Yahoo News Labour's ground game helps secure coup in Peterborough
Labour’s victory in Peterborough is a psychologically significant coup for a party that limped into third place in the European elections a fortnight ago, and a handy win in a seat where 60.9% voted leave in the 2016 referendum.
The victory in a classic marginal – the kind of small city seat where general elections are won and lost – is undoubtedly important, but falls short of a decisive endorsement for Jeremy Corbyn and his party’s Brexit contortions.
Labour ultimately won because the rightwing vote was split. Lisa Forbes secured first place on 10,484 votes with 31% of the vote, down 17 points from its surprise win in the 2017 general election. The elections expert John Curtice said it was the lowest winning share of a vote in a byelection since 1945.
Nigel Farage’s insurgent Brexit party came from nowhere to 29%, hauling most (but not all) of its 9,801 votes from the Conservatives in a seat where Ukip did not stand in 2017.
But for all Farage’s post-result bravado, the byelection represented possibly the best opportunity for a party he has led to win a Westminster seat with a new candidate (as opposed to a Tory defector).
The hard Brexit politician blamed “a lack of data” for the near-miss and pointed to the strength of the Labour party machine as mitigation for another failure by a Farage-led party in a parliamentary election.
Certainly, Corbyn’s party was helped by a classic Labour ground game. As many as 500 volunteers were engaged in getting out the vote and had been canvassing for several months after the previous MP, Fiona Onasanya, was convicted of lying over a speeding offence.
Labour’s leadership will be also pleased that voters, faced with a stark left-right choice in a key seat, did not desert in material numbers to the anti-Brexit Liberal Democrats.
The Lib Dems may have gained nine percentage points – almost certainly all from Labour – to finish at 12%, but it was not enough to change the result.
The Conservatives were left with the most to think about in the short term, after failing to win a seat they would once have been confident of taking, particularly given Labour’s travails over Onasanya’s disgrace.
Paul Bristow, the Tory candidate, secured 7,243 (21%) of the vote, a plunge of 25 percentage points – hardly a surprise after the party’s dismal fifth place European election result. There could be no clearer example that failing to deliver Brexit could let Corbyn into Downing Street, as a string of leadership candidates observed.
Related: Peterborough byelection result: Labour scrapes past Brexit party to hold seat
It is obvious who the Conservatives need to take votes from: the Brexit party. Taken together, Brexit and Tory party votes amounted to 50% of the electorate (although interestingly that is lower than the 61% who voted to leave the EU).
In any event, the task for a new Conservative prime minister could not be clearer: find a way of reuniting the pro-Brexit vote.
For Labour, the picture is more complicated. The party has shown it can take a leave-majority seat when it matters, but it will have to work out how to respond to the inevitable Conservative reboot and an environment in which the Lib Dems are revitalised.
