Vote Labour on Thursday – and get a general election in January 2025

Two more by-elections in two Tory safe seats and – in John Rentoul’s view – two inevitable outcomes: one, the Conservatives will lose both seats and, two, the PM will be forced to push the general election even further down the road

Labour’s Mid Bedfordshire by-election candidate Alistair Strathern needs a 19 per cent swing to take Nadine Dorries’s old seat (PA Wire)

Conservative hopes are rising that they can this week repeat the double by-election trick of losing one but holding one.

In July, they lost the safe Tory seat of Selby and Ainsty in Yorkshire, which Labour gained with its second biggest swing from the Tories ever. But on the same day, the Tories held Uxbridge and South Ruislip, a marginal seat that had been held by Boris Johnson.

There is another brace of by-elections this Thursday. They are both safe Tory seats – Tamworth in Staffordshire, and Nadine Dorries’s former seat of Mid Bedfordshire. Labour needs a 22 per cent swing to gain Tamworth, which is less than the 24 per cent swing it achieved in Selby, but the situation in Mid Beds is complicated because the anti-Tory vote is split between Labour and the Liberal Democrats.

Some Tories see the divided opposition as their chance to defy the national opinion polls – just as the campaign against Sadiq Khan’s unpopular ultra-low emissions zone (Ulez) gave them an unexpected victory in Uxbridge.

To win in Mid Beds, Labour needs a 19 per cent swing, the kind of result that is well within its reach while the government continues to be so unpopular. But the Lib Dems have claimed the seat as one of their targets. They thought they could win it from third place, as they did in Tiverton and Honiton, and in North Shropshire. Their argument is that they are better placed to win over disaffected Tory voters who might be reluctant to go all the way over to Labour.

Unfortunately for them, they were undermined by astute Labour tactics in commissioning and publishing an opinion poll in the constituency showing Labour ahead of the Tories and the Lib Dems in a distant third place. Since then, another poll published last month by Labour Together, a pro-Starmer pressure group in the party, showed Labour and the Tories neck and neck on 29 per cent, with the Lib Dems trailing on 22 per cent.

Because neither Labour nor the Lib Dems will give way in fighting to present themselves as the best option for the anti-Tory protest vote, the Conservatives have suddenly become the betting favourites to hold the seat – hence the recent optimism in the Tory campaign.

You would expect the Tories to be talking down their chances so that retaining the seat could be presented as evidence that the government is more popular than journalists think it is – but it seems that some of them have got carried away. The betting markets suggest that the Tory candidate, Festus Akinbusoye, has a 46 per cent chance of holding Mid Beds, while the Labour candidate, Alistair Strathern, is given a 35 per cent chance; the Lib Dem, Emma Holland-Lindsay, is on 19 per cent.

Compare these numbers with Tamworth, on the face of it a safer seat, where the market gives Labour a 76 per cent chance of winning. There, the Lib Dems started from such a low base that they were happy to defer to Labour as the challenger.

I think the Tories are still likely to lose both by-elections. The voters of Mid Beds can be expected to work out that voting Labour gives them a better chance of humiliating the government than voting Lib Dem.

But even if the Tories hold on to Mid Beds because of a statistical freak in the division of opposition votes, it shouldn’t give them the kind of hope they could draw from the Uxbridge result. In Uxbridge, they could see the outline of a strategy for fighting a general election: that people might shy away from voting Labour if they thought its green enthusiasm would cost them personally.

No such strategy could be built around dividing the Labour and Lib Dem vote nationally: it is already divided, but largely in Labour’s favour, giving Keir Starmer an average 18-point lead – the average has crept up from 17 points this week – which translates into a notional landslide of seats.

The bad news for Rishi Sunak keeps coming. Another by-election is likely in Blackpool South, a marginal seat where the Tory MP is being investigated for alleged paid lobbying; and another in Wellingborough, after Peter Bone was found on Monday to have bullied and sexually harassed one of his staff, which he denies. Labour needs an 18 per cent swing to gain Wellingborough: almost any Tory seat is within range of a protest by-election in the current political climate, and that climate has only become slightly more hostile after the party conference season.

With the Institute for Fiscal Studies on Tuesday predicting a shallow recession next year and insisting that Jeremy Hunt has no scope for tax cuts before the election, the walls seem to be closing in on Sunak. I heard of one Tory former minister who said today that they wished the government would fall so that we could have a general election now – “and I certainly won’t be voting Conservative”.

They are unlikely to get their wish. With things going this badly, and given the reluctance of prime ministers to bring their time in office to an end, I wonder if we could be heading towards an election in January 2025, the last possible date.