October 20, 2023 - 7:45am
It was the worst possible outcome for the Conservative Party. Twin by-election defeats, with massive swings against them. In Mid Bedfordshire, it was the overturning of nearly a century of Tory wins; in Tamworth, it was the second-biggest swing since the war. There is no spin, no expectation management and no consolation that can mitigate this. It was a humiliation.
Both seats the Conservatives should have held without breaking a sweat. Affluent places on the rural-urban fringe, contests they entered with twenty-thousand-plus majorities. Instead, the party haemorrhaged votes. In Mid Beds, in particular, they lost on two fronts, with a huge increase in the Liberal Democrat share too. Repeated nationwide, these results would leave the Tories on just twenty seats, with Labour enjoying a majority of close to 250.
By-elections are an exaggeration, and those results will not be realised. They do, however, point to trends. The Tories are being beaten back everywhere. People want them out. Even in rock-solid seats, held through the darkness of 1997, voters will take a chance to give them a kicking. It presents a huge electoral challenge.
Running into the next election, the Conservatives are fighting on every front. The alienated Labour voters of 2019 have swung back to the party. The disillusioned Tories of Middle England are staying home, voting Lib Dem or even backing Labour. The Conservatives are slipping back to their true core vote, and will need a sophisticated message which draws back the left of the party without pushing away the right.
More than that, the results in both Mid Beds and Tamworth point towards efficient tactical voting. In the former in particular, there was a worry among the opposition that a three-way split might help the Tories hold the seat. Instead, although the Lib Dem vote did increase, the anti-Tory vote largely split towards Labour. In Tamworth, the Liberals dropped to seventh, tying with the Green Party. If this pattern does materialise across the country, the Conservatives could find themselves vulnerable in a wave of seats that would look mathematically safe.
This also presents them with logistical problems. Campaigns, especially when you are unpopular, are fought with limited time and constrained resources. Choosing where to deploy them makes a huge difference to the outcome. In 1997, the Tories made the mistake of lingering too long in seats in which they had no chance and neglecting the real battleground. Once again, they will have to make these sorts of tough decisions — based on a deep, humiliating honesty about where things actually stand.
Aside from the electoral implications, there is a broader problem for the Conservatives embedded in these losses. The successive large defeats give a sense that this government is spent, unpopular, and just waiting to be ousted. It remains within Rishi Sunak’s gift to decide when the election is, but time is running out. The more he holds on, the greater the sense will be that he is just putting off the inevitable — which will only aggravate voters.
Equally, it undermines his authority. More and more, his administration is imbued with the sense of being a caretaker government. The decisions made are just temporary, the long-term announcements simply illusory, and the real decisions will be made when Sir Keir Starmer takes the reins. Paradoxically, it has little time left to get things done, but a lot of time left to linger.
In the last batch of by-elections, much was made of the semi-upset in Uxbridge. It gave the Tories hope. Last night showed that was delusional, treating an unnecessarily narrow as an act of triumph. The trend is clear: the Tories are losing badly in places where they should have never had to fear defeat. It’s time for them to accept that the next election is about staving off catastrophe.
John Oxley is a corporate strategist and political commentator. His Substack is Joxley Writes.
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SubscribeBoth the Tamworth and Mid-Bedfordshire by-elections show Labour getting approximately the same number of votes they received in 2019, while Tory votes were cut by two thirds.
There is clearly no enthusiasm for Starmer’s Labour, and the author’s conclusion that the Tories “will need a sophisticated message which draws back the left of the party without pushing away the right” is absurd.
The missing 2/3 were not petticoat hem grasping left-wingers frightened off by the Tories; recent empty rhetoric on immigration and woke.
They were people like me who want: a small state, enterprise economy, our borders protected and enforced, low levels of controlled immigration, criminals caught and punished and the public protected, the dangerous malignant woke identity politics driven from our institutions and children. and young adults protected from zealots of the bizarre transgenderism cult. In short, a return to the normality of life in this country that existed for hundreds of years, but which has been overturned with disastrous consequences in a mere generation.
I loathe Labour. But I now despise the Tories with a far greater, visceral hatred, for deserting the country and leaving it and its institutions to be ravaged by “progressive” Leftist ideology, and for spending 13 wasted yeas stabbing its voters in the back.
The Tory Party must replaced as the de facto repository of the right-wing vote. For that to happen it has to be electorally routed and smashed at the next election. Only then can we hope for a true right-wing party in Britain.
I agree until your last paragraph. I think the only option is to change the Tory party, not to replace it. There is just no mileage in a new party in FPTP. Perhaps a minority Labour government dependent on the Lib Dems will change the voting system but a majority Lab government will not – it isn’t in their interests to do so.
