Tag Archives: tamworth by-election

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.