthrough under First Past the Post: geographically-concentrated support.
To date, there isn’t any evidence that Reform UK has the sort of regional base their Canadian namesake (which campaigned on “The West wants in” and scooped 46 of its 52 seats in Alberta and British Colombia) enjoyed. Without it, their odds of securing many seats at the next election are slim.
(Breaking through without such a base is not impossible. UKIP came second in a hundred constituencies in 2015, and were probably poised to become a significant presence in Parliament had we not had the referendum. But that took decades of work.)
Of course, Reform don’t need to win seats to do the Conservatives serious damage by bleeding votes in close-fought seats. But any potential benefit of tacking towards them to mitigate that must be weighed against the risk of losing even more voters to Labour or the Liberal Democrats, both of whom are actually poised, if the polls don’t shift, to take scores of Tory seats between them whenever the election finally happens.
Perhaps the narrative will shift again after Rochdale, which has turned into an absolute dumpster fire of a contest and where Labour is currently struggling to prevent the delivery of leaflets featuring its now-former candidate, sacked for peddling antisemitic conspiracy theories.
But if so, that will owe more to the understandable tendency for journalists to try and keep things interesting than any significant change in the fundamentals (not least because the Conservatives are bit-players in the by-election). Labour’s woes tell us interesting and unhappy things about what our experience of a Starmer government might be like, but provide fewer clues on how to prevent one.