Four swings above 20 points is the same sort of performance Blair saw before his 1997 triumph 'So we’re getting the spread across the country we need.'Īnd when it comes to the patterns, the by-election wins are building up a picture that points to a Labour majority. 'We’re winning in Scotland, the red wall, Conservative shires and the East Mids ,' said one senior Labour figure on Friday. It is not just the places that Labour are winning, but the patterns in voter trends. This is because the Mid Bedfordshire and Tamworth wins point to a pattern over recent by-elections that led up to the Labour landslide of 1997. Then came the pandemic, Partygate, Liz Truss’s disastrous 45 days - and now the man who was meant to be Labour’s Kinnock has morphed into its next Blair.
He was there to do the hard yards, likely lose an election, and hand over to a successor to enjoy the spoils of his toil. Like Neil Kinnock back in the 1980s, Sir Keir’s task was to knock the party back into shape and detoxify a badly damaged Labour brand. When he took over as Labour leader in 2020, Keir Starmer was sitting on the worst election defeat for the party since 1945.
