Speculation grows over timing of next election after Tory by-election defeats

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Good morning. It’s the Monday after the night before. Labour’s pair of by-election victories has MPs speculating about when the next election will be — and has left Tory MPs wondering what if anything can turn their fortunes around in time. Some thoughts on that in today’s note.

Bad timing

Arresting (and, uh, apologies to our plant-based readers, mouthwatering) opener by Miranda Green:

The name of Tamworth burst in on the public imagination in the late 1990s with the compelling tale of two small piglets of that breed who made a break for it, hoping to escape the abattoir. Conservatives fighting off attack this week must have been hoping for a similar tale of unlikely survival. But the twin by-election battles held on Thursday in the West Midlands town of Tamworth and the Mid Bedfordshire constituency proved fatal for both Tory candidates. Labour sliced its way through huge majorities to a historic double win that could spell doom for the whole litter.

Labour’s twin victories are having any number of consequences. The first is that it has woken up Westminster in general and the Tory party in particular to the fact that Labour has had a double-digit lead for more than a year now, and thus far, nothing Rishi Sunak has done or said has managed to turn that tide. It is even enough to make Labour think it might win, too, as our Westminster team’s excellent piece on the party’s mood details.

There are 463 days between now and the latest possible date for the next election — which would involve a late January poll and campaigning over Christmas — which in one way, is quite a lot. It’s more than double the 224 days that separated the Conservative victory in the Hartlepool by-election back in May 2021, at which point the Tories enjoyed a poll lead of about 10 points, and the Conservative defeat in the North Shropshire by-election in December 2021, by which point Labour led by about 5 per cent.

But in another sense — given the tricky economic and social fundamentals facing the Conservative party — 463 days isn’t all that much time at all. Those fundamentals are one reason to believe that the next election will be as late as possible. As this informative blog by the Institute for Government demonstrates well, many of those underlying fundamentals ought to be improving by then.

Then, when you remember the historical trend that governments which are behind in the polls tend to leave it as late as they can — be they John Major in 1992 and 1997, Gordon Brown in 2010, James Callaghan in 1979 and Alec Douglas-Home in 1964 — all of that points to an election either very late in 2024 or very early in 2025.

Now try this

I mostly spent this weekend catching up on sleep and playing Spider-Man 2 on the PlayStation. It’s very good thus far. The video game, I mean, the sleep, less so.

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