The results are in and it’s another day not to be the Conservative spokesperson, as Labour have won both of yesterday’s by-elections.
In Mid Bedfordshire, Alistair Strathern will go down in the record books as having overturned a near 25,000 majority:
- Labour 13,872 (34.1%, +12.4%)
- Conservatives 12,680 (31.1%, -28.6%)
- Liberal Democrats 9,420 (23.1%, 10.5%)
It’s the first by-election of this Parliament in which voters had a choice between three alternatives with a credible chance of winning but it appears at first glance that, on the day, wavering voters opted for Labour rather than us as the means to defeat Nadine Dorries’s stand-in.
However, as Daisy Cooper put it:
We nearly doubled our share of the vote which would see the Lib Dems win dozens of seats off the Conservatives in a general election.
The Liberal Democrats played a crucial role in defeating the Conservatives in Mid Bedfordshire, and we can play a crucial role in getting rid of this Conservative government at the next election.
I’m so proud of Emma Holland-Lindsay and her campaign which convinced thousands of lifelong Conservative voters in the villages of Mid Bedfordshire to switch to the Liberal Democrats.
Unlike in North Shropshire, where in a short campaign we were able to “make the weather” and quickly overwhelm the Labour campaign, the long phoney war between the somewhat petulant announcement of Nadine Dorries’s resignation and the actual one meant that Labour had the time to organise a strong campaign. But nonetheless, it’s a good win for Labour, a decent result for us, and an awful one for the Conservatives, albeit they’ll probably expect to win it back in a General Election.
What it does show is that we’re staring at a 1997 scenario, where voters are shopping around for the candidate most likely to defeat the Conservatives. And that gives us opportunities to win a number of seats across the South and South-West of England.
It was also demonstrated by the result in Tamworth:
- Labour 11,719 (45.7%, +22.0%)
- Conservatives 10,403 (40.6%, -25.7%)
where the Conservatives shed votes both left and right – the Reform UK vote was larger than the Labour majority – whilst the Liberal Democrat and Green votes were squeezed down to near irrelevancy.
Many thanks must go to Sunny Virk and the team in Tamworth for fighting the good fight in the face of insuperable odds.
* Mark Valladares is the Monday Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice.
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60 Comments
Disappointing to see we finished behind the Britain First candidate in Tamworth…
Looking at the results – our by-election gains will be a difficult hold. Tory voters returning to the party ( as they tend to do) and labour picking up votes as they appear credible – makes those gains hard work to keep…
So much for the glass ceiling and unelectable Labour candidate. On election night it is going to be hard to hold these seats so it will take up valuable resources which should be going to our most winnable 40 or so seats based on the last election night.
Oh dear, life will become very difficult over the next year and our expectations must be rationalised to a commo9n sense level. To get 20 MPs would be very good. Could be less and with potential by elections for Labour to gain the process will go on, i e Blackpool South and Wellingborough as well as the overall Labour vote hardening up even in our good areas.
In the meantime the staff at Mid Beds did as much as they could , if not more. They deserve a months rest. Well done to all involved. Just wonder if we need to change some aspects of our by election approach, maybe, maybe not, but that is for another day.
I don’t think the Tamworth result should be compared to the famous Bootle by-election which gave the David Owen Fan Club Continuity SDP its quietus.
What I take from these results is that the Tories are in deep trouble, not that the LibDems will struggle to hold Somerton & Frome (former LD seat and not a Labour prospect) or North Shropshire (look at the Council byelection which also took place yesterday). Yes, it’s a shame Emma didn’t take Mid Beds, and yes, you can argue that if the Labour Party were taking the long view they should have been seeking to boost the other half of the anti-Tory pincer.
But these were two unarguably awful results for the Tories, who couldn’t even cling on in Mid Beds with the aid of the split vote that is such a wonderful feature of the incomparably democratic X-voting system. And I’ll take that.
