And so Keir Starmer’s bad week comes to an end, just like that. Labour has won two by-elections in a single night in seats that had Tory majorities of over 10,000 after the 2019 general election. The heat now returns to Rishi Sunak, as inevitably it was always going to.
To be fair, no one expected the results of these by-elections to be any different. For that we should credit No. 10 with decent expectation management, if nothing else. In fact, let’s not credit No. 10 with anything else here: most of the way these by-elections were run looked shambolic from beginning to end. There are many things to pick on, yet in a week where Labour has been lambasted for its poor candidate choice in the upcoming Rochdale by-election (fairly, it must be added here), the Tories decided that picking the girlfriend of the MP who had to resign from one of these seats after a scandal was a good idea.
The Tories need to keep hope alive somehow in the face of results which imply a huge general election loss
The Kingswood by-election loss will be a painful one for the Conservative party for several reasons.
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