As the Press Association reported:
Liberal Democrats are celebrating a by-election bounce during their leadership battle after taking two council seats from Tories.
Their candidate Timothy Huggan won at Manor, Forest Heath District, Suffolk, where Conservatives were unopposed in May.
The second gain came at Rhiw, Conwy County Borough, north Wales, where Trevor Stott triumphed in the ward’s third by-election in less than four years.
Liberal Democrats also scored a landslide victory to defend a previously knife-edge marginal at Norfolk County Council’s Aylsham division where the previous contest was on the same day as the last general election.
The Lib Dem revival, after their gloom leading up to the resignation of Sir Menzies Campbell as leader, is bad news for the Tories’ David Cameron in what was otherwise a good week for him.
His hopes of making it to Downing Street depend crucially on making progress against Liberal Democrats as well as Labour.There were too few comparable contests to indicate how Labour support has stood up in the face of crises over Northern Rock and the data loss debacle and England’s exit from Euro 2008.
Congratulations to all concerned.
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6 Comments
We also had good progress in Wellingborough West, where we managed a credible second place in a a formerly ‘safe’ Tory rural seat – which is the best Wellingborough result for many years.
As for Labour support – it fell to just 7%!
And in Rhiw the BNP polled under 5%.
Even better, somebody fed a “duff” story to the far-right website Stormfront saying they’d polled 599 votes, only 30-odd votes from winning. Didn’t they look stupid when the real result came through !!!!
@2: Thats fab!
Big congrats to the team in Conwy.
I have heard very good things about their (us, not the BNP) campaign. I’m not sure which constituency Rhiw is in, but considering large parts of the county are Labour/Tory marginal, its even more impressive. A team to watch in ten years I would say.
The Guardian poll today isn’t exactly bad news either. Clearly decent folk are weary of Labour and don’t trust the Tories. I never thought that this would happen after last Sunday’s spat!
Rhiw is in Clwyd West (a Lab/Con marginal).
I may have missed this being posted elsewhere but I thought it might be interesting in view of the previous article about George Hollingbery and his ‘useful by-election’ remark. We held Wickham with over 60% of the vote and the Tory vote went down due to the intervention of UKIP who took 40 votes. Not so useful for the Tories after all.