Byelection nights are typically a source of succour for the opposition. Its vote usually goes up while the government almost invariably suffers some kind of reverse.
But this pattern was entirely absent in both Copeland and Stoke. In Copeland Tory support increased by no less than 8.5 points – the biggest increase in support for a government party since Harold Wilson’s Labour government won the Hull North byelection in January 1966 (at the cost, incidentally, of a promise to build the Humber Bridge).
This swing was enough to deliver the Tories a seat they had not won since 1931. Indeed, never before in the whole history of postwar British byelections has a government overturned so large an opposition majority as Labour was defending in Copeland.
Doubtless Labour, whose support fell by five points, will argue that it had its own particular local difficulties in Copeland – the party’s leader, Jeremy Corbyn, used at least to be antipathetic to the nuclear power industry, on which the constituency is heavily dependent. But for his critics, this local difficulty will be regarded as symptomatic of the wider unpopularity of some of his policy stances.
Meanwhile, although the contest in Stoke had been widely portrayed as a two-horse race – and thus the third placed Conservative vote was supposedly vulnerable to a squeeze – Conservative support also increased there (by a couple of points) too. While Labour held the seat quite comfortably, its vote still fell by a couple of points.
Labour’s share of the vote has now dropped in every single byelection since the Brexit referendum. From leafy Richmond to windswept Copeland the message has been the same : the party is struggling to hang on to the already diminished band of supporters who backed it in 2015.
The party’s problems were, of course, in evidence long before 23 June last year. But the vote to leave the EU has exacerbated them.
Labour seems to have decided in recent weeks that its first priority is to stave off the threat from Ukip to its traditional working-class vote, much of which supposedly voted to leave in the EU referendum.
But in so doing it seems to have forgotten (or not realised) that most of those who voted Labour in 2015 – including those living in Labour seats in the North and the Midlands – backed remain. The party is thus at greater risk of losing votes to the pro-remain Liberal Democrats than to pro-Brexit Ukip.
And the Liberal Democrats edged up in both Stoke and Copeland, just as they have done in every byelection since the EU referendum.
Ukip itself shares this misapprehension about the importance of the Labour leave vote. Hardly anyone who voted remain is willing to vote for Ukip. Yet it insists on targeting a Labour vote that voted by two to one to remain rather than a Conservative vote where well over half voted to leave.
The seeds of Paul Nuttall’s failure to win Stoke, or indeed to register anything more than a two-point increase in the party’s share of the vote, almost undoubtedly lie in his failure to squeeze what will almost undoubtedly have been a predominantly leave-inclined Conservative vote in Stoke.
Meanwhile Ukip did see its own vote badly squeezed in Copeland, suffering a drop of nine points, the party’s worst byelection performance yet in this parliament. Most probably it was the advancing Conservatives who primarily benefited – a stark warning to Ukip that Theresa May’s allegedly hard Brexit could enable her to steal the party’s clothes.
On 24 June the Conservatives were in turmoil, Now, seven months on they must be wondering whether it was fortunate after all to have lost the EU referendum.
For if the whole country were to swing in line with what happened in Copeland and Stoke together, May could secure an overall majority of nearly 100. Perhaps her one regret this weekend is that she has so firmly ruled out trying to hold an early general election.
