Brace yourself, Rishi, things can only get better… for Starmer

Labour’s stunning by-election gains in Tamworth and Mid Bedfordshire echo the pre-1997 Blair years – and confirm that Rishi Sunak is careering towards the exit, writes John Rentoul

Keir Starmer with his winning Mid Beds candidate, Alistair Strathern (PA)

Now we can believe in the second coming of Blairism. Labour’s stunning by-election gains in Mid Bedfordshire and Tamworth were comparable to those won by Labour under Tony Blair in opposition. If that points to a swing in a general election similar to Blair’s, Labour is heading for a majority of up to 60 – because Keir Starmer starts from a lower base than Blair. But there is at least a year to go. Things can get worse for Rishi Sunak.

Blair was absurdly popular the moment he was elected Labour leader in July 1994. He started off 30 points ahead in the national opinion polls, and his lead drifted down to about 20 points when the election was called three years later.

Starmer, on the other hand, started off as nothing much and still seems to be gaining ground. Blair’s best by-election result, and Labour’s best ever, was in Dudley West in the first few months of Blair’s leadership. He scored impressive victories later, including in South-East Staffordshire, which includes Tamworth, but on lower swings. Under Starmer, Labour won a bigger swing in Tamworth yesterday – 24 per cent against 22 per cent for Blair in South-East Staffs.

It’s worth remembering that Starmer’s by-election record started badly – so badly that Labour actually lost a seat to the government: Hartlepool in May 2021. But it gradually improved as the Conservatives crumbled. Labour held on to Batley and Spen in West Yorkshire a couple of months later and then gained Wakefield from the Tories in 2022.

This year, Labour has started to match Blair-era by-election swings. The result in Selby and Ainsty in North Yorkshire in July, a swing of 24 per cent, was obscured by the Conservative triumph on the same day in holding Boris Johnson’s old seat of Uxbridge on a single-issue campaign.

But the result in Tamworth yesterday was a slightly bigger swing than Selby, despite its being a markedly more Leave-voting seat (66 per cent Leave versus 58 per cent). The Brexit issue is no drag on Labour’s performance. Indeed, in attracting business leaders and centrist Tories such as Sir Max Hastings to the Labour cause, Brexit is now a plus for Starmer.

The really striking result yesterday, though, was in Mid Beds, the seat vacated by Nadine Dorries in revenge against Sunak for denying her a peerage. Really, the voters should have punished such vindictiveness by voting for Festus Akinbusoye, the Conservative candidate, but they had the future of the country in mind, rather than settling scores in the Tory civil war.

The Mid Beds result was a particularly good one for Labour, given the strong Liberal Democrat challenge. Alistair Strathern, the Labour candidate, posted a 21 per cent swing from the Tories – still in the Blairite range – even though the Lib Dem gained almost as many votes.

Yesterday’s by-elections are a further setback to Sunak’s attempts to make a stand. At the beginning of this year, he tried to halt the Tory slide by setting out five clear targets for the year. It quickly became clear that the NHS waiting list target would be missed, and that halving inflation, which had seemed a statement of the obvious, would be touch and go. So Sunak tried again, with some “long-term decisions for a brighter future”, which turned out to be the presentational disaster of what I thought was the right decision to cancel the rest of HS2, and a “pragmatic” recalibration of net zero, which I think is also right, but which has failed so far to turn the tide of public opinion.

These by-elections postpone the recovery in Tory fortunes again. There will be more by-elections to come. Peter Bone’s seat of Wellingborough is an easy Labour win in the current climate, needing a swing of just 18 per cent. At this rate, it could be the 2030s before the Tories look like a plausible party of government.

The only thing that could really pull things back for Sunak would be if the real incomes started to rise more sharply than expected – and the voters felt that a Labour government would threaten their gains. But both parts of that would have to be true, and so far neither seems likely.

In recent days some commentators have suggested that Starmer is in trouble with his party over Gaza. Maybe so, but I don’t think that is going to have much bearing on how people vote at the general election.

The worse things get for Sunak, the later that election is likely to be. Maybe not January 2025, the latest legal date. He does not want to be remembered in history as the prime minister who ruined Christmas. But another December election seems all too possible.