I am sorry for Emma. Unfortunately I am not in a position to help in by elections anymore but, from the outside, I was not at all happy with the hype in the emails I received and there was a degree of dishonesty about the whole thing. As soon as it was clear that Labour were fighting this hard, a foot off the pedal would have been good with more resources going to Tamworth and Rutherglen to avoid the embarrassing results there.
Oh, and a measure of how well Emma did in Mid-Beds is the amusing projection of the Mid-Beds result across the country as a whole, which apparently gives seat projections of:
LAB: 480 (+284)
LD: 104 (+96)
CON: 20 (-356).
Which would admittedly be twenty too many; but the projection would see Truss, Braverman, Badenoch and Coffey, among others, receiving their P45s.
This is what happens when a party has no perceived identity. ‘Me too’ dislikes are not enough. Disaster!
The results were at the lower end of my hopes/expectations. Once those two opinion polls were published, purporting to show that the LDs weren’t in the race, they became a self-fulfilling prophecy, making it hard for them to maintain that they were the main challenger. I do question the rationale of the party to continue campaigning so fanatically, right up to and including polling day, when canvass returns must have shown them that the cause was lost. It has just made them look rather silly, and will make volunteers question why they should continue to make sacrifices in future by election campaigns, if they are not being given an accurate assessment of the situation.
The percentage shift figures may be misleading.
If you look at the numbers, Labour’s vote was slightly down from 2019, Lib Dems slightly up, so not much change for either.
But the Conservatives were down to just less than a third of their 2019 vote (12,680 from 38,692).
Are their any polls to indicate that significant numbers of voters actually switched between these 3 main parties?
Various serious over-reactions in the above comments.
1.The result here has no bearing on our ability to hold our own by-election gains.
2. Theakes: we would do very well to get 20MPs. You are a glass 9/10ths empty kind of girl/guy.
3. The fact we didn’t win doesn’t make us “look silly”. Why on earth do you think that? Multi-party elections in FPTP will always have “silly” losers.
We had a solid result. It was worth going for the win. But we didn’t. Beat on against the current.
The party’s GE strategy, confirmed by Daisy Cooper on Today this morning, is to defeat Tory MPs where we are in second place. Those are the seats we can win, and probably we’ll pick up quite a few of them as the Tories go deeper and deeper into meltdown. Results like Tamworth show the price the party will pay elsewhere, where the logical conclusion for those who want to see the back of the Tories is to vote Labour. Unfortunately that’s FPTP in action. If we can recover our position as 3rd party in the Commons, develop a a distinctive policy agenda, and in due course, when Ed feels he has done all he can to rebuild the party, elect a telegenic new leader, the party may once again become a serious national political force.
I agree with Chris on this. The result in Tamworth was to be expected. Mid Bedfordshire result was not what I had hoped but it seems we attracted quite a lot more votes since 2019 on a much lower turnout. It’s not often that a 3rd place party gets a big rise in votes in seats like this.
I have to say the email numbers towards the end seemed over the top and that led me to expect that things weren’t going as well as hoped
Being realistic for England at next GE, with the slight exceptions of Westmoreland and North Shropshire our area of potential gains will be in fluffy Tory seats south of the Trent, along the M3 corridor.
Well done to our team in Mid-Bedfordshire. We need to address our result in Tamworth where we came 5th, behind Reform UK, Britain First and UKIP with a pitiful 417 votes. It demonstrates how low our core vote really is. If we want to make significant progress it is not enough that we are a party of decent competent people: Our leadership needs to at least occasionally mention Brexit, a policy which once defined us and with sixty percent of people wanting us to rejoin the EU.. The movement of Labour to the centre offers the opportunity to attack them from the left with some radical policies to tackle the poverty into which so many of our people have fallen under the Tories. We have these policies aplenty but need to select a few and hammer away at them remorselessly to achieve a political identity for our party again. If you agree with me we must demand that our leadership starts LEADING!
