Tories hold seat with 51% of vote
BORIS Johnson’s Tories have been celebrating after winning a heartland seat with more than half of votes cast in a parliamentary by-election.
Conservative candidate Louie French retained the true-blue stronghold of Old Bexley and Sidcup for the party in the poll triggered by the death of former minister James Brokenshire.
And the Prime Minister gave his party another boost by hitting the campaign trail last night for another byelection later this month.
He made a brief visit to Oswestry in the North Shropshire constituency vacated by the resignation of veteran MP Owen Paterson.
In the Old Bexley and Sidcup poll, in South-east Lodnon, Mr French won with 51.5 per cent of votes, down from the 64.5 per cent secured by Mr Brokenshire in 2019. Turnout was low compared with the last election, and the Tory majority fell from nearly 19,000 to 4,478.
Labour insiders claimed a 10 per cent swing from the Tories to their party since the last General Election showed Sir Keir Starmer’s leadership was making progress.
In a warning to the Tories, Reform UK leader Richard Tice won nearly seven per cent of the vote as the candidate for the political force that grew out of the Brexit Party. Conservative Party chairman Oliver Dowden said the vote was a “good result” for a governing party in the middle of a parliamentary term.
He said: “Governing parties shouldn’t expect to do well mid-term. We secured over 50 per cent of the vote in Bexley. I pay tribute to our excellent candidate.
“This idea that Labour have made some surge ahead is really for the birds. They’ve got about the same vote share as they secured under Jeremy Corbyn in 2017.
“Keir Starmer couldn’t even be bothered to turn up to the by-election, so I am really not terribly worried.”
Mr French said: “My focus will be delivering on those promises I made during the campaign – get our fair share of London’s police officers, securing more investment for local schools and hospitals, protecting our precious green space.”
IT IS safe to say the Old Bexley and Sidcup by-election will not go down in the annals as any kind of sensation. The result – a Tory hold with a muchreduced majority on a low turnout amid a moderate but not mountainous swing to the Opposition – is standard midterm by-election fare.
The Conservative majority tumbled from nearly 19,000 to 4,478, with a 10 per cent swing to Labour in second place.
That still means the Tories secured more than half the ballots cast by the third of the electorate that bothered to vote.
So, it would be tempting for Boris Johnson to dismiss it as the political equivalent of “small earthquake, not many casualties”.
But he would be foolish to do so, because the warning signs are detectable that his administration needs to up its game and start delivering on things the people who voted for it really care about if it is to avoid much bigger trouble next year.
For starters, the threat on the Tory Right flank has grown perceptibly.
Richard Tice, leader of Reform UK, formerly the Brexit Party, came third, easily beating the Greens and Lib Dems.
Perhaps more importantly from Mr Tice’s point of view, his 1,432 votes represented a crushing margin over potential rivals to lead a new Right-wing insurgency, such as Ukip.
RUNNING on a platform of tax cuts, opposition to any dash to carbon net zero and concerns about illegal immigration, Mr Tice did not exactly hit the jackpot with his 6.6 per cent vote share. But he did enough to ensure Right-of-centre voters elsewhere, who feel in the mood for a bit of mid-term rebellion, now know where to turn.
Should Reform capitalise on this result by performing well in the North Shropshire by-election later this month, the Tories could be staring at a seriously unwelcome development from their point of view: the emergence of a viable party of protest on the centre-Right.
While they can console themselves that our first past the post electoral system is likely to crush such a competitor at the next general election – as it did with Ukip in 2015 and the Brexit Party in 2019 – there is plenty of scope for Reform to set off some serious shockwaves in the interim.
Every point it advances in the polls is liable to come at the expense of a point off the Conservatives. That could hand Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour a morale-boosting lead and cause a meltdown among Tory MPs unaccustomed to such a thing.
With Starmer seen as a bit of a wet blanket by voters and Tice not yet showing the ability of Nigel Farage to whip up an insurrection, it is all perfectly recoverable if the Government gets its act together. But careless errors, such as choosing the wrong side in the Owen Paterson sleaze row, must be eliminated. If voters are to be convinced by Mr Johnson’s claim, made again at PMQs this week, that he is leading a “people’s government”, they need to see him being tough on his own party, not turning a blind eye to its excesses.
And it would be good to see a Conservative government doing notably conservative things rather than tacking to the Left on everything from its radical green agenda to high taxation.
A proper law and order crackdown to turn the tide against the criminal classes who appear so emboldened on our streets these days is long overdue. So is some decisive action, rather than more warm words, to fix the Channel shambles.
A more professional communications strategy to get across
Government progress on issues such as levelling-up, jobs and growth, getting the Brexit arrangements for Northern Ireland reformed, or seeing the country through the Covid nightmare is also essential.
ON THE last of these, the contrast between the light-touch restrictions in place here and the despotic controls, civil strife and rising death rates of continental Europe should give ministers a good story to tell.
Instead, they have spent the past week making idiots of themselves by saying ridiculous things about snogging at Christmas parties.
Being in government is seldom easy and mid-term blues hit most administrations. The ones that come through them are those that understand their priorities and keep a disciplined focus on important reforms.
Those who grow complacent and think they can just busk it are the ones that come unstuck.
The ball came loose at the back of the scrum for Mr Johnson, to use his famous analogy. But this by-election result shows the public are starting to wonder whether he knows what to do with it.
‘The warning signs are detectable... the Government needs to up its game’