Analysis: Sleepless nights at No10 as North Shropshire by-election approaches
15 December 2021, 12:43
Boris Johnson has long been viewed as the Conservative Party’s greatest asset at the ballot box.
In 2008, he won the London mayoralty in what has always been viewed as a Labour city. Then in 2012, against the backdrop of austerity and an unpopular coalition government, he repeated the same trick.
As Chancellor George Osborne was booed at the Paralympics, Mr Johnson was heralded outside Buckingham Palace as our athletes triumphed with a record haul of medals.
Vote Leave, led by Mr Johnson, then won the Brexit referendum in 2016, and although initially denied by Theresa May the chance to lead the Conservative Party immediately afterwards, he got his chance in 2019, and secured an 80-seat Commons majority, winning over traditional Labour voters Mrs May could not.
In Government, it had been a similar story. In the Spring, the Tories won Hartlepool, holding the seat for the first time since it was formed in 1974. This, despite the fact there had been a flurry of stories about a £200,000 renovation of his Downing Street flat with lavish wall-paper. But the good folk of Hartlepool didn’t seem to care.
Now, however, it seems to be a different story.
Firstly, the PM tried to save the skin of his own MP, Owen Paterson, who had broken lobbying rules.
When that didn’t work, he backtracked. Then a significant part of HS2 - seen as the cornerstone of the levelling-up agenda to bring investment to the North of England – got biffed, not before changes to the reform of the social care system meant many people who aren’t rich will now have to sell their homes to pay for their care in old age.
But from speaking to voters in North Shropshire, what seems to have been a real game-changer in the last couple of weeks is the row over parties in Number 10 when tight restrictions were in place banning households from mixing.
Rather than try and tackle the accusations head-on, Number 10 has obfuscated and deflected.
And so rather than dealing with the story in one fell swoop, we have had a drip, drip of continuous revelations that has dominated the public discourse for the last couple of weeks, even raising the attention of Ant and Dec.
This has had a knock-on effect in the polls, with Labour taking a nine-point lead in one piece of research at the weekend.
But now we have an actual vote, not just a survey of public opinion.
The big threat to the Conservative’s dominance in the seat comes from the Lib Dems, and the fear is that they could repeat their achievement from earlier in the year when they won the Home Counties seat of Chesham and Amersham, overturning a Tory majority of 16,000 in the process.
The reason this by-election is particularly important is because of the impact it will have on the dynamics between backbench Tory MPs and Number 10.
If the Conservatives lose, or see their current majority in North Shropshire of 23,000 severely dented, then there will be many MPs in far more marginal constituencies, particularly in Red Wall seats won back in 2019, who will know they are out of a job at the next election unless something drastically changes.
It’s what those drastic changes look like that will be giving those in Number 10 sleepless nights between now and the early hours of Friday when the result comes in.
