Tory wheels are coming off – Keir Starmer’s self-driving car is purring into pole position

As by-elections loom, Starmer is likely to ignore the low-hanging fruit of Nadine Dorries’s Mid Bedfordshire seat and focus on the prize of Boris Johnson’s former seat of Uxbridge, writes John Rentoul

From Starmer’s point of view, a government by-election defeat at the hands of Ed Davey is almost as good as one inflicted by Labour (PA Wire)

In the past seven days, Rishi Sunak and Boris Johnson have gone to war, Nicola Sturgeon has been arrested and Caroline Lucas has stood down as the country’s only Green MP.

Four by-elections are imminent, two of them being excellent prospects for the Labour Party – Uxbridge and South Ruislip, vacated by Johnson, and Rutherglen and Hamilton West, likely to be vacated by Margaret Ferrier, formerly of the Scottish National Party but suspended from the House of Commons after breaching Covid rules.

Meanwhile, Johnson is making as much noise as possible on his way out, calling everyone names and trying to do as much damage as he can to the man he blames for bringing him down and who now holds the office to which Johnson thinks only Johnson is entitled.

As the wheels fall off his opponents, Keir Starmer has found himself sitting in the front seat of a self-driving car.

Sunak has tried to stay above the fray, and indeed I thought he looked impressive when he finally drew a line between him and Johnson yesterday: “Boris Johnson asked me to do something I wasn’t prepared to do,” he said, referring obliquely to the former prime minister’s nominations for peerages. “If people don’t like that, then tough.”

Satisfying as this might have been for Sunak and for most of the rest of us, the prime minister had hoped to manoeuvre Johnson out of the limelight without causing by-elections, so the net result was not great for the government.

Who knows the truth of the silly dispute with which Johnson marked his exit: the Case of the Mysterious Disappearing Lords Nominations. But the bottom line is that the general public thinks that Nigel Adams, Nadine Dorries and Alok Sharma shouldn’t be given peerages anyway, and that Johnson and Dorries seem petulant for complaining about it.

To that extent, Sunak has minimised the damage. He should also be grateful that he avoided another by-election in Sharma’s seat, Reading West, which is also a seat that Labour should win easily with a strong message about the party’s appeal in middle England.

It is unclear who will win the other two by-elections, caused by Dorries and Adams, Johnson’s cheerleader and fixer respectively, resigning after being denied peerages. I suspect Labour is putting on a great show of contesting the right of the Liberal Democrats to present themselves as the main challenger in Dorries’s Mid Bedfordshire seat, but that Starmer will turn down the volume once peacocking honours are satisfied, and focus on winning in Johnson’s former seat of Uxbridge. Mid Beds is the sort of safe Tory seat that the Lib Dems can win in a by-election, but Labour cannot, even though Labour came second in the general election.

Selby and Ainsty, Adams’s former seat, is a more open question because the Lib Dems have no local council representation there – and the Selby part of the constituency used to be a Labour seat in the Blair years. Still, the Lib Dems won North Shropshire, Owen Paterson’s former seat, where they initially protested they had no local presence, so again I think the Lib Dems have the better chance. Lifetime Tory voters in safe Tory seats will happily vote Lib Dem as a protest, but they won’t vote Labour.

From Starmer’s point of view, though, a government by-election defeat at the hands of Ed Davey is almost as good as one inflicted by Labour.

In the meantime, Caroline Lucas standing down as the Green MP for Brighton Pavilion gives Labour the hope of gaining another seat at the general election. Not all of her strong personal vote will transfer to Sian Berry, the Green candidate who hopes to succeed her.

Then on Sunday, Nicola Sturgeon was arrested and questioned, making it harder for the SNP to resist Labour’s recovery in Scotland, which simultaneously makes Starmer’s ambition to form a majority government in the Commons more credible – without his having to do anything except sit tight and dispense platitudes.

Starmer should be careful of resting on his laurels this week, because it is always when Prime Minister’s Questions looks like an open goal that the leader of the opposition tends to fumble it. But in the six days since the standards committee confirmed that Margaret Ferrier would be open to a recall petition, and therefore to a by-election that could almost have been designed to send the message that Labour is back as a force to be reckoned with in Scotland, everything has gone wrong for Starmer’s opponents.

The Labour leader should savour the schadenfreude while it lasts.