Shropshire blues
A by-election defeat threatens Boris Johnson’s ailing premiership
The popularity that has got him through past scrapes seems to be fading
NORTH SHROPSHIRE should have been an easy by-election for Britain’s ruling Conservatives. Neil Shastri-Hurst was a true-blue candidate for a true-blue seat. A surgeon who had served in the army and then retrained as a barrister, he would be found clad in Barbour jacket and tweeds—a fogeyish get-up, perhaps, given his early middle age, but not out of place in the villages and farms he toured, drumming up support.
History and demography had suggested he would find plenty of it in the constituency of North Shropshire. Constituency boundaries had shifted, but the area had elected Tories continuously since 1832, bar a two-year hiatus in 1904, when a Liberal won. Owen Paterson, the previous MP, had secured 63% of the vote at the most recent election in 2019, the best result of his 24-year career. The area is older, whiter, and more pro-Brexit than the average constituency, which typically suggests favourable Tory terrain.
True blue no longer. In a by-election on December 16th, locals elected Helen Morgan of the Liberal Democrats, by a margin of 17,957 to 12,032. It is a remarkable defeat for the government: the swing of 34.1 percentage points is the largest against the Tories since 2014. Sir John Curtice, a psephologist at the University of Strathclyde, said that, as electoral earthquakes go, it was at least 8.5 on the Richter scale. It follows a similarly dramatic Liberal Democrat victory in Chesham and Amersham, a wealthy Buckinghamshire seat, in June. The significance for Tory MPs is clear: if such seats are at risk under Mr Johnson, so are theirs.
Mr Johnson’s party has indulged his erratic style of government in the belief that he is an unrivalled campaigner. That compact is breaking down. A party will tolerate incompetence or unpopularity, but not both. No challenge to Mr Johnson’s party leadership seems imminent. But, said Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, a Tory bigwig, one would materialise if the prime minister doesn’t shape up within three months.
Oliver Dowden, the Conservative Party co-chair, dismissed the result as mid-term blues. “Voters in North Shropshire are fed up and they gave us a kicking,” he said. It is a rule of thumb that governments lose by-elections mid-term, and this result is a return to historic form for the Lib Dems, who have long been skilled by-election battlers. Often, gains fall back to the governing party at a general election (see, for example, Liberal gains in Richmond Park in 2016, or Brecon and Radnorshire in 2019).
At other times, however, they are turning-points: signs that a prime minister is irrevocably unpopular and auguries of electoral defeat. For Margaret Thatcher, the beginning of the end came at a by-election in Eastbourne in 1990; for John Major, Newbury, 1993; for Gordon Brown, Glasgow East, 2008. What is a hiccup and what is a harbinger becomes clear only in hindsight. But this does not look good for Mr Johnson.
The first reason is evidence that voters are responding to Mr Johnson’s government with not mere dissatisfaction, but distaste. Mr Paterson left parliament in disgrace. In October an inquiry found that he had improperly worked as a lobbyist while serving as an MP, and recommended a 30-day suspension from the Commons. He thought that unfair, as did Mr Johnson, who dragooned his MPs into voting to overturn that decision and to overhaul the committee that made it. It was an autocratic reflex, and met a rapid backlash from his own party. Mr Johnson retreated; Mr Paterson resigned.
That would have been survivable, were it not the start of a catastrophic month, which allowed the Liberal Democrats to turn the election into a referendum on Mr Johnson’s style of government. During a speech to business leaders, he embarked on a rambling digression about Peppa Pig, a children’s cartoon. The Conservative Party was fined for breaking electoral law after failing fully to report a donation that had paid for the refurbishment of Mr Johnson’s Downing Street flat. It emerged that parties had been held in Downing Street and Conservative Party headquarters during last year’s covid-19 lockdowns.
On December 14th Mr Johnson suffered a serious rebellion of MPs against new anti-pandemic measures, which the opposition said was a sign of weakness. All the while, his personal ratings fall: Ipsos Mori, a pollster, said on December 13th that the Labour Party’s Sir Keir Starmer, is rated the more capable prime minister by a margin of 13 points, the first time a Labour leader has been ahead on this measure since 2008. Fewer than a fifth of voters now think Mr Johnson has good judgment, or is a good representative for Britain abroad.
The second reason for Mr Johnson to worry is that the result suggests that the volatility that has reshaped British politics in the past five years has not abated. Mr Johnson’s electoral triumph in 2019 rested on the weakening of longstanding allegiances towards the Labour party in its heartland seats. This result hints that allegiances are unsettled in Tory strongholds, too, and that, with the divorce from Europe settled, Brexit is not the powerful rallying cry for the Tories that it was two years ago.
Still more ominous for the prime minister is the evidence that opposition voters are sorting themselves remarkably efficiently, piling behind one opposition candidate to oust a Tory. As the Liberal Democrats’ share of the vote shot up in North Shropshire, that of the main national opposition party, Labour, fell by more than half. A similar pattern was seen in Chesham and Amersham. There is evidence of low-key and informal co-operation: Labour held the seat of Batley and Spen in a by-election in July, aided by a light-touch Liberal Democrat campaign, and Labour did not fight quite as hard as it could have in North Shropshire, despite finishing second in 2019. That ballet makes sense: the number of seats where the Lib Dems and Labour are each other’s main rivals has dropped to a handful in the past decade, as their most promising battlegrounds have become increasingly distinct. If the rallying behind a single opposition candidate seen in North Shropshire were repeated in other Tory-held seats in a general election, it could prove brutal for the Tories. ■