By-election Results: Wakefield, Tiverton and Honiton.

Yesterday England, technically the British Parliament but they did both happen to be English constituencies, had two by-elections.

Both were caused by Tory MPs resigning in the face of a scandal. One, the MP for Wakefield, was convicted of historical sex abuses while the other, the MP for Tiverton and Honiton, resigned after it emerged he’d been watching porn on his phone in the chamber of the House of Commons. Honestly, it takes watching porn at work to a whole new level if you’re doing it at the place where people make the laws about whether it’s just to sack people for doing that…

The Wakefield By-election, for all it was caused by a thankfully rare type of scandal, went pretty much as expected. The Tories won it in 2019, in something of a surprise, Labour won it back this time. The Tory spin machine is saying “nothing to see here, move along.” Broadly, that’s fair - this was a pretty marginal seat that you’d expect the government to lose in the middle of a parliament, plus it’s a traditional Labour seat. However, we saw an 11% swing from Conservative to Labour, patches of Wakefield that are traditionally Tory voting Labour for the first time ever (reversing the pattern of last time) and that 11% swing is big enough that, if it were replicated nationwide, Labour would win a small majority at the next general election. Of course, the Johnson loyalists will argue, there’s still two years to turn things around, again true. But Johnson’s support was based on his ability to win them votes, to win them votes in unexpected places like Wakefield, and that lustre seems to have vanished. In addition, the 2019 general election, and results since then, until yesterday, had been drawing a new political reality - the more strongly pro-Brexit the area had been in the referendum, the more strongly they had swung to vote for BoJo. Wakefield is the first seat to buck that trend. Whether that’s due to BoJo, the individual candidate, the economy or a combination of these things is a bit too hard to tell from one result.

Much, much more interesting is the result in Tiverton and Honiton. This seat has been Conservative for 99 years. This sort of reversal is not unknown, the Tories did similar things in 2019 to Labour in the “Red Wall” seats after all, but it’s pretty uncommon. What is different, this was the biggest ever swing, 30%, in a by-election. To put it in context, if this was replicated across the country, the LibDems would go from 14 MPs to 308! Not likely but dramatic. The former MP had the 41st largest majority of any Tory MP, the LibDems now have a comfortable majority.

Unlike Wakefield, which was broadly predictable although the size of the swing will worry anyone with a brain in the Tory party, Tiverton and Honiton is at least a body blow, if not a killer blow for BoJo. Before 2010 you could loosely paint mainland Britain in a couple of easy stripes. England, south of Birmingham, was Blue, everything North of that, and Wales was Red (as was London). After 2010 Scotland went SNP yellow but the rest stayed the same. If you looked closely there were protects of other colours, and some mixing, Derbyshire was often blue, so were parts of North Yorkshire for example, Bristol was typically red and there was a spatter of green and LibDem yellow as well.

There are a chunk of around 100 seats that typically change between red and blue that decide who has the majority. When BoJo won his majority in 2019 he repainted that picture and the North is more a spatter of red and blue. Conventional thinking says Labour has to win back all those northern seats and a load of swing seats to form the next government. However, Tiverton and Honiton suggests that solid “blue wall” might be susceptible to a yellow rash. Expecting them to win every seat except the top 40 is crazy, but if they were to win 40 Tory seats… that’s obviously 40 fewer that Labour need to win. If they were to win 100 (I suck at election predictions but that seems high-end of possible now whereas yesterday it would have sounded like I’d been on hallucinogens) a Labour outright victory becomes unlikely but a LibLab pact and a change to the voting system starts to become a real possibility. While this is all wild prognostication, there are some Tory MPs who have, at least outwardly, opposed BoJo’s continued premiership as a matter of principle - he’s unfit to lead the country. Some have done so as a matter of policy - largely they’re unhappy that a Tory PM is raising taxes. Others, let’s be honest here, are going to look at the results in Wakefield and especially Tiverton and Honiton and start looking at their majority and feel distinctly unsafe. They’re going to perform the calculation that if BoJo goes and someone else is in charge for the next year or two (we have until Christmas 2024 until we have to have another election) then will they stand a better chance of keeping their job? That answer is looking increasingly like a yes, at least from the outside.

My comment about this being a killer blow for BoJo was not in jest, although we'll have to see if it happens. A number of senior figures have, on the record, said that it’s up to the cabinet to do the right thing and oust him, before the party votes to change the rules and topple him. Honestly I doubt they will. None of them, except maybe Gove, will get a job under a new PM and they’re just about smart enough to see that, definitely self-serving enough to cling to power for as long as possible. But that circle of loyalists is shrinking day by day - it’s noticeable that there’s been a dearth of ministers speaking out in support of him, even if they haven’t put the knife in - and the chances that the MPs will change the rules to get rid of him. It’s now just a matter of time. At least one member of the cabinet has very publicly put the knife in - Oliver Dowden might not be a really well known figure outside of the Westminster Bubble, he was the co-chair of the Tory Party rather than a big ministerial figure. He resigned in the wake of the by-election results - that’s not too shocking. But there’s a form to these things. They go “Dear PM, in light of X, I’d like to tender my resignation. Blah, blah, blah. I remain loyal to your vision and with you all the best.” (The blah, blah, blah might be anything from a comment about the job left undone, an apology for shagging the secretary or whatever.) Dowden, very pointedly, stressed his loyalty to the Tory party, didn’t mention BoJo. It’s a striking departure from the norm.

UPDATE: I wrote this on Friday, but wanted a little bit of time to be able to reread and edit it. By Saturday, when it was obvious Boris wasn’t going to change, a number of MPs who have been openly critical of him for years have announced they are standing for election to the executive of the 1922 committee. That might sound esoteric but that means they will be in a position to change the rules about how long there can be between votes of no confidence in a Tory leader - its a mechanic to oust BoJo. It might not be time to start the countdown clock, but the knives are out, it’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you!