In the early hours of Friday morning, the Conservative Party lost another by-election. That was always probable – West Lancashire has not been Tory since 1992 – but what is noteworthy is the sheer scale of that loss. Between 2019 and this week, Labour increased its vote-share by more than ten points; the Tories decreased theirs by nearly 12. (Reform, in third place, was nowhere.) That’s pretty much consistent with the polls: the New Statesman’s Britain Predicts model, which got the result pretty much bang on, currently says that if a general election was held today, we would be on course for a Labour majority of 198.
And so, a question: why aren’t the Tories panicking? Why aren’t they running around gibbering like the end of the world is nigh? Perhaps they are – decisions like appointing Lee Anderson, or sticking the Prime Minister on a private plane at every opportunity and to hell with the optics, do have a certain Yolo quality to them. For the most part, though, I suspect not: Rishi Sunak is giving smiley interviews about how Labour hasn’t closed the deal, and the talk is all of the party pinning its hopes on the next election being 1992 not 1997, as if the latter provides any sort of floor for Tory seat numbers. (It doesn’t: for one thing, that result came in the middle of an economic boom.)
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