Wakefield and Tiverton & Honiton were a spectacular double bill of humiliations for Boris Johnson’s Conservative government; the first time since 1991 that a party had lost two seats on the same day and in circumstances and by margins that were much worse than that temporary setback for John Major as he looked forward to his first general election. The pastoral and old-fashioned mid-Devon seat of Tiverton & Honiton produced a classic Lib Dem byelection victory on a massive swing. However, the Conservatives have had time to refine their script after similar big results in Chesham & Amersham and North Shropshire last year: mid-term blues, planning policy, tough but necessary decisions, getting on with the job and so on. They have not had to cope with losing a seat in a byelection to Labour since 2012.
Wakefield belongs to a rare category of byelection: a contest in the sort of constituency that determines the winner of a general election. In the last quarter of a century, government parties have defended only four marginal seats threatened by the main opposition party: Crewe and Nantwich in 2008, Norwich North in 2009 and Corby in 2012 all changed hands and now so has Wakefield. The swing of 12.7 per cent in Wakefield would be enough to put Labour in with an overall majority if repeated in other marginal seats; it was not a landslide, but it was comfortable enough. Wakefield is not landslide country; except in 1997 (on somewhat different boundaries) it has been inclined to low swings and its electorate contains solid voting blocs for both the Conservatives and Labour. Nor was the apparent swing to Labour accentuated by the rise of parties to the right of the Tories, as it was when Ukip polled an ominous 14.5 per cent in Corby in November 2012. Within two months of that result David Cameron had promised an in-or-out referendum on the EU and the rest is history. The Wakefield swing was lower than byelection defeats inflicted on the Major government in 1994-1997 and Gordon Brown’s government in 2008-2009, both of which went on to lose power at the next general election.
Byelections that demonstrate enthusiasm for the opposition through a massive swing and a high turnout, such as those of the early Blair era or the Crewe and Nantwich result for Cameron’s Tories, are rare indeed. Only Blair, and Edward Heath in 1966-1970, have been at all consistent in their byelection victories. Even for Margaret Thatcher, for every triumph such as Ashfield or Stechford there was a flop in Grimsby or East Lothian.
Wakefield is similar to Labour’s best results in marginals under Neil Kinnock in the 1987-1992 parliament, but even so comes nowhere near the 21-point swing that took place when Labour gained the non-marginal Mid Staffordshire seat from the Tories in 1990. That result itself proves that even a very strong byelection or two is no guarantee that the opposition will win the next election. Wakefield is the sort of result achieved by an opposition that has won a hearing from the electorate against an unpopular government, and that should come as no surprise given the national polling. It is not enough on its own either to show that Labour is on track for victory, or doomed to fall short. If there had been a byelection in a Labour target seat during John Smith’s leadership of the party between 1992 and 1994, it would probably have looked a lot like what we saw last night in Wakefield.
We know what byelections in apparently safe Conservative seats looked like in the 1992-1994 period without the need to imagine. They looked like Tiverton & Honiton. The spectacular swing of 30 per cent in Tiverton & Honiton is firmly in the territory of celebrated Lib Dem victories in Newbury (28 per cent swing) and Christchurch (35 per cent swing, still the record-holder by a narrow margin over North Shropshire). As in these seats, the Labour vote collapsed in favour of the Lib Dems amid a sort of gleeful Tory-bashing mood among the electorate in previously highly Conservative constituencies.
The byelections mark a revival of the politics of the interval between Black Wednesday in 1992 and the rise of Blair in 1994, when a fourth-term Tory government was in deep trouble but Labour had not seized the public imagination. Then as now, it was starting to make sense to lump Labour, Lib Dem and Green together as part of a common anti-Tory enterprise, an equation which did not apply in the elections of the preceding period, be they 1987 or 2015. While the starting point of the small Conservative majority in the 1992 election made “one more heave” seem easy compared to the task of overturning the much larger majority in 2019, other things are working in the opposition’s favour in 2022. In the mid-1990s, largely by accident, Britain was entering a prolonged period of growth and low inflation, whereas now the economic outlook is very bleak. While Major was unpopular and the Conservative Party increasingly tarnished by “sleaze,” the prime minister retained vestiges of the respect and affection he had enjoyed at the time of his 1992 election victory. He was, at least, given credit for honesty and trying his best.
We live in curious times, when 1990s politics runs alongside 1970s economics and 1980s industrial relations. The Conservatives’ attempts to re-run more recent material such as the Brexit divide fell flat in Wakefield and Tiverton, both heavily Leave-voting areas in 2016. Like all revivals, the modern copy of 1990s politics is not quite the same as the original. Labour and the Liberal Democrats can penetrate further into the wealthy suburbs and affluent urban areas than they could in the 1990s, while areas that were Labour’s foundation back in 1992—Scotland, former mining constituencies and working-class towns—now have to be treated as target seats. Most Midlands ex-mining seats, still angry over pit closures and swinging to Labour in 1992 and 1997, will stay blue now even if the Tories suffer a national defeat. But in their different ways, Wakefield and Tiverton both point back to the future.