Chris Moore: we look silly, not because we lost, but because we kept telling both the media and potential volunteers that we were on the cusp of victory. That will have a huge impact on the party’s credibility in future elections, and on whether activists will feel motivated to help in future contests if they are not being told the true story. Can you not see that?
@John Bicknell: I seriously doubt it. For activists, Mid-Beds was a gamble that didn’t pay off. It was always going to be an uphill struggle to try to win from 3rd, but it was one that had paid off before (North Shropshire and Tiverton & Honiton). It certainly wouldn’t put me off going to help in a by-election where we had any sort of chance of winning.
As for our “credibility”, we’re talking about our perception among ordinary voters who don’t tend to follow the twists and turns of politics as closely as people like us do. How a party did in some by-election in the past, and what may or may not have happened there, is of interest mainly to party hacks, not floating voters.
@Chris…
I hope you’re right Chris – but historically labour in by-elections & local elections tend to under achieve.
With the perception of credibility & and the labour vote increasing at a GE makes it more difficult for us..
Also tactical voting in my experience doesn’t materialise as much as we’d like to think …We can also add the fact that – never underestimate the English voters willingness to put that X next to a Tory candidate…
Sadly, and despite heroic efforts from many dedicated Lib Dem activists from all over the country, we could not persuade sufficient numbers of voters that we were a better choice than Labour to beat the Conservatives in Mid Beds. The real problem this creates is that it weakens the narrative we have built that the Lib Dems are the one party that can beat the Conservatives in rural England. In addition, the extra publicity that another Lib Dem win would have created in the mainstream media would have reinforced that message in the public consciousness.
All this of course is the consequence of the self inflicted collapse in our support between 2010 and 2015, where too many Lib Dems swallowed the “It’s all for the good” narrative which ultimately led to Labour taking second place from us in so many rural seats.
Now we have to hope one more winnable by-election comes along in the next few months to give us the opportunity to raise our profile before the next General Election.
The contradictory ‘advice’ in the comments is telling.
We had a chance in Mid-Beds, and very little to lose by going for it. This was an election that wouldn’t change the government & the Tories could hold the seat at a GE and still lose by a landslide. It was a free swing for both main opposition parties and it wouldn’t really matter if either or both missed. We certainly shouldn’t rely on Labour making a decent job of a by-election campaign, as they’ve made a mess of several in recent history.
It’s possible some activists won’t bother turning up unless they are assured a victory, but there are likely others who won’t bother turning up if they think victory is assured.
Anthony’s right, we need to work with the existing FPTP system, which unfortunately means targeting swing voters in selected seats and recover our 3rd party status to have a hope of getting the coverage we need.
@Anthony Acton “a distinctive policy agenda” is something we need people to know but we also need to present a vision for the future of our country. In Frome a few non-Lib-Dems told me our leaflets were mainly anti-Tory, some messages about what needed to be done (which they agreed with) but no clear message of what we stand for and our hopes for the future. Could this be why in so many places (as Leekliberal says) our core vote is so low ? Likewise Graham Jeffs says we have “no perceived identity” and although that is an exaggeration, there are so many voters who wonder what we stand for and also too small to ever gain national power to put our vision (if we have one) into practice. Electioneering is good for temporary gain but without practical vision (as opposed to philosophical statements) it cannot be a long term strategy.
Leekliberal – “We need to address our result in Tamworth where we came 5th, behind Reform UK, Britain First and UKIP with a pitiful 417 votes. It demonstrates how low our core vote really is.”
No, it doesn’t show anything of the sort. I probably would have voted Labour in Tamworth, and you don’t get more core vote than me! What the two results do show is what a difference a strong campaign makes.
