Three by-elections and a win each for the three main parties. Labour won with the biggest electoral swing in their history in Selby and Ainsty, the Lib Dems won a huge majority in Somerton and Frome and the Conservatives just about held their seat in Uxbridge.
On the surface, the set of results are better than what the Tories had anticipated. But, better than terrible can still be pretty bad.
And does Labour Mayor of London Sadiq Khan need to rethink his ULEZ zone if Labour want to avoid struggling in next year's inner city campaigning? It sounds like Keir Starmer and Labour think so.
We're joined in News Agents HQ by Labour's Emily Thornberry and Sarah Olney from the Liberal Democrats to pick apart the results, and what this could mean for Tories, Labour and Lib Dems ahead of next year's general election.
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This is a Global Player original podcast.

Westminster has been acting like the next election's a done deal, the Labour Party's been acting like it's a done deal, the people of Uxbridge just told

Now, No 1 expected us to win here, but Steve's victory demonstrates that when confronted with the actual reality of the Labour Party, when there's an actual choice on a matter of substance at stake, people vote Conservative.

That was Rishi Sunak in the rumbling tum calf in Uxbridge.

But these results overnight will give him some heartburn and a bit of indigestion too, like a good greasy spoon breakfast often does, because the Tories had a pretty bumpy night.

Now kudos to him for not reciting what the 5 pledges were.

That must be the first time he said, I've got 5 pledges without listing them.

But otherwise, yes, Uxbridge was interesting, But the rest of it was bloody awful.

Going into yesterday, Rishi Sunak was trying to ensure that he didn't become the first Prime Minister since 1968 to lose 3 by-elections on the same night.

He just about managed to avoid that fate.

But On today's show, we're going to tell you why it is that you shouldn't pay too much attention to that.

Because the real story of these elections is what we knew before, that the Conservative Party is in 1 almighty hole.

And there is no obvious way for Rishi Sunak to dig them out of it.

And we now know how those big 3 by-elections have gone.

If you haven't heard yet, these are the results.

We're doing it like an election programme.

Labour had a spectacular win in the North Yorkshire seat of Selby and Ainslie.

This had never been a Labour seat since its creation in 2010.

and the now very young MP, Keir Mather, another Keir, Keir the Younger, won the seat.

And he didn't just win it, he won it by a majority of over 4, 000 with a 24%, yes a 24% swing.

Labour have never overturned a Tory majority so big in a by-election.

The Lib Dems continued their spectacular by-election run, winning their fourth by-election off the Conservatives in this Parliament at the other end of the country in Somerton and Froome in Somerset with a 29% swing.

That's their sixth biggest in Lib Dem by-election history.

I'm worried that I'm going to have to sedate Lewis at some point because the excitement levels in this studio, I mean, he's almost bouncing off the walls.

And the Conservatives, and this was the glint of light for Rishi Sudhak, The Conservatives unexpectedly held Boris Johnson's old seat of Uxbridge and South Ryce.

There was still a swing to the Labour Party of 6.7%, but it wasn't quite enough.

And they held on with a majority of 495, largely as a result of what is clear a pretty big local issue of deep dislike over Mayor Sadiq Khan's ULAIRS ultra low-emissions zone policy.

Well let's come back to that because I think the bigger picture was worth staying with for the time being and where it leaves the Tories and where it leaves Labour.

Interestingly, maybe the 1 helpful thing, well you could argue that, that emerged this morning was Jacob Rees-Mogg on the radio rowing in behind Rishi Sunak, which is not something...

Sir Jacob, John, you keep making this mistake.

I think the Tory party mustn't panic, and it may surprise you that I'm going to say this, but we must support Rishi Soonak.

This is really important that Tory MPs, including me, need to row in behind the Prime Minister.

I'm pausing to check that I've heard what you said.

man who has criticised Rishi Sunak, suggested he'd almost got socialist economic policy, spends too much, borrows too much, taxes too much, and you're now saying, steady as she goes, back the leader.

That's absolutely right, because I want the Conservatives to win the election rather than have Kirstarma, who will punish us all with these high green taxes, and therefore we have to back

So you back the leader that you've got according to Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg but interesting there he's talking about how we have to get behind him and that this could be like 1992 when the Tories came from behind to win a general election with a very small majority when John Major was prime minister.