If the Tories lose the next election (which looks nailed on) then new leadership will bring an opportunity to rethink all their policies and to offer the electorate a platform that addresses all the issue you list in paragraph 3. In fact Kemi Badenoch should print out your list of demands and pin it on her wall.
I think there is a very interesting and fertile intellectual scene around conservatism at the moment – of which UnHerd is a part. Whether it is best described as post-liberal or traditionalist or national conservative or something else, there is no denying that these discussions are happening. Eventually they will figure out a platform that finds a balance between the free-market liberalism needed for a dynamic economy and the socially conservative, pro-family patriotism that the public wants. When they do, they will wipe the floor with Woke Labour electorally. A word of caution: they also need to figure out how they would deliver said policies in the face of resistant civil servants.
If, however, the Tories lose and decide that they need to be more like Labour and put someone like Hunt in charge. Then they will never recover power until the Labour party are themselves exhausted after 2 or 3 terms.
With respect to your thoughtful reply, I think there is a far too optimistic vision, in which the rump of Tory MPs left after the next election will go through some torturous wrestling with ideology and ideas and emerge out of the other side as a unified national conservative style government.
Firstly one has to consider which Tory MPs will survive an electoral cull and what the resulting ideological balance of power will be among them.
Many of the older Tories on the right, such as Bill Cash are retiring. Of the current right wing contingent, a quick cross reference of Tory MPs belonging to the Common Sense Group ,with Electoral Calculus indicates that the vast majority of them will be out at the next GE, whilst many of the Lib Dems Cameron’s reforms have fed in to the Party will remain and become senior MPs in a shadow cabinet.
I think it far more likely that the Tory Party will devolve in to social democrat rump allied to the Lib Dems, than be reborn as national conservatives.
The Tories power rests on FPTP and the belief that a vote for any other party on the right is a wasted vote that assists Labour and Lib Dems. If the Tories can be smashed in to such disarray and low level of support that Reform can overtake them in the polls post election, I genuinely believe that it could get on a roll of support that see it replace the Tories as the dominant right-wing party in the UK.
Cheers Marcus, we shall see how it plays out. In either case what is required is some serious thinking from people of a traditionalist mindset over the next few years.
Incidentally, it looks like Reform swung both by- elections. From the Telegraph:
The country will never accept Badenoch and her divisive right wing views. You guys are delusional. It’s those views that are being rejected right now. There is a sheet of paper between Badenoch, Braverman and Sunak. Your time has passed.
Absolutely right, with the final paragraph being the most important. The past 25 years of “Conservative” leaders have utterly trashed the brand and it can never recover.
Interestingly in Tamworth almost 1 in 10 of those who voted left a cross for UKIP, Britain First or Reform. If they weren’t haemorrhaging votes to the right, they may have held the seat, albeit by a whisker. Perhaps a reiteration of your point; they’re not Conservative in any meaningful sense.
Spot on. Many, many people agree with you. The idea of pandering to the ‘left’ of the Tory party is bizarre. The government is arguably to the left of Blair by some margin. The tragedy is that taking on the metastasising grievance industrial complex doesn’t take billions of pounds. It is a cultural battle that underpins so much stupid or incontinent spending too. But the Tories are too stupid, cowardly or weak to do so. They insult the intelligence of their voters.
It’s not the 1950s you know. The Britain you hunger for us gone and your desired lurch to the right will not being it back. Quit living in the past.
Most of continental Europe is drifting to the right (in most cases much more so than any UK party), so why should the UK be any different?
Because it’s the UK. Sovereign, not part of the EU. Doing its own thing etc etc.
Just because we left the EU doesn’t mean we’re immune from the political trends there. You can leave the bloc and still be affected by the same issues that plague your neighbours
“They were people like me who want: a small state, enterprise economy, our borders protected and enforced, low levels of controlled immigration, criminals caught and punished and the public protected, the dangerous malignant woke identity politics driven from our institutions and children. and young adults protected from zealots of the bizarre transgenderism cult. In short, a return to the normality of life in this country that existed for hundreds of years, but which has been overturned with disastrous consequences in a mere generation”. Only one addition: a well funded war-making capacity.
This requires getting rid of May and everything she represents.
Are we about to experience a final capitulation to the Left? They have already taken the levers of power throughout many of our institutions, the MSM propagates the Leftist worldview, the schools and universities teach it.
A Labour government with a massive majority, regardless of the moderate face Sir Keir tries to put on it, will take electoral success as a mandate to bring in all the pro-woke, social-engineering legislation the radical Left are pining for. Is that what the voters really want?
