Rishi Sunak on Friday managed to avoid becoming the first prime minister since 1968 to lose three byelections on the same day, as his party slipped to defeats in two safe seats but clung on in Boris Johnson’s former seat of Uxbridge and South Ruislip.
Conservatives portrayed the results as a sign that Labour’s huge national poll lead is vulnerable, especially when the Tories find the right issues to campaign on, as they did in Uxbridge with Labour’s plan to extend London’s Ultra-low emission zone.
However, pollsters say the dramatic swings against Sunak’s party in Selby and Ainsty and Somerton and Frome show the national mood has turned against them, and may not return in time for next year’s general election.
John Curtice, a professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde, told the BBC on Friday morning: “The tide is still a long way out for the Conservatives and they still have an awful long way to go before they look as though they might have a chance to retain power.”
The Tories had predicted all three byelections would be tough for them, for national and local reasons. But the scale of the swings in Selby and Somerton still caught many by surprise.
Labour won Selby with a majority of just over 4,000, with a swing of nearly 24 percentage points. Such a result repeated nationally would lead to a landslide general election victory.
The Lib Dems won Somerton with a majority of 11,000 and a swing of 29 percentage points. Over the three seats, the Tories dropped an average of 21 percentage points.
Keir Mather, the new MP for Selby and Ainsty, said in his victory speech: “We have rewritten the rules on where Labour can win.” Party officials agree: one MP told the Guardian before the byelections that the most important lesson for Labour from Thursday’s votes would be a better understanding of how the shifting electorate is changing the party’s list of target seats.
For the Conservatives, there were reasons to hope and reasons for despair. Tory MPs stressed that the Uxbridge result showed voters were unconvinced by Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, and would vote against him when given a good reason to do so.
Laura Trott, the pensions minister, told Sky News: “There is no overwhelming love for Starmer. The electorate are not sold on him and that’s come through strongly in these results.”
The party can also point to the fact that Selby and Somerton were lost not so much because of thousands of Tory voters switching parties but because so many stayed at home. In Selby, the Conservatives dropped 21,000 votes, but Labour gained fewer than 3,000. In Somerton, the Tories lost 26,000 votes but the Lib Dems picked up just over 4,000.
Sunak’s allies hope that if the economy begins to recover, they may be able to reignite the enthusiasm of their former voters. Trott said: “Byelections tend to be trying to send the governing party a message. We’ve got it. We’ve got a lot of work to do to regain that trust, but the public are not sold on Labour.”
But there are also many reasons for the Tories to worry, not least the scale of the losses. Selby is 237th on Labour’s list of target seats, and the party has not achieved such a large swing at a byelection since it won Dudley West in 1994 – three years before its landslide general election victory.
Both Selby and Somerton were also won with a substantial amount of tactical voting between Labour and Lib Dem voters. The Lib Dems came sixth in Selby, while Labour came fifth in Somerton, with a vote share so low the party lost its deposit. If similar behaviour is repeated at a general election it could wipe out the Tories in many different parts of the country.
Those close to Sunak insist the prime minister can turn things round by focusing on his “five priorities”: halving inflation, growing the economy, reducing government debt, cutting NHS waiting lists, and stopping small boat crossings across the Channel.
The party won in Uxbridge largely by ignoring all of these issues and campaigning almost solely against the Labour mayor Sadiq Khan’s plans to extend restrictions on highly polluting vehicles to London’s outer boroughs.
Conservatives will hope to find other such “wedge” issues on which they can split the electorate at a general election.
Henry Hill, the deputy editor of the Tory grassroots website ConservativeHome, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme the party should “find a local issue that people really care about and just run on that”.
However, Hill also warned that the army of volunteers and supporters who will be needed to sell that message next year are not feeling motivated to do so.
He said: “There is a sense not only that the government is in acute trouble now, but also mounting frustration that after 13 years in government, the party doesn’t feel like it’s achieved very much.”