The biggest Labour swing since before the 1997 general election, which presaged Tony Blair's landslide.

The Liberal Democrats, for the first time this parliament, have won 4 by-elections.

There is so much that is so much more similar to the lead-up to the 1997 election that I think that it is Tories whistling to keep their spirits up to try to make the comparison now with 1992.

Because 1992 was a completely different set of circumstances.

Thatcher had been ousted after a very long period.

John Major comes in with a mandate to get rid of the hated poll tax, which he does.

The British people, come the 1992 election, feel they've had a general election because they've got rid of Thatcher.

And there were question marks over Neil Kinnock, the Labour Party leader.

So to compare it now to 1992 just seems way off target.

Yeah, I think this is what quite a lot of the coverage this morning has missed, which is that inevitably, because of the surprise of the Uxbridge results, it's got a lot of attention.

Rishi Sunak, fair play to his media guys, they were out first thing this morning, they were in the rumbling tum, frankly why wouldn't you be?

First thing and the pictures were everywhere and the headline was, you know, surprise, surprise win for Sunak and he's looking happy and it gives the image on the TV screens of this unexpected win and an ebullient Prime Minister.

The fact of the matter is, is that the only thing Uxbridge really tells us is something we already knew, which is that there is a great deal of antipathy in the outer London boroughs about you Les.

Were it not for you Les, the Labour Party would almost certainly have won the seat.

A seat, by the way, which has always been Conservative.

It has historically been a solid Conservative seat.

It's trending maybe a bit more demographically towards the Labour Party.

And even in Uxbridge, there was still a near 7% swing, as I was saying earlier, to the Labour Party.

And that is all 7% that the Labour Party needs to become the largest party in a hung parliament.

So even if you had Uxbridge, which was a pretty meagre result in some ways for the Labour Party, if that were translated nationally, then they would still become the largest party.

The true story, like you're saying, John, is the fact that what we are seeing is, and we've got lots of evidence for this now, we've got lots of evidence for it in by-elections, we've got lots of evidence for it at local elections, the coalescence of the anti-conservative vote in seat after seat is now, we've got enough evidence to say that it is a profound and significant trend.

That where the Lib Dems have the best chance of defeating the Conservatives, Labour voters hold their nose and vote for the Lib Dems.

Vice versa as well in Labour facing seats as we saw indeed with Selby.

And that, as you say John, is exactly like the mid-1990s.

And let's just get real here for a moment.

I mean, like Selby, a couple of years ago, if we had said the Labour Party is going to win a by-election with a 4, 000 majority in Selby and Ainslie, A seat which is 1 of the safest Conservative seats in the country.

We would have been told that we were absolutely off our bloody heads.

This is a seat which is exactly the sort of seat where the Labour Party has not just been doing badly but has been catastrophically underperforming in recent years.

It is a seat that is more rural, it's a seat that's quite affluent, it's a seat with fewer graduates, it's a seat that was heavily leave voting.

I mean, come on, just 2 years ago, they couldn't even win the Hartlepool by-election against the government.

The government won that seat, a seat that had been Labour until the mid-1960s.

The transformation in just 2 years has been mind-boggling.

Now you can argue whether that's because of Keir Starmer and a Labour Party resurgence or just because the Conservatives have completely and utterly imploded, but the transformation is profound.

The transformation is profound but You've also got, just go back to the 2019 election and Boris Johnson getting an 80 seat majority.

For a start, Labour no longer has Jeremy Corbyn as the party leader, who was a deeply polarising figure, easy to rally support against, very difficult to sell on the doorstep in kind of working-class conservative small c areas and Labour got punished accordingly.

You also had among Brexit voters them saying look if we're going to get this bloody thing done, we need to have a Tory government because they're the only ones who are going to achieve it.

That coalition has completely fractured since then.

I do think, though, that 1 thing that has kind of occurred to me this morning was that Nigel Adams, who had been the MP in North Yorkshire, and who resigned in a fit of pique because he couldn't have a peerage.

I mean, if he hadn't resigned, and this by-election hadn't taken place, and it had just been 2 by-elections where Tories had held onto Uxbridge but lost in the West Country in Somerset and Froome.

The narrative that Rishi Sunak would have had today would have been completely different.

