Over the course of the past two months, we’ve had three by-elections in England. One of them was a huge Tory gain in a previously safe Labour seat. Another was a Lib Dem by-election victory over the Conservatives in the London commuter belt. Then, yesterday, Labour held Batley and Spen, a seat that has been theirs since 1997. On paper, this wasn’t a bad run of results for Boris Johnson, as head of a party that has been in government for 11 years.
Except, no one is going to be talking about it in those terms after Number 10 allowed the narrative to spin away from them completely. Instead of playing old school politics and massively downplaying the chances of Tory victory in the by-elections following Hartlepool, Boris Johnson and his team seemed to have decided they were invincible. In a democracy, this has a tendency to come back and bite you, hard and quickly.
The holding of Batley and Spen now appears to be a massive victory for Keir Starmer’s leadership.
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