Politics: even more analysis

By Richard North - July 25, 2023

So, yesterday, I started the laborious process of analysing the results of last week’s by-elections, starting with Selby and Ainsty. Today, I am looking at Somerton and Frome, where the circumstances could not have been more different.

Thus, while Selby and Ainsty is a traditional safe Tory seat, Somerton and Frome is a classic West Country Tory/Lib Dem swing seat, being held as recently as during the 2010-2015 parliament by the Lib-Dem’s David Heath, who had held it consistently since 1997.

When the seat was recovered for the Conservatives in 2015 by David Warburton, the victory benefitted from the nationwide collapse of the Lib-Dem vote following the Cameron/Clegg coalition. With a typically exaggerated swing, Warburton turned his Lib-Dem predecessor’s vote of 28,793 into a personal vote of 31,960.

This is one of those parts of the country, therefore, where a huge section of the electorate is essentially interchangeable as between the Tories and Lib-Dems. Thus, in last Thursday’s by-election, if any party was going to take the seat from the Tories, it was going to be the Lib-Dems – and where Labour was always going to do badly.

The point to make, therefore, is that while Selby and Ainsty, and Somerton and Frome had in common that they were Tory seats held with large majorities, they were also seats with entirely different characteristics. Other than the coincidence of having by-elections on the same day, they had little else in common.

As such, the reason for the by-election is of some considerable significance, in this case because the incumbent, David Warburton, had lost the Conservative whip in April 2022 following allegations of misconduct and on 17 June 2023 had resigned altogether as an MP, triggering the by-election.

In English electoral politics, it is often the case that when a Tory MPs is driven to resign under dubious circumstances, triggering a by-election, the Tory electorate will “punish” the Party by voting Lib-Dem. This is not always so, but it did apply to North Shropshire, in the by-election held on 16 December 2021.

Then, a disgraced Owen Paterson, who had held the seat in the 2019 general election with 35,444 votes, resigned as an MP in November 2021, whence the seat was won by Lib-Dem Helen Morgan with 17,957 votes – despite Labour usually taking second place. It would appear under these circumstances that disaffected Tory voters were not prepared to switch to Labour but a proportion would tolerate moving to the Lib-Dems.

In Somerton and Frome, however, we get a complex, if not nuanced picture. The Lib-Dems take 54.6 percent of the votes cast, Conservatives take second place with 26.2 percent of the vote, while Labour – previously coming second, struggle for fifth place with a mere 2.6 percent of the vote. Greens do relatively well, winning 10.2 percent of the vote.

Although some may argue that tactical voting played a hand, as indeed did John Curtice, but this is difficult to prove, especially as Labour was also castigated for a failure “to show clear and unambiguous leadership” on some policies.

In what, therefore, can be taken as an ambiguous result, we see the Lib-Dem winner take a mandate of 24.14 percent as against 42.18 percent for the Tories in 2019, not quite so precipitous a drop as in Selby and Ainsty. And if there is a collapse in the support of any political party to be seen, it is in Labour – not quite the result Starmer would want to see.

On the back of any by-election results, there is always a temptation to draw conclusions for the next forthcoming general election, and especially here where the election is so close.

But, of the two by-election results so far examined, I would argue that it is not possible to draw on a common thread which would point the way to a result in the General next year. Although the prognosis for the Tories is not good – just based on the normal tracker poll set – I suspect we are no closer to picking the winner than before we got Thursday’s results.

It could, of course, be the case that the Uxbridge and South Ruislip result holds a special message which could more accurately point the way, or that the combination of all the results, taken together, give us more insight.

These issues I will look at tomorrow, by which time I hope I will have recovered more of my form and can bring this series to a useful conclusion.