The Tiverton and Wakefield by-elections are, of course, shatteringly bad for the Conservatives and Boris Johnson. They should finally destroy any illusions Conservatives hold about the PM’s electoral appeal. As I and several others have often pointed out, Boris is not a Heineken politician and hasn’t been one since the middle of the last decade.
Analysis of by-election results is often bad. In the minutes and hours after the result, commentators scramble to explain what local results mean for national politics, in a crowded field where political actors are doing their best to skew the narrative in their own interests. That being so, I’m not going to try to tell you what Tiverton and Wakefield mean for Johnson’s future or the next general election.
Instead, I’m going to suggest that the numbers from the by-elections aren’t the most important facts in British politics this week. Instead, the numbers that matter are 9.1
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