Rishi Sunak must want to stick pins in Nigel Adams for what he's done over all of this.

But the bigger picture that you describe is absolutely spot on.

It's like when you are caring for a very elderly relative and you know there are no good options of what you can do.

When you hear Jacob Rees-Mogg saying, oh well, steady as she goes, we've got to row in behind Rishi, That's all they've got.

I mean, look, in terms of where this leaves Sunak personally, I mean, there is no sense that there's going to be a move against him.

Even if he'd lost Uxbridge, I think that would have been the case.

I think 1 of the other things in terms of the change that you're talking about, John, which would have surprised us again if we rewound sort of 2 years or 3 years, is that again, Selby, deeply leave voting area.

Somerton and Froome for the Lib Dems, deeply leave voting area.

And the retreat of Brexit as a salient issue, as an indicator of voting intention is extraordinary.

if we'd been having this conversation 2 or 3 years ago, we'd have been talking about the Great Realignments, this idea that Leave voting areas were inexorably moving to the Conservatives away from parties like Lib Dems or the Labour Party.

For Leave voting areas at least, that process seems to have been halted in its tracks.

And we should talk about Lib Dems because it's almost like we're getting used to this now.

The by-election victories that they have achieved now in seats as disparate as Cheshire and Amersham in Buckinghamshire, of North Shropshire, Tiverton in Devon and now Somerton in Froome, they've achieved them all, huge conservative majorities with extraordinary swings.

I think 4 of the biggest swings they've ever had in by-elections have been in this parliament.

1, it shows that they are returning to being a by-election winning machine, which of course, historically, they were.

They are recovering from the doldrums of the coalition period.

It also shows that they're making a return in the southwest to their historic heartlands, which they'll be very pleased about.

And it shows as well that pincer movement of the Labour Lib Dems, which is what you need to really defeat the Conservative Party, is coming back.

There is a question, of course, as to whether they can translate by-election success to the national picture, because they're very good at throwing the whole kitchen sink at 1 by-election.

They have fewer resources when it comes to a general election.

But they've got every reason to be extremely pleased.

If you look at 2 polling questions that I think are interesting, the first polling question is, is it time that the Tories had a spell in opposition?

Overwhelmingly, the British public answers that question in the affirmative.

A huge majority think that the Conservatives need a spell now out of government.

And of course that is, you know, time for a change is 1 of the most powerful clarion calls in politics.

The other polling question is would you like to see Labour replace the Tories?

And that is still where there are still a few more questions for Sir Keir Starmer to answer.

Because I think that there are still some reservations.

It is not Blair in the lead up to 1997, I would argue.

And the EULA's factor, there are a number of constituencies on the suburbs of London that could also have been good target seats for Labour.

Can the Tories capitalise on that in a general election or a general elections fought on big national issues and you can't do micro-targeting?

Yeah and look there are going to be and I know for a fact because I was focusing on some of them this morning there are pretty irritated figures in the Labour Party at the moment they were very close to a clean sweep they were very close to there being no other narrative other than Labour success and there are questions about ULEZ and about the way Sadiq Khan has approached it.

And you could sort of hear that in some of the Labour interviewees this morning.

This was Labour's deputy leader, Angela Rayner, talking about this.

We're trying to do the right thing and keep Londoners safe, but we've also got to recognise that people need compensation and need a way to be able to do that that isn't going to impact on them at a cost of living crisis when people can't afford it.

So there is a concern that we have to make sure that whatever is implemented is not at the cost of working families.

Funnily enough, Uxbridge I think, this is a weird by-election because I think it doesn't tell us very much about the next general election, but funnily enough I think it probably tells us more about the direction of our long-term politics than the election itself.

I mean, it doesn't tell us much about the election because as we've already said, Labour were in this weird kind of quasi incumbent position.

It sounds quite uncomfortable, but it was uncomfortable for them because they obviously had Cairn there as mayor and The Tories very successfully managed to do what politicians always say they want by-elections to be about but rarely are, which is local issues.

It doesn't have much import beyond a few other London seats.

And let's be honest, London's already so dominated by Labour, it won't make much difference when it comes to the general election.

But I do think it tells us something about the future of our politics.

