The swing to Labour in Chester’s by-election could be a game-changer – the Tories should be extremely worried
Chester #Chester
Labour emphatically retained its City of Chester parliamentary seat, courtesy of a 13.8% swing from the Conservatives – one of the largest since the Second World War.
Labour knows that the electoral challenge it faces at the next general election is huge, but this by-election marks a significant step on the journey.
The Conservatives should be extremely worried.
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Voters who backed the Tories in Chester in 2019 had other options on the ballot paper, but ignored them.
There was no flirtation with minor parties. Instead, many Conservatives appear to have switched directly to Labour, albeit on a turnout 31 percentage points lower than at the last general election.
Samantha Dixon’s 61% vote share is Labour’s highest ever in the constituency. Her majority of almost 11,000 votes is larger than even that achieved by the party during Tony Blair’s landslide victory in 1997.
Inevitably, Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour has to be compared with how the party performed in the run-up to that spectacular victory. The Chester result offers the chance for comparison.
Labour has often struggled to mobilise voters in by-election vacancies it is defending. During Mr Blair’s march towards Downing Street, however, it didn’t. Labour had to defend nine seats, won all of them and achieved a swing against the Conservatives in each case.
By contrast, in Hartlepool, Labour actually lost its first defence this parliament, with the extremely rare occurrence of a governing party gaining a seat from the opposition.
Earlier this year, in the Birmingham Erdington by-election, the swing to Labour was under 5% while the Conservative government under Boris Johnson was imploding.
The 13.8% swing in Chester, however, could be a game-changer.
It does not quite match the heights Labour hit in the mid-1990s but it would be good enough to win the party an additional 138 seats and a 32-seat majority in the House of Commons – assuming a uniform national swing away from the Conservatives of the same magnitude.
Labour wins Chester by-election
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Prior to Chester, Labour’s realistic ambition was to wipe out the Conservatives’ 80-seat majority won in 2019 and then overtake them as the largest party in a hung parliament.
That sounds modest, but such was Labour’s defeat in 2019 that the recovery is daunting. In fact, the required national swing just to overtake the Tories, 7%, would be the second largest at any general election since the war – larger than even Mrs Thatcher achieved in 1979.
Now, the party might dare to dream that Mr Blair’s record 10.2% swing in 1997 is within reach. If they can perform like this in one of their own seats, think what they can do in a seat being defended by a Conservative.
The Conservative vote fell by 16 sixteen percentage points and most of that loss went to Labour.
Many Conservative members of parliament are now reviewing their own majorities. This analysis suggests that 147 of the 365 members elected in the 2019 cohort would lose their seats on a swing of this magnitude.
Seats such as Macclesfield, Banbury, Basingstoke and Hexham that have been in Tory hands for around a century would fall.
Read more
By-election wasn’t just a bad result for the Tories – it was a disaster
Prominent cabinet ministers, once believing they were in “safe” seats, might now be imagining themselves in the unwelcome spotlight as television records them being voted out of office.
With bad timing, the Conservative Party is currently asking its MPs to indicate whether they to stand again at the next election.
Chester has certainly given many more of them cause for thought.