The one crumb of comfort the Tories are trying to take from the North Shropshire result is that Labour didn’t win the seat. Keir Starmer’s party came third with just under 10 per cent of the vote, a fall of 12 per cent from the 2019 result. Tory party chairman Oliver Dowden has been touring the broadcast studios today saying ‘there is no love lost for the Labour party — they should have been surging ahead and in fact they were sinking’.
Is this really true? The fear in progressive circles was that voters switching from the Tories would end up being split between Labour and the Liberal Democrats, thus meaning Boris Johnson’s party could have held the seat. This was a particular risk in North Shropshire given the Conservatives have held it for two centuries, meaning there is no history of tactical voting in the area.
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