I agree with Mary
I wish l could agree with Mary, who it seems is relaxed about our miserable 479 votes from an electorate of more than 70,000 voters. I’m just grateful there wasn’t a Monster Raving Loony candidate or we would likely have come 6th! Of course targeting is essential but l am asking for our leadership to do the ‘vision thing’,getting across what a LibDem UK would look like and plugging away relentlessly on a few radical well thought-out policies, to include Brexit, which can come to define us in the minds of the electorate Then we may finally rise from our measly ten-percent in the opinion polls.
@John Bicknell ”
Chris Moore: we look silly, not because we lost, but because we kept telling both the media and potential volunteers that we were on the cusp of victory. That will have a huge impact on the party’s credibility in future elections, and on whether activists will feel motivated to help in future contests if they are not being told the true story. Can you not see that?”
Agreed. This is also a longstanding issue for the Lib Dems, with the famous bar charts and the claim that Jo Swinson expected to be Prime Minister.
@Neil Hickman “you can argue that if the Labour Party were taking the long view they should have been seeking to boost the other half of the anti-Tory pincer.”
I’m a Labour Party member these days and you might not like this, but a large chunk of Labour people are just as opposed to the Lib Dems as they are to the Tories.
@Former Dem; I have gone the other way, having quit the Labour Party over Brexit. And I am all too familiar with the tribalism of many parts of the Labour Party.
It existed back in 1997 too.
@Neil Hickman like ships in the night! Of course there is a lot of tribalism in Labour, but I don’t think this is tribalism. Many parts of the party are genuinely and sincerely opposed to the Lib Dem proposals and (especially) to their record in government. So I think it’s pretty fair.
@Neil Hickman Like ships in the night! I don’t think it’s tribalism in this case (though there is a lot of that in Labour). Many on the left of Labour are just sincerely opposed to what the LDs stand for, and of course the feeling is mutual, if you remember the Lib Dem opposition to Corbyn in 2019.
Most Labour MPs were opposed to Corbyn in 2019. That people from other parties also thought him useless/dangerous is hardly surprising.
In many ways my politics span Labour and the LibDems and I’d much prefer a Labour government to a Tory one. There are a number of reasons that when it comes to the ballot box I lean more towards LDs, but Labour’s institutional arrogance, and specifically their attachment to FPTP to ensure they maintain an unearned advantage, is the the one that looms large at election time. Tactical voting is easy enough when candidate/party supports electoral reform, but is otherwise a potential millstone for future progress.
@ Neil Hickman: it goes a lot further back than 1997. I remember being in a count in Basildon in 1974 when the news came through that the Tories had regained Sutton and Cheam from Graham Tope. The Labour activists cheered because , as one of them put it, he was glad that we were “getting back to two party politics”
@ Former Dem: one does not need to be a LibDem tribalist to recognise that Corbyn is unfit to be PM. But this former activist would be happy to see Starmer and his team replace the current government.
I agree with the anti-Corbyn sentiment, and have become far more active in Labour since Starmer took over. But in a fair’s fair manner, you have to recognise that Corbynistas and others on the left of Labour can legitimately and reasonably object to a lot of what the Lib Dems stand for. That’s not ‘tribalism’, that’s just a difference of political views, especially given the Lib Dem history of eg NHS privatisation and the bedroom tax during the Coalition years.
It’s very difficult if you believe in nationalisation of the utilities but are against ULEZ and road closures. I no longer feel there is a centre left party which represents me or to vote for these days. Perhaps the SNP if I lived in Scotland, though I have spoken to one other person with the same view recently. Ed Davey needed to back up his messages on sewerage in rivers, ambulance delays, lack of NHS dentists, GP appointments with more of a strategic plan but that hasn’t happened. The party does need a vision and identity as at least you then know where it stands on key issues, whether to vote LD or not. I certainly do not relish a Labour party in power living in an area with a Labour MP and Labour controlled council. They tend to believe in a one party state when it comes to council elections. The anti-Semitism still clings to elements of their party. The Greens tend to be their opposition these days. I’d rather there were other parties getting some representation.