The Conservatives have let us down badly.
The Conservatives will deserve their electoral kicking (and then some). However, I suspect they want this. They’ve had three or four open goals that they have just completely ignored (dial back net zero, deal with immigration, don’t ban conversion therapy – none of those are extremist positions).
The rot started with David Cameron and his heir-to-Blair ‘modernising’ shtick.
Panicking Tories are now calling for immediate tax cuts – as though that were the solution to their problems. One-track minds. Pathetic!
I also get the feeling the Conservatives want to abandon government (for a least one electoral cycle).
It baffled me that Sunak chose to go with a smoking ban and some changes to A Levels in his conference speech. If he had gone with your three suggestions (I would have added in something on crime and wokery in the classroom too) he would at least have galvanised his base. As it was, he deflated the bounce he had gotten from banning the petrol engine ban.
It seems that the voters want this. More so when the voting age reduces to 16. To be a little provocative, the actions of MPs (all MPs) and the comments in the media seem to show that UnHerders are years behind the world.
It is OK to be behind the times but it attracts ridicule from the media, especially from social media. The ridicule then compounds the effect. Today, youth demands that everyone should be nice, oh so nice, so criticism is not allowed. Not everybody on UnHerd is nice. Therefore, UnHerd must be bad to a huge percentage of the population.
Is it really possible to criticise and be nice at the same time?
The polling consistently shows a large majority in favour of drastically reducing immigration and against so called “gender affirming treatment” for children and young adults.
Disgruntlement with ULEZ clearly influenced large numbers of voters in the recent by-election in Uxbridge and South Ruislip. Further, polling by YouGov and People’s polling found an overwhelming majority were in favour of delaying the ban on petrol and diesel engines until 2035.
Have you considered that what you read on the “progressive” Leftist dominated MSM and social media does not represent what people actually think and it therefore you that are out of touch?
Ok, so the Tories are going to amble through the nrxt election. I must be wrong!! And I must be way behind the times.
No. You are right for the wrong reasons
. It is because of the Tories’ failures on immigration, failure in tackling woke and sick transgender ideology, their cynical, superficial changes to the historic folly of Net Zero, that will see them lose the next election.
Put simply, they have nothing to offer those inclined to Labour and have absolutely nothing to offer anyone on the right, for whom the last 13 years have been one of utter betrayal.
You’re 100% right. All these old right wing Tory duffers are pissing into the wind. Their time has gone. It’s sad and pathetic to read their comments. I’m a small c conservative but these guys are just so dumb with their right wing diatribes and failed policies.
My only cause for optimism (or maybe schadenfreude) is that the Left typically struggles with success and a larger majority just increases the possibility of schism.
Yes, I know Tony Blair managed to hold things together for 10 years but then Kier Starmer is no Tony Blair.
Yes it’s bad, but worth noting the incredibly low turn out – this was equally about people not voting conservative and not voting at all as opposed to switching to Labour.
The dilemma Sunak has is how to inspire those people to vote again, because right now, I can’t see it happening and tbh, I’m one of them.
The only time I haven’t voted was in the final local elections when Teresa May was in and everything was just hopeless. I thought, that’s it! I’m binning my voting card.
Like you, I have the same feeling now. But I do think with the right policies, I could be persuaded to go out and vote. It is very frustrating.
I am not a Leftie. I wouldn’t know MSN if it bit me in the b*m. I don’t watch TV or any news channels, except perhaps Michelle Dewberry on GB News – very entertaining. I will give you my Labour manifesto over for the next 10 years:
1) Reduce voting age to 16 and fill schools with agitators.
2) Analyse polls and show that old people are not voting : everybody on UnHerd has decided not to vote, apparently. Use this analysis to make a case for disenfranchising over-80s – later over 75s – later over 70s. From that point the Tories will never again win an election.
3) Remove the triple lock for 10 years, minimise the pensions and use the money to give every young person £10,000 on their 21st birthday.
4) Instigate on-line voting by using facial recogniton software.
5) Ensure that there is a quota system of Labour MPs, especially focussing on Trans people.
6) Tax wealth to death, thereby releasing houses on to the market.
7) Ban offshore purchases of London housing. Nationalise all empty house (this one difficult and less likely).
8) Nationalise rail and bus services and water boards.
Then look forward to 50 years of power.
‘Wealth’ is no longer trapped in fixed or heavy assets – factories, mines, shipyards – except for property. It is relatively easy to liquidate historic property wealth and it is easier to create new wealth in the service economy whilst parked somewhere sunnier and less hostile overseas. And these days the service economy overwhelmingly is the UK economy – some very high percentage I can’t remember .
