Britain’s Conservative Party has now suffered its highest number of by-election losses in a single parliamentary term since World War II, following two major defeats on Thursday evening.
Voters in Kingswood, Gloucestershire, and Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, destroyed two comfortable Conservative majorities in separate elections that could take “decades” to win back and which have prompted pundits to declare that “nothing can save the Tories now.”
Tory Chairman Richard Holden, who had the unenviable job of defending his party’s losses on Friday morning’s media round, said that the by-elections had to be viewed “in the context in which they happened.” He pointed to the fact that in Wellingborough, for example, the ballot was triggered after Parliament upheld a number of serious allegations against the then-MP Peter Bone—allegations he denies.
But this is not enough to explain the overturning of two five-digit majorities, which also demonstrates the extent to which both of these results are about the Conservatives doing badly rather than Labour doing well—not that this stopped leader Sir Keir Starmer from celebrating “the progress we’ve now made.” In Wellingborough, Labour only received 107 more votes than it did in 2019, while the Tories lost almost 25,000. And in Kingswood, Labour has actually lost more than 5,000 votes since the last election while the Conservatives shed 19,000.
This is largely due to the fact most voters decided to stay at home. Turnout was around 38% in both seats.
Reform UK, formerly the Brexit Party, came third in both constituencies with more than 10% of the vote. In Wellingborough, which was contested by the party’s deputy leader, Ben Habib, it achieved an impressive 13% of the vote. This is Reform’s best election result yet and is higher than the party’s national polling average.
Habib told The European Conservative that these results “provide a fantastic staging post for the growth in popularity of Reform UK,” and “the trajectory is on the up in a dramatic way.”
[Voters have] put Reform UK on the national map. It is a genuine electoral option for people who are sick and tired of the same old broken Tory promises and the utter failed policies that they offer, which would only continue to be implemented by the Labour Party, but more extremely.
He added that “the country desperately needs to do a 180-degree turn” from both Labour and the Tories which are “undercutting” the UK and “tearing at its social fabric.”