I find it somewhat amusing that we’re simultaneously discussing (a) that Labour members disagree with what the LibDems stand for, and (b) that the LibDems lack identity and apparently don’t stand for very much 😉
@ Simon R granted it is pretty funny! But Labour members are obviously far more involved in politics than the average bod, so I think they know Lib Dem principles (even if they disagree with them), but the same is not true for the average woman on the street.
@ Former Dem: I hold no brief for the Coalition. I lapsed my LibDem membership in 2011 and voted Labour in 2015. I have recently rejoined the LibDems (‘though, for reasons which I will not go into here, not as an activist) because, in my area, the LibDems are doing a good job on the local council and their candidate has the best chance of removing a Tory Cabinet Member in next year’s election.
I think you’re confusing two issues. Labour members dislike the Lib Dems. Many current Lib Dem members are unhappy with the lack of clarity on certain policy areas and lack of social liberalism in party policy. This is also not a very welcoming forum for social liberals.
Granted, members of the Labour Party can legitimately disagree with Lib Dem policies. Heaven knows, Lib Dems often do.
On reflection the word “tribalism” used in a hurry to describe the mindset that is quite happy to welcome as the Party’s consigliere the man who “never let a day go by without working for the defeat of the Labour Party led by Jeremy Corbyn” (= “working for the election of a Nat-C Government led by Johnson”) and would rather contemplate a Nat-C victory than a sharing of power was indeed inappropriate. A more appropriate word would however attract the attention of the moderators.
Oh, and while it’s entirely true that the Lib Dems supported a lot of bad things during the Coalition, some would say that criticising NHS privatisation sits badly with support of Wes Streeting.
@Jason: Some Labour members dislike the Lib Dems. I’ve had nothing but friendship from former associates in the Labour Party
@Neil Hickman kind of agreed about Streeting, actually, as much as I like him. I think we should keep the NHS truly public and encourage the creation of a parallel private healthcare system, as exists in most other European countries, like Ireland for example. The public will never swallow the tax rises needed to properly fund the NHS as the elderly population grows. One problem is that large chunks of the UK are just too poor for private healthcare.
I used to be in the Labour Party. My memory from that time is that the two things Labour members almost invariably cited when discussing their dislike of the LibDems were (1) They perceived the LibDems as trying to be all things to all people, saying whatever was necessary to be elected and lacking firm principles, and (2) they objected to the LibDems going into the coalition Government. Personally I suspect that behind that was also the instinctive unsaid Labour tribalism whereby many Labour members – especially on the left of the party – seemed to mentally divide the World into Labour/socialist=good, vs. not-Labour=evil. (Although it wasn’t the only reason, that tribalism was one of the reasons why I eventually left the party)
@Simon R I actually do think (1)! The Lib Dems have a track record of promising different things in different areas, and you might even argue this is principled for you guys: you believe in local decision-making and freedom.
About (2)… I don’t really object to them going into the Coalition. It’s what you did when you were in coalition (especially the bedroom tax and tuition fees, but also NHS privatisation). There really was a sense that all principles went out the window, and the Lib Dem leadership seemed genuinely bewildered when people expected them to keep the personal pledges they’d made. Everyone does this to some extent, but even today a lot of Lib Dems get affronted when they are judged for their actions, not their intentions or stated principles. Labour can sniff out that attitude and it does repel people. (The Tories on the other hand just used you guys as bait.)
I’m not going to deny that kind of tribalism (non-left=evil) does exist, but you get it everywhere. I suspect many Lib Dems would think you can’t support Brexit without being evil or stupid, for example.
