RIGHT until the early hours of Friday, Downing Street was bracing for a triple by-election drubbing, wondering how on earth they would spin the painful blows.
“I’m not s****ing you,” one of Rishi Sunak’s top aides said. “We’re going to lose all three. No question.”
Rishi Sunak said: ‘The Labour Party has been acting like it’s a done deal, the people of Uxbridge just told all of them that it’s not’
With his popularity ratings as low as Boris Johnson’s at the time the ex-PM was ousted, the term in Westminster was on course to end on a bleak note for the increasingly greying 43-year-old PM.
Despite some encouraging news on inflation, teachers ending their strikes and a major boost for Brexit Britain after car giant Jaguar Land Rover chose Somerset over Spain for a mega-battery factory, Tory MPs were mooching off on their hols down in the dumps.
No 10 dangled the prospect of a reshuffle all week to try to keep an increasingly strained Government on its best behaviour, but that threat faded away at 3am on Friday as an unexpected victory in Uxbridge quickly became a rallying point.
Losing two out of three was bad . . . but it could — and really should — have been worse.
“Westminster’s been acting like the next election is a done deal”, an upbeat Sunak trumpeted yesterday.
“The Labour Party has been acting like it’s a done deal, the people of Uxbridge just told all of them that it’s not.”
Turning the race into a de facto referendum on London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s hated Ulez expansion had paid off — and writes the playbook for next year’s mayoral race and even General Election.
But keeping Boris Johnson’s old seat by a slender 495 majority is not yet the makings of a political weather shift that would point to an unprecedented fifth term for the Tories.
Especially given the staggering losses to Labour in Selby and the Lib Dems in Somerset, both wiping out around 20,000 majorities.
It led elections guru Sir John Curtice last night to declare the PM was in “deep electoral trouble”, saying Labour’s commanding poll lead was being borne out at the ballot box.
Downing Street is clinging to some sources of comfort.
They say swathes of fed-up Tory voters are folding their arms and staying at home, rather than flocking en masse to Sir Keir Starmer.
Nevertheless, Sunak is still desperate to turn his fortunes around and — apart from his own brief break — No10 has drawn up a “packed grid” of announcements throughout the summer.
That will start with a major pledge on house building on Monday, although some tip Housing Secretary Michael Gove to be moved to the Department of Health in the reshuffle to finally end the NHS strikes.
Will it be enough?
Quizzed by hacks this week, the straight-A student-turned-PM refused to grade his own performance nine months into the job.
Some of his MPs are not so shy. “I’d give him 5/10,” one Red Wall MP says.
“Rishi is punchy when he wants to be but he needs to remember who his voters are. We’re going to get hammered in the Home Counties, so there’s no point trying to out-liberal the liberals.
“Let’s get stuck into gritty local issues and stop horsing around with this Net Zero garbage.”
An ex-Cabinet minister is more generous, scoring the PM 7/10.
Big-vision speech
“He’s competent, but competency will only get you halfway,” they warn.
“He now needs a proper policy and personnel reset to get up to an eight or nine. But he’s taken us from a position where we had zero chance of winning to a 30 per cent chance.”
Once again a big-vision speech is looming for September, with Tory MPs hoping it will be a bit more personal than his Five Pledges sermon at the New Year.
No 10 says the PM will set out what a full term of Sunakism would look like after the next election.
The more glum among his ranks think he will not get the chance to enact it.
For them, it is a question not of if they lose next year — but by how much.
BUT if Sir Keir Starmer was all smiles publicly as he rushed to Selby yesterday to toast his win, Labour know things are only going to get harder on their side of the aisle too.
“What keeps Keir up at night is not that he won’t be PM”, one supportive MP says, “but how he will actually govern.”
Labour needs to make an unprecedented 122 more gains to win a majority of just one seat — a huge ask.
“It’s not how big a majority that worries Keir, but who that majority is,” says the Starmerite.
If the party did manage to recreate a swing like Selby across the rest of the country, they would still only be heading to a small majority.
And that would make the small remaining hard-Left bloc of MPs such as Richard Burgon and Lloyd Russell-Moyle far more powerful than they are now.
‘Wafer-thin grip’
“We’ve made great strides wrestling control back from that lot,” says one shadow minister who fears a wafer-thin grip on the Commons will see Starmer constantly have to negotiate with the Corbynistas on the backbenchers trying to pull them to the left.
This week’s row over Starmer signing up to capping child benefit for two kids was a case in point.
Starmer refused to give in to angry Labour MPs, with activists branding him “Sir Kid Starver” as he tried to convince voters he is not a spendaholic.
He can stare down his critics in the party now.
But that will be much, much harder to do if he is left relying on every single backbench vote to get anything through the Commons.
Westminster is now on holiday for six weeks.
The PM and his would-be successor have plenty of summer agonising to do.
Labour MP Keir Mather with Sir Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner after winning the Selby and Ainsty by-election
Newly elected Liberal Democrat MP Sarah Dyke with party leader Sir Ed Davey in Frome, Somerset