It is not 1975. And envy as a motivator is not a good idea.
The UK is going to be a poor country with politicians trying to fool its people they are still rich and have choices. Whereas the cost of money is entirely in the hands of overseas lenders that fund our delusion. The UK will track US rates or the pound will crater, whacking up inflation as we import so much. I fear only hitting the wall hard will wake people up. You certainly don’t find many in the Tory party either aware or brave enough to engage with the electorate on any of this. All must have prizes. Paid for by someone else, somewhere else….
So things have to be really really bad for the Conservatives before Labour get a chance to secure a majority? That should be taken as a reminder that the media predicted Labour ‘landslide’ has no special validation beyond the game of musical chairs that is our democracy (at the moment).
The Tories lost these by-elections because their natural supporters stayed at home or voted Reform UK, whose vote share in both cases would have been sufficient to retain the seat.
The lessons for the Conservatives are that if they want to win the General Election next year (and they still can), they need to:
Stop promoting unrestricted housebuilding; protect the green belt; and recognise that services and infrastructure from water to the NHS haven’t kept pace with development. They must stop listening to the NIMBY-bashers and growth fanatics and start listening to their natural voters.Get a grip on immigration: not just ‘the boats’ but legal migration which is ridiculously and unsustainably high.Recognise that the economic problems we face are not the result of national policy and accept that we just have to weather the storm.Acknowledge that Brexit has already been a success: this just requires hammering home the message that our economic and other ills would be worse if we’d stayed in the EU and that the rest of Europe is in a much worse position than the UK.
I understand the point you have made that had all the Reform votes gone to the Tories they would have won. My problem with that argument is that arithmetic works like that but in reality those voters were a protest vote and would not have voted for the current Tories under any circumstances. They would, like many other ex-Tory voters, stayed at home or even, just to really sock it to them voted for anyone else. One or two might have angrily even voted Labour.
The Tories just weren’t going to win either seat this time.
I really, really don’t want a Labour government, but the problem is that I don’t want the existing Tory party to be rewarded with any sort of victory. It has betrayed every single principle upon which it ought to stand and only a severe thrashing at the ballot box will force the current crop of useless MPs to rediscover which side their bread was always buttered.
I don’t want to generalise about all Tory MPs: Kemi Badenoch will hopefully be the new leader after the disastrous election next year, and I have always had some regard for Iain Duncan-Smith – he might have been a hopeless shadow PM, but his work on the welfare state in the Coalition government, which was in many senses a continuation of Frank Field’s work in the New Labour years, was politics at its best, only frustrated by George Osborne’s inability to do anything actually useful while in office. Suella Braverman has all the right instincts but is of course only Home Secretary because the existing Tory establishment needs her to be the political target for the immigration fiasco: it has no intention of doing anything about it.
Anyway, I’m now merely hoping that Keir Starmer has been as effective as people say in booting out the hard left from Labour. I have my doubts and it’s not as if there aren’t already enough insane ideas in the Labour party even when the hard Left isn’t talking, but like or or not Labour will lead the next government, so I’ll just have to accept it.
The Tories are not “slipping back” to their core vote, they abandoned their core vote years ago. Those still voting Conservative are people who think, not incorrectly, that a Labour Government would be even worse.
The country is not moving Left, any more than Italy, Sweden, Finland, The Netherlands, Germany, or France (to give a few recent electoral examples) are moving right. It’s simply that, across the continent, people are fed up with the entire political class and are taking it out on the incumbents.
Ironically, the Tories don’t seem to have spotted this. The incumbent Mayor of London is very unpopular and the Tories could win next year’s mayoral election and put a big spoke into Starmer’s path to Downing St. But they seem too exhausted and limp to grab the opportunity.
I agree with all you said.
My only addition is that the political class, including the media, is absolutely refusing any responsibility. It’s easier for them to blame a public for becoming populist (left or right) than it is to have the merest hint of self awareness
The Conservatives are “now” a zombie government?
Surely that’s been the case for months?
Just what are the Tories doing allowing American Pharma to make and sell useless and possibly dangerous vaccines here? I would love to have Professor Angus Dalgleish’s vaccine which reinvigorates our T Cells to tackle any Bacteria / virus but this Dystopian Government won’t approve it. What might seal Sunak’s fate is if he signs our freedoms away to the World Health Organisation who effectively want to control this and every Country. What they want to do is quite frightening and can only be described as complete and utter totalitarianism without accountability. This world has gone mad.
