For Rishi Sunak, two out of three ain’t bad – it’s a disaster

By-elections are a funny old business, writes Tom Peck. On the face of it, these results say Sunak will be trounced by Starmer next year. But beware the pernicious pong of Ulez and the lurking ghost of ‘long Boris’...

What a performance (Getty)

So, Rishi, here’s the good news. Just so long as you can convince the rest of the country that they, too, want to die a premature death from sucking in diesel fumes, you’re still in with a chance.

The bad news? Come on, you already knew the bad news, didn’t you?

It was, much to their and everybody else’s shock, a night of “mixed fortunes” for the Conservatives. A mere two out of three by-election defeats, not the full hat-trick that had been widely predicted, most of all by them.

And so, on a night when they lost a 20,000 majority in a North Yorkshire constituency right next to the prime minister’s own, to a brand new Labour MP who doesn’t look like he has even been alive for all of the “13 years of Tory neglect” he is apparently very angry about, there was some good news to cling to.

They hung on to Uxbridge and South Ruislip by 495 votes, in a by-election they had deliberately turned into a single-issue campaign, that issue being Sadiq Khan’s forthcoming expansion of London’s ultra-low-emission zone into the outer boroughs next month.

Inevitably, as is always the way, they are results from which all concerned are already extracting the truths they need. Full marks to Tory party chair Greg Hands, who was up and on Sky News in the dawn light and, without dying of shame, was genuinely able to pass air through his mouth while forming it into the shapes required to make the following sounds: “People see Labour in charge! They see them botching things and making a hash of things!”

What a performance.

As someone who lives in an outer London borough that is about to be Ulez’d, I must confess to being quite surprised that there is enough hatred of the scheme out there to lose a by-election that Labour was, at one point, 1-25 to win. My car is 16 years old and is still entirely exempt from the £12.50-a-day charge, as are virtually all petrol cars post-2006 – and in total, an estimated 90 per cent of privately owned vehicles in London’s outer boroughs.

But I only know this because a grocery delivery driver recently tried to convince me my car was “worthless” because of Ulez so I should sell it to him for a hundred quid. It took me about 20 minutes on Google to work out that he was talking rubbish. No one else, certainly not the mayor’s office, has told me anything.

So it is hardly surprising that being “affected” by Ulez does not primarily involve what car you drive, but how regularly you listen to talk radio phone-ins on the subject, which are filled exclusively with furious rage from the vanishingly small number of people who will have to pay the charge.

It is, potentially, a uniquely depressing result. If it is a clear demonstration that political power can be won by aggressively turning away from green issues, that does not necessarily bode well for the future of life on Earth. And Ulez is not even about asking people to do their bit to combat global warming, it’s about them not dying from poor air quality in the city where they live.

Before the polls opened, Tories were managing their expected defeat by talking about “long Boris”: asserting that the reason for their forthcoming triple defeat was that people had not forgiven the transgressions of their leader from fully three prime ministers ago. That the only election they actually won was in his old seat, which also had the smallest Tory majority of the three by far, is already, for his fan club, evidence that the great man can even win elections from beyond the political grave. The ghost of Boris Johnson is not going away.

They’re a funny old business, by-elections. These results make it all but certain that Sunak will lose by miles next year, yet whenever the general election happens, all three of Thursday night’s results could very easily be reversed.

In the meantime, well, if the people of Uxbridge and South Ruislip want to carry on swallowing it, who knows, maybe the rest of the country will do the same. It’s the only hope the prime minister’s got.