On the NHS & Streeting. He looks like he’s planning to privatise even more of the NHS. Talk of the “reform fairy” will ofc not create sufficient resources to do everything. Some of the NHS problems are because of bed-blocking by those fit to be discharged but with insufficient care support to be safely looked after outside. Some is because it’s underfunded, clearly the recent strikes by all medical staff indicate problems with pay levels and ofc recruitment with thousands of vacancies. So if there is insufficient tax revenue to make it work as is, its remit probably needs to shrink. NICE re-assessments
of the most expensive procedures to cut the coat according to the cloth would be a good start. As to a parallel private health system: we already have one. For example cataract surgery is often carried out privately. What the NHS does it does well, and it’s important that people know that it’s there for them.
Clegg & co should never have forced through the Lansley reforms IMO.
@Former Dem: “a large chunk of Labour people are just as opposed to the Lib Dems as they are to the Tories.” True, among activists and (especially) apparatchiks, but much less among voters (except maybe the Red Wall type socially conservative type of Labour voter). And it’s the Labour-leaning voters that Lib Dem tactical voting messages are aimed towards. Voters don’t think like party hacks, otherwise hardly anyone would ever switch their vote. So they are not interested in partisan grievances of the sort that consume party hacks.
That’s not the case where I live where the labour party were more than happy to see all the Lib Dem councillors defeated with the exception of one or two. It does not just have to be the public being taxed more though does it, multi national companies could be taxed more. It was party policy once that a penny in the £1 would be allocated to the NHS so why not increase it for higher earners. It’s a bit like the age old argument of the minimum wage destroying jobs, and that of course never happened.
On reflection the big mistake was to give the Labour Party a free hand at Selby and Ainsty.
It gave Labour great internal motivation and hit us just as the Mid Beds campaign was really getting under way. The result at Tamworth was indescribably bad and is a condemnation of continuing with the policy of standing back. The consequences are too great.
One of our problems is that we seem to have a disproportionate number of activists in Tory areas. They do not necessarily understand how Labour personnel operate and think. Hence our moribund state in so many Midland and Northern areas where what twenty years ago we have good support and representation eg 36 councillors in Manchester.
Labour are cock a hoop and will not give us any easy rides now that they have sampled the champagne that is available for them.
I was thinking of voting tactically for them at the General but their class based stance on private school VAT which probably means my presently very happy grandchildren will have to uproot to the state sector, from which they left 3 years ago unhappy and being bullied. I shall vote Lib Dem in the hope of saving the deposit, but we have allowed the Greens entry here so that may be unlikely.
A rather ratty Peter Kyle on the lunchtime news denied that LibDems taking Tory votes allowed them to win. Quite amusing. But then l wondered that if many defect to us and thousands more don’t bother to vote Labour can’t be winning as much as we think.
The voters got it right, from their point of view. Given two promising alternatives to the Tories, which will be best for me? Clearly Labour, because they are expected to be the next government. Considering that, Emma did extremely well.
I agree with Leekliberal, at 1.01 today, asking for our leaders to get across what a Liberal UK will look like, and ‘plug away relentlessly at a few radical well-thought-out policies including Brexit’ – to define us and raise us from our measly position in the opinion polls. Exactly so – that’s the work for the next few months
There’s over optimistic & then there’s wild speculation..
Tim’s unfortunate account in mid beds hasn’t aged well ….”The Lib Dem by election campaign team know what they’re doing. It’s by far the smarter, bigger and more engaging campaign. 4) Labour won’t win but they probably won’t lose their deposit and they could stop us winning. 5) Lib Dem activists need to go there en masse”….
We had too many like this that talked up our vote..
Surely returns couldn’t have been that far out ? …
The messages that I got from the party were that it was a very competitive campaign and we were in with a shout. And more help was needed.
Nothing wrong with those messages. Neither inaccurate, nor unrealistic, nor silly. No one claimed we were cruising to victory.
Let Labour have their day in the sun.
But stop all the self-flagellation and doom-mongering.
Isn’t the story of Mid-Beds that the tories lost 26,000 votes and that Labour picked up very few of them. Most stayed at home, a few voted Labour, probably just as many voted Lib Dem or Reform. Labour won with less than their 2019 General Election vote because most tories stayed at home.
