Sir Keir Starmer has declared he hopes to “follow in the footsteps” of Sir Tony Blair and lead Labour to power, after the UK opposition party seized two previously safe Conservative seats in a significant double by-election triumph.
Starmer’s party overturned Tory majorities of nearly 25,000 in Mid Bedfordshire and close to 20,000 in Tamworth, a pair of results that will send tremors through the ruling Conservative party.
Starmer said while celebrating with activists that Labour had “made history” and was “redrawing the political map” in the wake of the results.
They replicated “what’s going on across the country — people are fed up to the back teeth with 13 years of decline under this government. They want a fresh start,” he said.
Starmer stressed later in an interview with Sky News that the present was “different” to the run-up to the 1997 election, but said he hoped to emulate Blair, who led Labour to a landslide victory that year.
“What I do want to do is follow in the footsteps of a leader of our party who took us from opposition into power,” he said.
He acknowledged it was still a “big” task to win the election given the swing to Labour needed, but he said the by-election results had given him a “renewed spring” in his step.
While by-elections do not always foreshadow the results of subsequent general elections, the results will reinforce the idea that Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is struggling to win over the public after a year in office.
Sir John Curtice, a respected elections expert, told the BBC the results left the Tories facing “the serious prospect of losing the next general election heavily and even more heavily than in 1997”.
Speaking in Cairo during a diplomatic tour to discuss the Israel-Hamas conflict with regional leaders, Sunak conceded the by-election results were “obviously disappointing”.
However, he stressed it was “important to remember the context — midterm elections are always difficult for incumbent governments and of course there are also local factors at play here”.
He told broadcasters he was committed to delivering his five priorities, as well as working on his “new approach” to net zero and transport links.
Labour secured victory in Mid Beds, previously held by former culture secretary Nadine Dorries, after a three-way fight with the Liberal Democrats.
Labour candidate Alistair Strathern won with 13,872 votes, while the Tories’ candidate Festus Akinbusoye took 12,680 votes. The Lib Dems came third with 9,420 votes.
The Conservatives had a majority of 24,664 under Dorries, a close ally of former prime minister Boris Johnson. She formally resigned in August with a withering attack on Sunak for presiding over a “zombie parliament”.
It was the largest majority that Labour has overturned in a by-election in modern political history. Strathern said: “Nowhere is off limits for today’s Labour party and tonight’s result proves that.”
George Osborne, former Conservative chancellor, had warned earlier on Thursday night that losing Mid Bedfordshire — a Tory seat since 1931 — would mean “Armageddon is coming for the Tory party”.
Labour also won in Tamworth in the West Midlands with 11,719 votes for candidate Sarah Edwards against 10,403 for the Conservatives, with a low turnout.
The Conservatives previously enjoyed a huge majority of 19,634 in Tamworth, making it their 57th safest seat in the country. The swing of 23.9 per cent from the Tories to Labour was the second highest since the 1940s.
Labour’s victory has historic resonance because it previously won the seat — then called South East Staffordshire — in a by-election in 1996, one year before the party’s decisive 1997 win.
Chris Hopkins, a pollster at Savanta, said there was “no sugar coating how bad this is for the Conservatives”.
There had not been three consecutive 20-point swings in by-elections from the Conservatives to Labour since 1996, he noted. In July, Labour also overturned a 20,000 Tory majority in the Selby and Ainsty by-election.
The Tamworth by-election was precipitated by Chris Pincher, the former Tory MP, quitting parliament after losing his appeal against an eight-week suspension from the House of Commons for groping two men last year.
The Tories also faced issues on their right-flank, as the Reform UK party secured more votes than the Labour party majority in both seats.
Reform UK leader Richard Tice wrote on X, formerly Twitter, that “twice in [the] same night have Reform UK ensured Tories lost their seat”.
But Peter Kyle, who led Labour’s campaign in Mid Beds, said it was the “biggest by-election shock in history”, which was only possible because of Starmer’s leadership.
“We saw the Tory vote had totally collapsed . . . we trusted residents when they told us they wanted to see something better,” he told Sky News. “What happened tonight was a political earthquake.”
The Conservative party has been defeated in a string of by-elections in various parts of the country in recent years, with an unusual number of the contests caused by resignations for misconduct.
Only once during this parliament have the Tories taken a seat from another party in a by-election, when they won Hartlepool from Labour in May 2021.
