By-elections show Tories lack public confidence

Sedgefield Conservatives

21 July 2007



No one any longer imagines that by-election results are sure pointers to the outcome of the next general election, but they are nevertheless rough indicators of how strong and weak the three major parties are.

A sudden Labour surge in a clutch of by-elections in June 1994, on the eve of Tony Blair's election as party leader, proved a harbinger of Labour's triumph three years later.

There was no such surge in the Tories' favour on Thursday. On the contrary, the Conservatives remained stuck in third place in Ealing Southall and slipped into third place in Sedgefield.

The two by-election results reinforce the point made by the opinion polls: that, just as it took the Labour Party a generation to slough off the reputation it acquired for governmental incompetence during the 1970s, so it is likely to take the Conservatives many years to restore public confidence following the chaotic displays they put on during the early and mid-1990s.

If a party flounders under five successive leaders, as the Tories have done since 1994, the problem almost certainly lies in how voters have come to see that party rather than in the inadequacies of any one of its leaders. A political party can change its policies and its leaders, but cannot change its past. The Tories - in the words of one wise old party strategist - need to "think long".

The Conservatives' share of the vote remained virtually unchanged in both Southall and Sedgefield. In Southall it edged up a minuscule 0.9 points. In Sedgefield it edged up a paltry 0.2 points. The return on David Cameron's personal investment in Southall could scarcely have been smaller.

In Sedgefield the intervention of a BNP candidate probably cost the Tories some support. The far-Right party's candidate there captured 8.9 per cent of the vote.

If the Tories are depressed by Thursday's events, Labour has little to cheer about either - apart from the mere fact of having held on.

Labour's vote fell by 14.1 points in Sedgefield and by 7.3 points in Southall. In Sedgefield, Labour's share of the vote was only 44.8 per cent, in Southall only 41.5 per cent. In neither place does Labour now have an overall majority.

The only party to make more than derisory gains was the Liberal Democrats, who were up 8 points in Sedgefield and 3.2 points in Southall. However, even the Liberal Democrats failed to come within hailing distance of victory in either.

The swing in their favour from Labour was 11.1 per cent in Sedgefield and 5.3 per cent in Southall.

Local circumstances undoubtedly affected the results at the margin in both constituencies - the fracas over Tony Lit's recent conversion to the Conservatives and his company's recent donation to Labour cannot have done the Tories much good in Southall - but the broadly similar results in a London constituency and one in the north-east of England suggest that long-term national forces were mainly in play.

Only four by-elections have been held in England since the May 2005 General Election. Labour has lost support by varying amounts in all four. The Liberal Democrats have gained support by varying amounts in all four.

The Tories have neither gained much ground nor lost much, except in Bromley and Chislehurst a year ago when they suffered a swing of 14.6 per cent to the Liberal Democrats.

The inferences to be drawn are that by-elections generate less local excitement than Westminster's political junkies often suppose and only rarely do large numbers of ordinary voters undergo violent swings of political mood.

David Cameron has certainly not succeeded in engineering any such mood-swing in the Tories' favour so far.

• Anthony King is professor of government at Essex University