If it can happen here, it can happen anywhere. That’s what plenty of Tory MPs in apparently safe southern seats will be thinking after yesterday’s result in Chesham & Amersham.
I’m as firm a by-election sceptic as they come. They tend to have low turnouts, hinge on local issues that don’t necessarily reflect the national picture, and are often reversed in the subsequent general election. Think Corby in 2012, or Richmond Park in late 2016 – won by Labour and the Lib Dems respectively, then overturned in the following national election.
Such was the scale of the reversal, however, that you really can’t help but take notice. Here was an ever-blue seat, which Dame Cheryl had won in 2019 with a majority of over 16,000. To win at all in such a seat would have been a triumph for the Lib Dems, to do so with a majority of 8,000 was genuinely shocking, even if the Tory majority had been gradually declining since 2015.
We can still throw in some caveats. Turnout was only 52%, well down on the 76% at the last general election. It’s also unlikely the Lib Dems will do this well when their resources are spread across 600+ constituencies instead of one. Bear in mind too that long-standing incumbents such as Dame Cheryl tend to command a significant personal loyalty from voters – loyalty that Tory candidate Peter Fleet could never have hoped to replicate.
So what caused this political tremor?
A combination of anti-HS2 sentiment and opposition to new housing seems to have worked in the Lib Dems’ favour. Dame Cheryl had been an implacable opponent of the new line, which cuts a swathe through rural and suburban Bucks. With her passing, Chesham & Amersham residents clearly sensed a chance to give the Government a bloody nose over a project many see as a catastrophe. Add on to that a great deal of suburban anxiety about the Government’s planning reforms, which the Lib Dems cannily described as a “free-for-all for developers” rather than, say, “building homes for priced out young people”.
That will give a shot in the arm to every Home Counties Tory who opposes liberalising the planning system. The Government was already wobbling on those reforms before this result, from now on Chesham & Amersham will surely become a totem of what happens when the party upsets its traditional voters. Others, such as Dominic Grieve, have suggested this was a case of Tory supporters turning their backs on a government whose agenda is focused on northern, post-industrial seats and has forgotten about its core support.
It’s not all about the Lib Dems and Tories, though. Labour went from over 7,000 votes last time out to just 622 this time, losing their deposit. That’s less a sign of the party’s precipitous decline (a whole other story) than a willingness for Labour supporters to switch to the Lib Dems, which suggests the intense left-on-left animosity of the coalition era might finally have dissipated. Again, this kind of cooperation is much easier to organise for a one-off by-election than a national campaign, but it will give both Tory strategists and the ‘progressive alliance’ cheerleaders some food for thought.
I would caution any over-excited progressives against the idea of a great tumbling Blue Wall of seats that will oust the Tories from power. Yes, there are places that could ‘do a Chesham’ – from Hazel Grove to Watford and Worthing, demographic shifts are pushing once solidly blue seats into ‘maybe’ territory. But there aren’t enough of them for the ‘Blue Wall’ to provide a viable route to power.
Labour would also have to work out how to marry a message that wins those kinds of seats with one that attracts a very different kind of voters in their former heartlands, and that’s before we even come to Scotland. Equally importantly, there are still 40-odd Red Wall-type seats with modest Labour majorities which are ripe for a fresh Conservative assault. The next election will be just as much an offensive one for Boris Johnson’s party as defending its established territory.
Nonetheless, the Tories clearly face their own challenge with changes of voting behaviour and tailoring a message that appeals to their new voters while shoring up what looks an increasingly soft southern underbelly.
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