A nagging doubt about Keir Starmer has been exposed

‘One out of three ain’t bad’ isn’t a saying you hear often. Yet avoiding a clean sweep of by-election defeats overnight will surely have Rishi Sunak breathing a sigh of relief. Holding on in Boris Johnson’s old seat of Uxbridge & South Ruislip not only means the Tories have exceeded the rock-bottom expectations of the pundit class, but there is an unmistakeable further intuition hanging in the air: had Johnson not lost his courage and instead decided he would trust his electors and stand in a by-election under the recall process, then he surely could this morning be the man who had pulled off an unlikely triumph. And imagine how he would have milked that.

Instead, it was the somewhat less lyrical but more collegiate Steve Tuckwell who passed the chequered flag for the Tories, clinging on with a majority of under 500.

That win cannot disguise the extent of the crushing defeats the Conservatives suffered in nominally ‘safe’ seats to the Lib Dems in Somerton & Frome in Somerset and to Labour in Selby & Ainsty in Yorkshire.

So it would surely be over-egging it to claim that the ‘narrow path to victory’ at the next election that some Downing Street insiders talk of can be confidently declared still intact. Over at Labour HQ they have plenty to cheer about. Not only do they now have a second MP called Keir after the triumph of 25-year-old Keir Mather in Selby, but their strategists will also have picked up on signs of anti-Tory tactical voting given the Lib Dem surge in the West Country and the collapse of their own vote share there.

It seems like so-called 'progressive' voters will not need to see evidence of a firm electoral pact between the two opposition parties in order to perpetrate a psephologically efficient pillaging of Tory-held seats in 2024.

And yet the more experienced Labour strategists – the ones who lived through the false dawns of Neil Kinnock and the plodding implosion of Gordon Brown - will be nursing a nagging doubt today. That defeat in outer London, where they were unable to overturn a previous Tory majority of around 7,000, will tell them that nothing is in the bag for Keir Starmer.

Some awkward conversations are clearly going to need to take place between the party leader and London mayor Sadiq Khan. Shadow cabinet minister Steve Reed has already sent a thinly-veiled message to Khan this morning: 'I think those responsible for that policy (Ulez) will need to reflect on what the voters have said and whether there’s an opportunity to change.' His radical chic agenda of Ulez expansion and rampant identity politics is going down like a lead balloon in the outer suburbs of the capital.

Out there, in travel zones four, five and six, a full-scale political uprising against Khan’s extension of the Ulez charging zone for motorists is gaining momentum. Not only could this cost the party a swathe of seats at the next general election, but it could even catapult Tory mayoral candidate Susan Hall to victory next spring.

Were that to happen a big signal about Tory political recovery would be transmitted nationwide just in time for the general election.

The anti-Ulez uprising offers the Conservatives a tantalising glimpse of the way in which a new, earthy and provincially-driven right-wing policy blend could drive them to a political resurrection. Radical environmentalism appears to have hit its outer-limits amid the living standards squeeze. If Labour is judged the party most wedded to further escalating the Net Zero drive and most in bed with radical protest groups such as Just Stop Oil then Tory-leaning voters might after all turn out on polling day.

Favourable early polling about the Illegal Immigration Act – which commands majority support among every major social and political sub-group – also highlights Labour’s chronic weakness on the foundational issue of border control.

And the notion of Starmer himself as a political weathervane who cannot be trusted to stick to his promises is also starting to solidify among voters. Not only that, but the Labour leader continues to lack the electoral antennae possessed by Tony Blair in his early days, as demonstrated by his failure to take the side of Nigel Farage against banking practices that most voters immediately clocked as obviously sinister.

Mayor Khan will no doubt argue that the pain of Ulez extension will be over with by the next election and the salience of the issue will have faded. But it fails the 'whose side are you on?' test. 

It would not be true to say that the three by-election results in their totality leave Starmer with more problems than Sunak. But the former is now not gazing at a cloudless sky, while the latter may have spotted a shaft of sunlight breaking through the gun-metal grey that was previously threatening to engulf him.