Because the future of our politics, we know, if we're to take the Labour Party at their word, is to say that the next 5 to 10 years are going to be dominated by the transition to net 0, by more environmental policies, policies which, by the way, are going to have a big impact on people's lives.

And if you think about the fact the government itself, never mind the Labour Party, they're committed to phasing out the sale of petrol and diesel cars by 2030, the replacement at some point in the next 15 years of our gas boiler system, replacement with heat pumps.

You can see the politics of net 0 honing into view.

And although politicians often talk about it as if it's unequivocally a good thing, by the way, I'm saying we need to do this, it is a good thing, but you can see the potential for backlash against it and a sort of populist center right or right wing backlash against it.

And there are already going to be, I fear that the net result of this, by the way, is going to be that the Labour Party is going to be that little bit more sceptical, that little bit more worried about environmental and net 0 policies.

And you really heard it from the right as well today.

Jacob Rees-Mogg in that interview wasn't just saying he backed Rishi Sunak, but he was imploring Rishi Sunak to back away from net 0 policies, to go for the Labour Party on the politics of the environment, on the politics of net 0 and all of these sorts of things.

And we've already seen glimmers of that with Jetstop Oil and all that sort of thing.

So I think that this by-election is a portent of our politics to come, both in terms of the Conservative government and its politics now, and the Labour Party in the future.

It's so interesting, the Blair insight into politics, and he tells this story of someone stopping him and said, after the 92 election and saying, oh Tony, what is wrong with the British people that they didn't vote for us?

And Blair said, no, maybe it's us and we have to go closer to the British people.

It is very dangerous for politicians to go so far ahead of public opinion, even though they might get a lot of likes on Twitter for the positions they're taking.

That on the environmental agenda, I think Keir Starmer's takeaway from this will not be I've got to be more radical and I need to be bolder in what I'm offering the British people.

I think his takeaway will be, yeah, I'm pretty well right to be cautious about what we're saying we will do, because undoubtedly, Labour strategists thinks that this whole ultra-low emissions zone thing around London has cost them the Uxbridge seat.

And I think you will see more caution, not less, sticking to his broad ambitions and goals and not going way ahead of public opinion on what can be done at a certain speed because we have seen the backlash when it becomes real what those policies will mean if you're driving an old gas guzzling car or you know with high emissions.

And we should say by the way in terms of ULEZ this was actually a sort of in some ways a conservative mandated thing instructing cities to get air pollution out of control.

But also, in terms of what it means for the Labour Party politics, that process or that dynamic is going to make the tension which is already there between Keir Starmer's office or the top of the Labour Party and Ed Miliband, his Shadow Energy Secretary, because Ed Miliband has been the 1 urging Keir Starmer to go further and faster on net 0 and all of these sort of things.

People like other people around the Labour leader going hold on a minute let's go a bit more slowly, it's going to make that tension even more acute.

We're going to go to the break in just a second but before we do, no by-election night is complete without an Ed Davey stunt.

It was pure Hollywood, It was as though Baz Luhrmann or James Cameron had come to Somerset and Froome and set up 1 of the most elaborate, Hollywood-esque grand productions ever.

It was Sir Ed Davy with a circus cannon and well it all went f**ked.

Now, if you're a political geek, you obviously love statistics.

And there is a fabulous statistic out of last night's crop of by-election results.

of the Liberal Democrats in Parliament are now Sarah.

And we're joined by a Sarah in the studio.

Sarah Olney, Lib Dem for Richmond Park, Treasury spokesperson.

Yes, it's been another good day to be a Lib Dem.

And another good day to be a Lib Dem Sarah, and another good day to be a Lib Dem Sarah who's won a by-election.

Yeah, I mean, I was down there 3 times over the course of the election and right from the start it was extraordinary, you know much more so than the other by-elections we fought over the last few years, extraordinary how ready people were to vote Liberal Democrat and we heard time and time again that people are fed up of the Tories and I think particularly in Somerton and Froome where obviously David Warburton hasn't even been present in any form.

The former Conservative MP, yes, hasn't been sort of present in any kind of form for the last year and people were particularly upset about that.

He had to resign in controversial circumstances.

Absolutely, absolutely, But more broadly than that people are just sick to death of the Tories and people are concerned as they're concerned everywhere about the cost of their mortgages, the cost of living, the state of the NHS but particularly in these rural areas and we've seen that in Tiverton and Honiton and We've seen it in North Shropshire.

