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Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and the Conservative party suffered a severe blow on Friday, ceding two safe seats to Labour in what the opposition party hopes is a harbinger of victory at the general election expected this year.
Labour overturned Tory majorities of 18,500 in Wellingborough in Northamptonshire and 11,200 in Kingswood in South Gloucestershire. While by-elections do not always provide an accurate picture of what will happen at a nationwide election, the results point to growing disaffection with the Conservatives.
In Wellingborough, Labour clinched a 28.6 per cent swing, its second largest since the second world war. The party received 13,844 votes to the Conservatives’ 7,408, while Reform UK secured 3,919 votes.
In Kingswood, Labour secured a 16 per cent swing. The party won 11,176 votes, while the Tories took 8,675. Reform UK came in third with 2,578 votes.
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Labour has secured a string of by-election wins in recent months, having now taken six seats from the Conservatives since July.
Keir Starmer, leader of the Labour party, said: “By winning in these Tory strongholds, we can confidently say that Labour is back in the service of working people and we will work tirelessly to deliver for them.
“The Tories have failed. Rishi’s recession proves that. That’s why we’ve seen so many former Conservative voters switching directly to this changed Labour party.”
The results will come as a relief to Starmer, who has suffered one of the most challenging fortnights of his leadership.
The Labour leader faced criticism for abandoning a pledge to spend £28bn a year on green investment and sparked anger from the left and right of his party after he dithered before suspending two party candidates for remarks that were critical of Israel.
A Savanta poll released on Wednesday showed Labour’s lead over the Tories dropping by seven points to its lowest level since June 2023.
The results also cap a challenging few days for the Conservatives, who spent Thursday battling accusations that they were responsible for tipping the UK into a recession.
The Conservatives, who are trailing Labour by around 18 percentage points in polls, were conspicuously absent from the campaign trail in Kingswood and Wellingborough even though they had held both seats for two decades.
Damien Egan, the new Labour MP for Kingswood, was formerly mayor of Lewisham in south London.
His new seat will be abolished at the general election as part of a shake-up of constituency boundaries and he will contest Bristol North East instead.
Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, who will gain some of the Kingswood constituency as part of the changes, said the result was not as bad as he had expected, given that the combined votes for the Conservative and Reform parties exceeded those for Labour. “If it’s not winning and winning strongly here in a by-election then its prospects in a general election aren’t that good,” he told the BBC. “What we must do is reunite the broad Tory family.”
The Kingswood by-election was called after the former MP Chris Skidmore, an outspoken environmentalist, resigned in protest at the government’s decision to grant new oil and gas licences.
The by-election in Wellingborough, won by 28-year-old Gen Kitchen, was called after a parliamentary watchdog found that then-incumbent MP Peter Bone had verbally bullied, struck and exposed himself to an employee.
Bone denied the allegations, branding them false, but the House of Commons approved a recommended six-week suspension, prompting a recall petition. Bone’s partner, Helen Harrison, ran as Conservative candidate in the seat.