Liz Truss, a name with which you will be painfully familiar if you have had to remortgage your home since she was prime minister, has claimed that “Britain is full of secret Conservatives”. If so, these clandestine Tories were keeping themselves exceptionally well hidden when it came to voting in the recent brace of byelections. The Conservatives were clobbered in Kingswood and walloped in Wellingborough, the latter producing the second largest swing from the Tories to Labour since 1945. This double whammy of byelection humiliations adds to the lengthening list of electoral eviscerations that have been inflicted on the Tories since Rishi Sunak moved into Number 10. The promise to his party that he had it in him to turn around their fortunes remains undelivered.
The flaccid manner in which the Tories tackled these contests makes you wonder whether even the prime minister still believes in the notion of a Rishi Revival. During byelections where the governing party is profoundly unpopular, it is nevertheless usual for the incumbents to put up at least some pretence that they are competitive. One indicator of the fatalism in Tory ranks is that cabinet ministers did not go out to brave the doorsteps in either seat. Another sign is how very few Conservative MPs volunteered to help out in contests which were signifiers of two of the reasons their party has become so noxious to so many voters. The Wellingborough contest was triggered after the parliamentary standards watchdog rejected denials by the then Tory MP, Peter Bone, by finding that he had verbally bullied, physically struck and exposed his genitals to a staff member. The local Tory association then made the extraordinarily bizarre decision to choose the partner of the disgraced ex-MP to be its candidate. Mr Sunak refused to endorse her, but couldn’t stop her, demonstrating the Tory leader’s lack of grip over his party.
The contest in the Gloucestershire constituency of Kingswood came about because Chris Skidmore quit as the Conservative MP in protest against the government’s abandonment of commitments to tackle the climate crisis. One of these byelections was emblematic of Tory splits, the other of Tory sleaze, two of the push factors that have repulsed voters. Another is the cost of living crisis. So it won’t have helped that voting happened on the same day that it was officially announced Britain had entered a recession at the end of 2023, puncturing months of boasting by the prime minister that he had managed to swerve one. The one consolation for Tories to seize on is that Sir Keir Starmer has hit a rough patch. The excruciating U-turn about his green prosperity plan has been followed by the dreadful debacle over his candidate, now ex-candidate, in the Rochdale byelection. Having had a few days to reflect on that self-sabotaging shambles, senior Labour people will privately concede that Azhar Ali ought to have been disowned as the party’s candidate as soon as it was known that he had peddled the ghastly conspiracy theory that Israel wilfully permitted the mass slaughter of its citizens by Hamas last October to give itself “the green light” to invade Gaza. After initially allowing him to carry on for 48 hours, Labour finally repudiated Mr Ali when it emerged that he had made further remarks incompatible with Sir Keir’s “zero-tolerance” policy towards antisemitism.
This saga may not be quite as simple as dithering Labour leader fails to grasp nettle, but it can and has been presented that way to damaging effect. To compound Labour’s troubles, the party has felt compelled to suspend a second parliamentary candidate in a Lancashire seat for an outburst about “fucking Israel”.
When Rochdale goes to the polls at the end of the month, it will be for one of the weirdest byelections in the history of them. There will be no Labour candidate to vote for in a seat the party is defending. Because it is too late to remove his name from the ballot papers, Mr Ali may still become the MP, which will be embarrassing. There will be even sharper winces at Labour HQ if George Galloway, who has parachuted into the contest to run a pop-up campaign from the garage of a secondhand car dealership, takes the seat by exploiting anger about the conflict in Gaza. The fedora-clad firebrand has form in this respect, defeating his former party in the Bradford West byelection in 2012 and in Bethnal Green and Bow at the 2005 general election where he profited from opposition to the Iraq war. Whoever ends up winning, it is worth noting that no one thinks it will be the Tories.
That hasn’t prevented them, in concert with their megaphones in the rightwing media, from seizing on this farrago to depict the Labour leader as a fraud when he says he has drained the poisons of the Corbyn era and asserts that his party is “unrecognisable” from the one that lost in 2019. The Tories are going hard on this because Sir Keir’s claim to have changed Labour for the better is integral to his case that he can change Britain for the better.
It can’t be credibly disputed that he has made a fierce effort to purge antisemitism from his party. He took the unprecedented step of ending his predecessor’s Labour career because of the defiant way in which Jeremy Corbyn responded to the official inquiry into antisemitism on his watch. Hundreds of party members have been expelled in the Labour leader’s endeavour to “rip antisemitism out by its roots”. What the Rochdale episode indicates is that there is still some weeding to do in Labour’s garden. It is not entirely free of antisemitism and conspiracism. Neither, it should be pointed out, is the Conservative party. And, it should further be said, Islamophobia also pollutes parts of our politics.
You may find this surprising, but there are some senior Labour figures whose dismay about the Rochdale fiasco is lightened by a little relief. This is on the grounds that it is better that an incident like this erupts now, rather than during the general election campaign. There are even those who reckon it “a kind of blessing in disguise” because it has given a vivid warning to the party’s candidates to engage brain before opening mouth and to remember that there is no such thing as a truly “private” meeting. I’m sceptical that everyone will learn the lesson. It will not be at all surprising if secret recordings with incendiary content released at a time designed to cause maximum disruption are a feature of the general election campaign. History suggests it will not just be Labour that has made some unwise candidate selections.
After a debilitating fortnight for the leaders of both the largest parties, the big picture question is which of them has been left looking worse off? My answer is the prime minister. It is a rocky horror show for Labour in Rochdale, but the result there won’t tell us what is likely to happen at the general election. Ungorgeous George grabbing the seat will not be the harbinger of a landslide for his Workers party come the national contest. Wounding though this episode has been for Sir Keir, there’s absolutely no chance that the Labour leader is going to be threatened by an attempt to topple him.
The Tory leader can’t be anything like as sure that his position is safe. There were spectacular collapses in the support for his party in both Kingswood and Wellingborough. That reinforces the message of the national polls and speaks to the mood in both swing seats and constituencies that were once impregnably blue. It all conveys the strong impression that Britain is sick of the Tories and resolved to turn them out.
The performance of the Reform party, which took more than a tenth of the vote in both those byelections, is fuel for the fires burning around Mr Sunak. It will increase the pressure from within for the Tory leader to lurch further to the right – or surrender his job to someone who will.
The agitators’ agenda, which is to turn the Conservatives into some kind of fusion between Trussism and Farageism, doesn’t look like a path to recovery. It is much more likely to speed them down another loop of the doom spiral. That won’t deter the agitators from further destabilising the Tory leader’s already brittle position.
It has been a torrid fortnight for the Labour leader, but I’d prefer to have his problems to those which are crowding in on his Tory rival.
• Andrew Rawnsley is the Chief Political Commentator of the Observer
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 250 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at observer.letters@observer.co.uk
