It was a bad night for Labour – but even worse for the Tories

It shouldn’t make a difference to assessing Reform’s performance whether it won the Runcorn by-election by six votes or lost by six, but in practice, it makes all the difference in the world.

It confirms that a government that is still new is so deeply unpopular that it cannot hold one of its safest seats. A landslide general election win that matched the giddiness of Blairphoria just 10 months ago has turned into the humiliation of defeat at the hands of Nigel Farage.

It confirms that Morgan McSweeney, Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff and architect of his general election victory, is right to see Farage as the main threat to the Labour government – but it also shows how ineffective Labour’s attempt to fight Reform on the issue of immigration has been.

If Reform won Runcorn by the narrowest of margins, Labour held onto the mayoralties of the West of England, Doncaster, and North Tyneside by narrow margins too – in each case being lucky to fend off Reform’s challenge. Win or lose, in each case, Reform was the threat.

But if Labour did badly on Thursday, the Conservatives did worse, and if Labour faces a continuing challenge from Reform between now and the next general election, the Tories face something more frightening: a total eclipse.

Labour is not in the worst position to fight a national election. It holds the levers of power and can use them to try to deliver at least some tangible benefits for its voters who might be tempted to defect. Bridget Phillipson, the cabinet minister fielded by Labour to make its case overnight, said that she understood how “impatient” people are to see the government deliver the change that it had promised.

For the Tories, on the other hand, Thursday’s elections were more ominous. The party was nowhere in the by-election (its candidate came third, level with the Greens); it was outpolled by Reform in all the mayoral contests declared so far; and it is losing local council seats to Reform hand over fist.

For Kemi Badenoch, Labour’s unpopularity has come too soon, because her party will take years to recover from its own disfavour that led to its worst-ever general election result last year – and in the meantime, Farage will conquer all.

Farage may be dismissed as a maverick, a loner and fundamentally unserious, but he is an outsider with a simple message that the Tories cannot match. Every Tory attack on the government can be deflected by asking what they did about it when they were in office just 10 months ago. Baggage-free Farage, on the other hand, can come up with the most outlandish nonsense and disaffected voters will say that he cannot be worse than the two established parties (oh, yes – he can).

I assume that Labour’s attack on him for wanting to break up the NHS is achieving some cut-through, as the party seems to be focusing on that – and was helped by Farage on polling day saying that he didn’t think the NHS should be funded from taxation. It is notable that Labour doesn’t call the party “far right” any more, realising that its voters don’t like it; and it was striking that Starmer himself failed to visit Runcorn for the by-election campaign, possibly because Labour realised that its leader is a liability.

All the same, there will always be a market in a general election for sanity and stability; there will be a Labour base that will vote for Starmer, however uninspiring he seems. Badenoch has much less of a base to fall back on.

Thursday’s contests were a battle between Labour and Reform. The Lib Dems and the Greens did their things on the margins. But the Tories won absolutely nothing. It is no use their pointing out that 2021 was a good year for the vaccines. They risk being replaced as the main party of opposition by Reform.

As Sam Freedman, a former special adviser to Michael Gove, commented: “As the years go by, it does look more and more like the main long-term political consequence of Brexit will be to kill the Conservative Party.” There was nothing in yesterday’s votes to contradict him.