"Grim" By-Election Defeats Leave Rishi Sunak Battling Crushed Tory Morale

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak will return from parliamentary recess to a restless and despondent Conservative party after another disastrous set of by-election results further diminished Tory hopes of electoral recovery in 2024.

A former secretary of state said that Labour's wins in formerly Tory seats of Wellingborough and Kingswood in the early hours of Friday morning felt nothing less than "grim" for Conservatives. 

"It's difficult to see anything other than a Labour Government with a reasonably decent majority," they told PoliticsHome.

The fact that Labour's victory in Kingswood, where Keir Starmer's party overturned a Tory majority of more than 11,000, felt like a fairly unremarkable result speaks to the depth of the electoral hole that the Tory party finds itself as the next general election approaches. Sunak must call a vote this year.

By-election headlines on Friday were largely dominated by the result in Wellingborough, where Labour destroyed a Tory majority of 18,000 with a 28.6 per cent swing from the Conservatives, the second largest recorded in any by-election held in the post-war period. 

"These by-elections confirm what is also evident from the polling averages: nothing has changed. Labour remain dominant, and on course for a crushing win," Rob Ford, Professor of Political Science at the University of Manchester, wrote in his latest edition of The Swingometer in the wake of the results.  

Ford's analysis of by-elections since the current Conservative government was elected in 2019 will be ominous and miserable reading for No.10 and Conservative MPs. It showed that the average swing achieved by Labour under Starmer (14 per cent) since the end of 2021 is significantly bigger than what opposition parties have averaged