As I have been saying for a long time, the Tories are toast and Sunak knows it. His halfhearted attempts to rally the faithful by attacking the most vulnerable in society have backfired as those swivel eyed loons who like that sort of stuff have already decided they are going to do whatever Farage tells them to do while normal people are horrified and have abandoned the Tories in droves.
The upcoming election will make 1997 look like a good year for the Tories. Sunak will be on the beach in California before the Tories have time to reach for the brandy and revolver!
If Conservatives are a zombie, then Labour is a hologram.
Pitiful though it is that we are going to have a General Election about £1.7 billion, the imposition of VAT on private school fees, which is Keir Starmer’s only policy difference with the Government, does not seem to dissuade Shire Tories from voting for him.
Or products of that system from standing for him. Sarah Edwards pointedly does not say where she went to school, but Alistair Strathern is an out and proud public schoolboy, like Keir Mather. Edwards’s CV is lady of leisure stuff. I have been an NHS governor, and it is not a job. Of course it appears on my CV as voluntary work, but she is trying to palm it off as employment for want of anything else. Likewise, what, exactly, did she do at Oxfam? Strathern is the Bank of England’s “climate lead on insurance” while cohabiting with a full-time Greenpeace activist whose demonstrations he attends regularly. The Starmer Government is taking shape, and in Strathern’s case the shape of the Sunak Government is made clear.
We know that Starmer can win seats that the Conservatives held in 2019, but we do not know that he can win back seats that Labour lost to them. That happened at Wakefield in such a bizarre situation as to suggest nothing at all about anywhere else. But after having managed to lose Hartlepool, which Jeremy Corbyn never did, then Starmer failed to take Uxbridge and South Ruislip, meaning that even only one type of pre-2019 Conservative seat is susceptible to his charms.
The rolling English shires are voting for Starmer because they agree with him. The Mail and, especially, the Telegraph do their job brilliantly: holding the uniparty line on economic and foreign policy, just like The Times, while boiling their readers at an imperceptible pace from the views that their writers initially affected to hold on social policy, to the views that they always really did hold, as anyone who had ever met them had seen first hand. Those readers also always have held those views, but they look to their paper to give them permission to say so, in the way that while that subculture likes to think that it is Theresa May, far more of it is really personified by the financial fiddles and the adulterous affairs of its therefore beloved Boris Johnson.
The Guardian has the same role in relation to economic and foreign policy, and it is just as good at it. But neither The Guardian, nor the Daily Telegraph, nor The Times, is read all that much in Hartlepool, which did not vote for Starmer, having voted twice for Corbyn. Or in Uxbridge and South Ruislip, which also did not vote for Starmer. Wakefield did vote for him, but only under the most extreme circumstances, which will not apply next year. Yet Selby and Ainsty did. Tamworth did. Mid Bedfordshire did. Well, of course they did. And her local Conservative Association came within a whisker of deselecting Suella Braverman. Well, of course it did.
But when I tell you that there is going to be a hung Parliament, then you can take that to the bank. I spent the 2005 Parliament saying that it was psephologically impossible for the Heir to Blair’s Conservative Party to win an overall majority. I predicted a hung Parliament on the day that the 2017 General Election was called, and I stuck to that, entirely alone, all the way up to the publication of the exit poll eight long weeks later. And on the day that Rishi Sunak became Prime Minister (as well as five days earlier, according to my Facebook memories today), I predicted that a General Election between him and Starmer would result in a hung Parliament.
To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.
Here’s a question for all of you desperate right wingers as you cling to the wreckage of 13 years of disastrous Tory rule. Which swivel eyed loon are you backing to drive the party completely into the ground?
Braverman is my particular favourite. She’s so deliciously hideous and will clearly say literally anything to win favour with the lunatic fringe who seem to be all that is left of the Tories.
Badenoch just doesn’t seem to have her heart in the culture war garbage that she seems to be nailing to her mast. Unconvincing.
Mordant is far too normal for the Tories. Maybe she can reapply after they are tired of landslide defeats?
Bunter? I’d love to see him back but he has zero desire to do the rebuilding work when he can be fleecing the rubes instead. Plus its a hard pitch to be put in charge of rebuilding what you were responsible for tearing down…
It will all be highly amusing!
So tell us your solution. How do you think, were you as a champagne socialist to arrive as PM, what would you do?
Does your programme come up with anything other than ‘swivel eyed loon’? Who are the key people in Labour?
Its just such a perfect description for you!
In the Kingdom of Swivel-Eyed Loons the Straight-Eyed Man is king. Your Majesty.