OPINION - By-election defeats highlight Tory fears of tactical voting

When playing the board game of British politics, you always want to be the Conservative Party, because you’ll win most of the time. And thanks to first-past-the-post, you don’t even need a majority of the vote.

In each election that the Tories have won or ended up as the largest party since 1979, in all but two of them (2010 and 2015), they secured a remarkably similar share of the vote – never lower than 41.9 per cent or higher than 43.9 per cent. And in four of those elections, they achieved either a landslide or comfortable overall majority.

Conversely, and as you’d expect, in the years the Tories lose, their vote share falls. In 1997 and 2001 for example – both Labour landslides – it plunged to 31 and 32 per cent respectively. Ok, so the Conservatives do better when they win more votes. More searing analysis when we get it.

But a falling share of the vote is not the existential crisis for the Tories. That is when the other parties, let’s call them the unTories (Labour, Lib Dems and Greens) begin to work together, even unofficially, to oust them.

Because British politics – or to be precise, English politics – is not so much a classical two-party system but a ‘one party and the rest’ system. It is the Tories versus the others, and when the others get their act together – or the leader of the Conservatives repels enough voters – they operate to form a block powerful enough to overcome even the minoritarian instincts of first-past-the-post.

Take Tiverton and Honiton. Labour came second in the seat in the last two general elections. Last night, the party lost its deposit as its vote shifted en masse to the Lib Dems.

Now, the results in Tiverton (30 per cent swing to the Lib Dems) and Wakefield (12.7 per cent swing to Labour) will not be replicated across the country come the next general election. The Tories are not going to lose 300+ seats. That is because not every constituency where the Conservative majority is smaller than the combined Lib Dem/Labour vote will automatically flip. The two opposition parties still hate each other too much for that.

But those seats are far more vulnerable than they were in 2019, when many soft Tories who may have voted Lib Dem were scared off by Jeremy Corbyn as Labour’s alternative Prime Minister (as indeed were many Labour voters). Keir Starmer conjures up many adjectives, but scary is not one of them.

And so that is the real danger for the Conservative Party in 2024. Not simply that their share of the vote falls, but a pincer movement comprised of Labour gains in the urban north and Liberal Democrats in the sub-urban and rural south.

Such a result may not produce a Labour majority as it did twice around the turn of the century, but it could well deliver a non-Tory landslide. At which point, the game would be up for any Conservative leader.

In the comment pages, Paul Flynn declares that house music is back, with perfect timing for a summer of discontent. He also can’t believe Logan and Marcia are splitting – or why it’s now impossible to view the Murdochs outside of the Succession prism, in the ultimate triumph of fiction.

And finally, so neither of us are going to Glastonbury. Instead, go out and do these fun things in London before returning home for a shower and a comfortable bed.

Have a lovely weekend.

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