Lessons from Wellingborough and Kingswood: scorchingly hot takes on the by-election results
Paul Richards
With Starmer’s Labour enjoying two solid by-election victories over the Tories in Wellingborough and Kingswood, here are my five hotter-than-hell takes on the results:
1. The economy and cost-of-living crisis remain the central battleground of the coming election. The Tories will try to make it about wokery and culture wars, but it will be about bills, wages, mortgages, rents, and the weekly shop. Rishi’s recession is a neat slogan — but many of the votes had been cast by post before the announcement on Thursday morning placing the UK in a ‘technical recession’. The dire economy with flat-lining wages, sclerotic productivity, and the strong sense that nothing works, is one vital long-term determinant on voter behaviour.
2. Labour is the alternative government. The votes for Damien Egan and Gen Kitchen are positive votes for change. Labour has no automatic right to the anti-Tory vote. The party’s strategists will be pleased that protest votes did not go to the Lib Dems, Greens, or anyone else.
3. The right is fracturing. The breakthrough vote for Reform UK suggests a disaggregation of the Conservative right-of-centre bloc which has delivered them electoral success for decades. If the right-of-centre fractures, and Labour remains the only game in town on the centre and centre-left, Labour can become the dominant force in politics. Let’s hope Reform UK stand in every seat in the general election. And the performance of Reform’s Simon Danczuk (one of three former Labour members standing) in the Rochdale by-election will be significant.
4. Rishi is rubbish at politics. His decision to give up on the by-election, not turn up, and dismiss the results, make him look aloof and out-of-touch. Ten by-election defeats is not a good look. If he was a football manager, he’d have been sacked by now. John Major would have whipped out his soap box; even Theresa May went down fighting. Sunak has given up — and his party’s MPs will come back from Recess with murder on their minds.
5. Starmer’s strategy is being vindicated. Appealing to the centre ground. Strong, plausible candidates. Message discipline. Tough action on anti-Jewish racism. No impossible promises. And an awesome ground operation with brilliant Labour staff delivering the votes. These are the components of success.
Now, Labour must hold its nerve as the polls narrow. There will be more screw-ups, more secret tapes, more embarrassing revelations on the roller-coaster ride towards polling day. The test is not whether these challenges will come — they will — it is whether Labour can withstand them, stay firm, take action, and not panic. These results show (after the media was frothing over another ‘Labour’s worst week’) that the tectonic plates are shifting in Labour’s direction.
Paul Richards is a writer.
