By any reasonable standard the result in the North Shropshire by-election must be reckoned the funniest in years. Perhaps even decades. All governments need checking from time to time and desserts are always served justly. So this is a welcome result and not just because it is, viewed objectively, hilarious.
Nevertheless, it is quite an achievement to lose a seat held by the Conservatives, in one shape of another, for 120 years. To do so just two years after winning more than 60 per cent of the vote and a majority of almost 23,000 votes is quite something. To do so to the Liberal Democrats, who took just ten per cent of the vote in 2019, is really quite something.
The pandemic has exposed Johnson’s limitations and once seen such things are not easily forgotten
But who can doubt it is a thoroughly deserved kind of disaster for the Conservative party? In the first place, this was a by-election the government brought upon itself.
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