They feel really let down by the government's trade deal, particularly over farming.

Because we were talking on the show before you arrived about the fact that Brexit as a salient issue on the doorstep seems to be fast diminishing.

And in a way that we would have found that extraordinary even a few years ago.

I mean Lib Dems at 1 point with a revoke party you're now winning these elections in heavily voting areas including North Shropshire you've seen previously now again in Somerton and Froome.

They were just sick of the Tories, we need something different, we want to vote for you.

I spoke to 1 gentleman, I was in Temple Coombe yesterday, and a gentleman called Kelvin.

He's always voted Conservative, he felt that they always really, really aligned with his values.

He says he wasn't sure about Lib Dem policy, he thinks we're a bit soft.

I'm going to vote for you this time, he says.

That's Sarah, she's been here, she's knocked on my door, she works really hard, you've worked really hard in this campaign.

So that was the sort of positive message I was getting back from voters in a Somerset accent.

But what you can do in a by-election is very different from what you can do in a general election.

You can't be in 650 constituencies when it's the general election, and you can't have that intensity of people swamping the constituency to kind of get your message across.

Is this just you're really bloody good at by-elections and doesn't matter at all anywhere else?

Well I think it's probably a couple of things we are really bloody good at by-elections and I don't think there's much doubt about that.

But in terms of the bigger goal, what I think is really important about yesterday for us is that we can show that we're back in the Southwest.

Obviously, not just Somerton and Froome, but also Tiverton and Honiton last year.

We're back in the Southwest where we used to hold lots of seats.

They will be looking at the Liberal Democrats now and they'll be thinking, you know, these are the people that we want to vote for at the general election.

But I think also, yeah, we're not going to be competitive in 650 seats and that's not the plan for us.

But there are a number of seats where we do plan to really work hard and we've shown that we can beat the Tories.

There's I think 92 seats across the UK where we're in second place and in as many of those as we can we will be out there making the case that people should be voting Liberal Democrat if they don't

Just to follow up on that, there also seems to be a huge appetite among the British public for tactical voting as well.

You look at the result in North Yorkshire, you look at the result in Somerset, Labour were in the strongest position to win there, people piled in behind Labour, Somerset and Froome they piled in behind Liberal Democrat.

Is that a significant force in the next general election?

I think Labour have obviously got a job to do in terms of persuading perhaps some of their former voters to come back to them in the seats they lost in 2019.

Some of those seats I imagine will be fought fairly hard and we you know no way of knowing which way they'll go so I think where the Liberal Democrats can really make a difference if we don't want a Tory government after the next general election is that where we can gain seats that's where we can really make an impact.

Finally Sarah, why do you think it is, there's no doubt you've had spectacular by-election success 4 times now in this parliament, and yet it isn't translating to the national polls.

I mean you haven't been any higher, I was looking earlier, than 13 points basically over the last few years.

Why is it that you're able to perform well in these by-elections and yet there doesn't seem to be nationally any great enthusiasm for you.

I think it's the same as I was just saying though, we're second in 92 seats so there's a limited number of seats where people will be looking at the Liberal Democrats and thinking that that's where they're going to place

Sure, but if you go back not so long ago, you know, Pre-coalition days, you were often around the 20 point mark.

I mean, you're just bumping along the bottom.

But anyway, my point is more actually, I don't always think that polls capture our vote share terribly well, and I certainly don't think that they're a good guide to how many seats we're going to win and the seats is what really really counts.

I mean we've won the same number of seats on 8% as we've won on 12% and actually you look at difference between 92 and 97 it's kind of like the vote share was very similar but the number of seats was extremely different.

So I don't think, for us, it doesn't particularly matter what the vote share is in national polls.

I think they're a good guide to relative performance of Conservative and Labour.

I just don't think they tell a very useful story about the Liberal Democrats.

And I think, for us, we're really focused on the number of seats we can win at the next general election and we're hoping for a few more results like last night.

Sarah Hornley, thank you very much for being with us on The News Agents.

And we are joined now in the studio by Emily Thornberry, the Shadow Attorney General, and welcome to you.

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Why is Rishi Sunak acting like he won?