Just to say (and I’m sure it wasn’t intended this way, Emma did not come up short, the Liberal Democrats did.
We cannot expect to win seats from third place; every time we have done so has been an outstandingly astonishing bonus.
I frequently see comments on this site that decry the 2019 election as a disaster. It was not, it put our Party in second place in about 90 seats, giving a choice of target seats for the next election.
The disaster was the 2017 election in which narrowly faced targets that eschewed national trends reduced our second places to around 30 and only 28 seats in total where we achieved more than 30% of the vote.
I fear that the leadership is on course for repeating the errors of 2017. Success in the next General Election demands a good national campaign in which our leading voices are prepared to set out a distinctive modern Liberal voice. (to Katharine Pindar: this is a dimension I found missing in her article promoting radical policies).
Yes. Second places are a big asset when Labour is credible especially if we are very clearly second. Take a seat like Mole Valley (Con 55.4, LD 34.4, Lab 5.2). We’d actually win that on the Tamworth swing.
@ Peter Davies “We’d actually win that on the Tamworth swing”.
I’m sorry to introduce a bit of realism into all this, Peter, but the Lib Dem vote in Tamworth actually dropped by over two thirds (as it did in Rutherglen and in Selby).
Historically (my memory goes back over sixty years), when Liberals or Lib Dems have done relatively well in a General Election, they have had the benefit of a dynamic charismatic Leadership with broad popular appeal across the whole of the UK.
@theakes: and how do you propose to encourage activists to go somewhere like Tamworth to campaign? “Come and help save our deposit” doesn’t sound like a good rallying cry to me. I (in common with many activists) don’t generally go to by-elections where we have practically zero chance of winning.
Potential Lib Dem voters in our key battlegrounds are not going to care about how we are doing in no-hope seats. Voters don’t think like that. We’ve never been strong in Tamworth. Our vote share in the 1996 South East Staffordshire (covering a similar area) by-election was hardly anything to shout about (4.7%). As it happens I did go there, but mainly to distract myself from personal issues I was having at the time!
I think we are right to write off Lab~Con battlegrounds where we are not in contention and never have been. Labour seats where we the Tories are not in contention are a different matter, and if there were a by-election in, say, inner-city Manchester or Liverpool we should definitely get out the Lib Dem by-election machine.
Face it head on: both results were disappointing. The lessons may not be restricted to those our Chief Exec rushed out next day. But I agree that it shows voters shopping around for who can beat the Tories. Therefore I disagree that 20 seats at the general election would be a good result. It would be a failure, given the gross failings of the Tory government and the rather pallid Labour leadership. If voters do shop around, there are some 30 seats where we have an excellent chance of winning and probably a few outside that, especially in the Westcountry and the Highlands. Of the by-election gains, I can see good reasons why we should hold all but Tiverton & Honiton, normally the most Tory of Devon seats, and even that might surprise me given how we’ve been sweeping the field in Devon. If we run a decent general election campaign, I’d expect the seats tally to be between 1992 (around 20 seats) and 1997 (40+), but unfortunately on a lower overall vote than either.
The main reason we won’t hold Tiverton and Honiton is that it’s being abolished. We could win one of the new seats. Somerton and Frome is also being split in two but we might win both.
Of course, 2019 was a disaster. Actually managing to end up with less seats than in the disaster year of 2017.
Chris Moore: Boris Johnson had become Tory Leader and many voters thought he was The One so they voted for him because he was exciting and fun until the sky fell in. None of the likely contenders at the next election could remotely be described as exciting and fun.
Yes 2019 was a disaster and undid all of Charles Kennedy’s good work. But some people deny reality.
No, 2015 was the election that “undid all of Charles Kennedy’s good work” (though the rot started long before that, with even 2010 being a disappointment). 2019 was merely a second failed attempt to get the party back on its feet.