Conservative by-election defeats in Wellingborough and Kingswood highlight the party’s impossible task.
To avoid a shattering defeat, the Conservatives would have to unite hard-right culture warriors with middle-ground voters. The options for Rishi Sunak are narrowing — fast.
Only a fool would look at a couple of by-election results and try to predict the precise outcome of a coming General Election. But the direction of travel is hardly a secret.
Wellingborough was 226th on Labour’s target list. The Tories got almost two-thirds of the vote there in 2019 — now Labour has a majority of 6-and-a-half thousand. The Conservative vote collapsed on a swing to Labour of almost 30%.
In Kingswood the swing was more modest — 16% — but still enough to put Labour in power.
As the clock runs down, it’s clear Labour is heading for a significant victory, and a substantial number of voters have given up on the Tories. But they are leaving from different wings of the party, and it’s hard to see how the Conservatives can possibly bring them back together.
While polls suggest enormous Labour leads, few suggest much enthusiasm for a Labour government, or personal excitement around Sir Keir Starmer. While he will celebrate these gains, attention will soon switch to the next by-election, in Rochdale, where Labour’s mis-steps have left the party without an official candidate.
The Tories, meanwhile, are trapped in a pincer movement — Labour advancing on its seats in the Midlands and the north of England, the Liberal Democrats coming for Tory seats in the south and west. At the same time, Reform is carving chunks out of hard-right Tory support, making the situation even worse for Rishi Sunak.
In Wellingborough, Reform took nearly 4,000 votes, but some Tories will note the Reform vote in Kingswood was bigger than Labour’s majority — suggesting things would be less bleak if the party could be neutralised. Overnight, Jacob Rees-Mogg described Conservative and Reform voters are part of a wider “Tory family.” Reuniting that fractured family would involve a full embrace of Reform’s hard-right agenda, which itself would risk sending more middle-ground Tories fleeing to the Lib Dems and Labour.
What can Rishi Sunak do? The received wisdom is that he will hang on until the autumn, praying for something — anything — to revive his dying party. This still seems the most likely timetable.
But will he get the chance? If May’s local elections are as disastrous as current trends suggest, might the Tories conclude their least-worst option is to junk Sunak, crown a more “Reform-y” leader, leap further right and hope for the best?
Might that tempt Sunak to go for broke? Cut taxes in the budget and call a May 2nd election? He would lose, but would the defeat be even more disastrous in the autumn? It sounds like a suicidal mis-step, but it might be his only option.
The final months of a dying government are never pretty. But this could be particularly ugly…
