The message to Rishi Sunak is clear: Voters can’t wait to kick the Tories out

Labour’s shock double win shows Starmer is well on his way to a comfortable parliamentary majority – and the Conservatives face a worse result in the country than any since 1832. They’re doomed, writes Sean O’Grady

The moment Labour’s Damien Egan wins Kingswood by-election: ‘Tories sucked hope out of our country’ (PA)

To borrow a phrase, it seems things can only get worse for the Conservatives. The double whammy delivered to the party in Kingswood and in Wellingborough could scarcely have been worse for Rishi Sunak.

The voters may not be particularly enthusiastic about Labour or inspired by Keir Starmer but these results, “real votes in real ballot boxes” as the politicians like to say, broadly confirm the picture in the national opinion polls and indeed in by-elections in the last couple of years: the voters can’t wait to get the Tories out.

Quite simply, Starmer is well on his way to a comfortable parliamentary majority, and the Tories face a worse result in the country and in parliament than any since 1832, exceeding even the disasters of 1997, 1945 and 1906.

Contrary to what Sunak seems to think, there is no sign that hanging on and waiting for something to turn up will necessarily see his support improving. The electorate is getting impatient and resents having to wait for a change. In particular, the longer he leaves things, the more momentum the Farageist Reform UK can build up – it did well in both seats and far better than in past by-elections.

Were the situation not so hopeless, the Conservatives might panic but, based on these verdicts, even that looks like a futile response. They’re doomed. If you feed these kinds of numbers into those parliamentary electoral predictors you can find online and add in only a little wishful thinking, you can even see the Tories in third place at a general election.

Wellingborough was the outstandingly bad result of the brace of Labour gains. The swing to Labour was more than 28 per cent, even larger than the ones in Tamworth, Mid Bedfordshire and Selby, and the second largest since the Second World War.

It more than matched those witnessed before Tony Blair’s famous victory in 1997, with the sole exception of Dudley West in 1994 (29.1 per cent) – but that was three years before a general election, not a matter of months.

It’s worth repeating that this isn’t the kind of thing that used to happen to the Labour Party – voters shifting directly to Labour under an unpopular Conservative government, rather than to, say, the Lib Dems/Liberals/SDP.

Talking of which, in both constituencies, there were poor performances for the Liberal Democrats – lost deposits and vote share roughly halved. That may well be evidence of tactical voting by Liberal Democrat supporters in two seats where their party had no chance of success. In tighter contests, as many will be when the general election comes around, that sort of shift can make a real difference, as it did in 1997 and 2001.

The reverse pattern has happened in other seats where the Lib Dems were the obvious challengers – such as Tiverton and again in Somerton, where vast Tory majorities were demolished and Labour was left with a handful of votes and a lost deposit.

Perhaps most significant of all was the showing of Reform UK. Its deputy leader, the excitable Ben Habib, stood in Wellingborough and scored a highly creditable 13 per cent of the vote, the same kind of result that Ukip used to get in its prime.

More surprising was the 10.4 per cent it secured in Kingswood, a far less Brexity sort of place than Wellingborough. Habib often says his aim is to destroy the Conservatives, and he certainly did his bit on this occasion. The only danger is there’ll be no Conservative Party left for Nigel Farage to take over if, as is sometimes speculated, he fancies a go at leading it.

As in 2019, we may expect more pleas from Conservatives to Reform not to run in Conservative-held seats, especially those held by hard-right incumbents. In any case, the Tories are now being subjected to a painful sort of multiple-pincer movement – losing support to Labour, Reform and the Lib Dems simultaneously.

So far as Starmer is concerned, the rows about antisemitism and his candidate at the forthcoming Rochdale by-election in a fortnight don’t seem to have made much difference, even though they will in that seat itself.

The swing in Kingswood was more modest than Wellingborough, against expectations, suggesting that blue-wall seats won’t be so easy to convert as the old red wall and traditional Con/Lab marginals (as Wellingborough certainly used to be). The Tories had a particularly unsuitable candidate in Wellingborough and a weak campaign, which were special factors.

Starmer should also be a little concerned about a relatively strong Green showing in Kingswood (perhaps influenced by his stance on Gaza) and the possibility that Reform will nationally peel off a few voters that might otherwise turn to Labour, but these are just niggles really, and it’s the miserable state of the economy that’s driving the Tories out of office.

Given the economic outlook, things might even get better for Labour as this year grinds on. Habitually cautious after four successive defeats, the last one of historical proportions, Labour can start to dream.