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The name of Tamworth burst in on the public imagination in the late 1990s with the compelling tale of two small piglets of that breed who made a break for it, hoping to escape the abattoir. Conservatives fighting off attack this week must have been hoping for a similar tale of unlikely survival. But the twin by-election battles held on Thursday in the West Midlands town of Tamworth and the Mid Bedfordshire constituency proved fatal for both Tory candidates. Labour sliced its way through huge majorities to a historic double win that could spell doom for the whole litter.
The party’s campaign chief Pat McFadden, a veteran of Tony Blair’s Downing Street, just about managed to let his natural caution triumph over glee at the result. But ranks of bleary-eyed psephologists who had sat up until the small hours abandoned their usual professional sang-froid.
Professor Sir John Curtice, the most sceptical of political scientists, went so far as to raise the possibility of a landslide bigger than the 1997 win by McFadden’s former boss. Professor Rob Ford of Manchester university, who has made close reading of the post-Brexit electoral landscape his forte, told me that voters are now extremely volatile. A massive collapse in Tory support on general election night, whenever that comes, is a real possibility.
In Tamworth, scene of the manifesto unveiled by Sir Robert Peel in 1834 in which he laid down the principles of modern Conservatism, a Tory stronghold was dramatically captured. Labour achieved a whopping 23.9 per cent swing in a Leave-voting region where the Conservatives made gains under Boris Johnson last time.
In Mid Bedfordshire, the seat vacated by Nadine Dorries, Labour’s win was the biggest Tory majority it had overturned since the second world war — even though its own vote actually fell. Conservative voters, in a seat the party has represented through thick and thin since 1931, switched or simply stayed at home.
But these results were not just fun for the experts — the record-breaking stats ranged from the party’s first double win since the early 1960s to the first Labour seat to include a Center Parcs since 2010. They may also presage a historic general election defeat for Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives.
This contest was that rarest of things on today’s political map: a genuine three-way battle. The Liberal Democrats might well have been blamed for splitting the vote if the Tory candidate had snuck through the middle to survive. But given Labour’s win, they managed to escape recriminations. Both opposition parties can now go back to poring over their complementary target seats lists this weekend.
In the pretty villages of Mid Bedfordshire, affluent long-term Tories swung to the Lib Dems — a trend that rewarded the UK’s third party with recent by-election wins in places where Labour is not “competitive”, such as North Shropshire and Somerton and Frome.
But in the towns, Labour made hay. Its central machine set out to prove a point; a party aspiring to government can’t afford to visibly concede seats outside its own core territory. “They threw the kitchen sink at it,” said one disappointed Lib Dem.
Opposition party votes divided along country vs town lines in the former Dorries seat. Paradoxically, this demonstrates the potential to maximise tactical anti-Tory voting, which Ford argues could be even more effective than when it boosted both Labour and Lib Dem seat numbers in 1997.
“Both parties have a clear territory to target,” according to Ford. His verdict on the growing sequence of huge by-election swings against the government will not cheer up CCHQ: “The last run like that was 1995-1997 and we know how that ended.” The number of constituencies in which there is any ambiguity about which party is the real challenger is already vanishingly small. Meanwhile, Curtice explains that voters will “take whatever stick is available” to beat an unpopular administration with.
As for those late-90s precedents, Tamworth has fallen once before to a Labour victory in a by-election: in 1996, in the run-up to the convincing rout of Sir John Major after 18 years of Conservative administrations.
“Governments don’t win by-elections,” the Tory chair Greg Hands intoned in the run-up to Thursday night’s drubbing, rolling the pitch for a double disaster. As statements go, it’s factually correct; think of this month’s earlier win for Labour in Rutherglen and Hamilton West with an over-20 point swing against the incumbent SNP.
But it’s also said that opposition parties do not win general elections; it is, rather, out-of-favour governments that lose them. Both contests were triggered by Johnson loyalists leaving the Commons, one after a groping scandal and one after a prolonged flounce off stage right. They reminded voters of the blemished record of the most recent Conservative years of the 13 they have now had in power.
I wish Hands the best of luck trying to convince the public that Liz Truss’s “mini” Budget and the handling of Covid are “legacy issues” while mortgage rates remain high and front pages discuss how Sunak’s “Eat out to help out” scheme contributed to viral spread.
But these political lessons may be not be learnt until polling booths open UK-wide next year. “Happy times to be an opposition campaigner,” says Ford. Plenty of them are already looking forward to the celebratory smell of bacon the morning after the coming election.