Lib Dem byelection win was spectacular – but Labour’s may hurt Tories most

The Liberal Democrats’ victory in the Tiverton and Honiton byelection was spectacular. The Conservatives’ majority in the seat was the largest, in terms of raw numbers if not percentages, ever to be overturned in a byelection. The swing of 30% was less than the 34% achieved in North Shropshire in December, but it was enough for a comfortable majority of 6,144 in this former Tory stronghold. However, Labour’s win in Wakefield may be the one that hurts Boris Johnson and the Conservatives more in the long term.

Wakefield is important for symbolic reasons. It is “red wall” not just in the loose sense of a long-term northern Labour seat that the Tories won in 2019, but according to the original, precise definition from the analyst James Kanagasooriam – a constituency where Labour’s support had been consistently higher than one would expect given its social composition.

While it had been Labour ever since a byelection back in 1932, Wakefield was never a monolithically safe Labour seat. The Conservatives came fairly close under Thatcher, taking more than 40% of the vote in 1987, reflecting the middle-class element that went with being West Yorkshire’s capital. The risk for Labour after the 2019 election was that the bonds between this sort of community and the party had been permanently broken. The Wakefield byelection, on top of some of the local election results in May, suggests that the wall is repairable.

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Labour’s campaign targeted some of the more Conservative-inclined parts of Wakefield, such as the smaller towns of Horbury and Ossett, and it seems to have succeeded.

Governments, particularly a government led by as skilled a fabulist as Johnson, are inclined to rationalise away shocking losses to third parties in apparently safe seats such as Tiverton and Honiton. These are dismissed, rather patronisingly, as midterm spasms caused by understandable reactions to difficult but necessary government policies, which will be replaced by a more mature judgment once the general election comes around. The lines to take will be the same as those trotted out for Chesham and Amersham and North Shropshire.

While it is possible that the Conservatives will regain these Lib Dem seats at the next election, it is far from guaranteed. They lost Christchurch in 1993 on a swing even bigger than Tiverton and Honiton and regained it in 1997, true; but other previously safe Tory seats such as Newbury (1993) and Romsey (2000) stuck with the Lib Dems for two general elections after the byelections.

The Tiverton and Honiton result represents a renewed threat. The Lib Dems prospered in the south-west in their revivals under Jeremy Thorpe and Paddy Ashdown, gathering in left-of-centre votes and people of all classes and ideologies who felt patronised by the smart types from London who ran the country. This electoral base shattered under the impact of the Cameron-Clegg coalition and Brexit – the Lib Dems lost their left and populist credentials.

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After Tiverton – and their sweep in the Somerset council elections last month – they have got their south-west momentum back. A new and perhaps devastating element of their success in Shropshire and Tiverton has been their ability to marshal the repugnance that many traditional Conservatives feel for what the party has become. In his victory speech the new Lib Dem MP, Richard Foord, focused on condemning Johnson’s lack of integrity.

The previous time a government lost two seats in byelections on the same night was on 7 November 1991, when the Conservatives lost Langbaurgh (Cleveland) to Labour and Kincardine and Deeside (Aberdeenshire) to the Liberal Democrats. Conservatives will point out that five months later in the 1992 general election they regained both seats and won an overall majority in the Commons, but they would be unwise to imagine that their problems in 2022 will be resolved so easily.

The swing to Labour in highly marginal Langbaurgh in 1991 was only a quarter of what it was in Wakefield, and Kincardine had been a long-term Lib Dem target as opposed to a triumph from a standing start like Tiverton. Most of the economic bad news had happened by the time of the 1991 byelections, while in 2022 the cliff edge is in front of us; in 1991 the Conservatives had John Major, a new prime minister who was regarded as competent, unifying and honest, while in 2022 they have Johnson.

The two byelections of 1991 also indicated that anti-Conservative voters were behaving increasingly tactically, which meant Major’s comfortable (7.6 percentage point) lead over Labour in the 1992 election produced an uncomfortably narrow majority.

The swings in Tiverton and Honiton and Wakefield resulted from super-charged anti-Conservative tactical voting. Wakefield and Tiverton both voted strongly for Brexit in 2016 and were supposedly on the Conservative side of the great realignment, but they rejected the Conservatives as emphatically as the remain-voting suburbs of Chesham and Amersham.

The byelections leave the Conservatives facing some problems they thought they had put behind them, and some new difficulties, without the traditional escape routes. Oliver Dowden’s successor as party co-chair has some tough times ahead.