Conservatives face prospect of a triple by-election defeat

Jul 19, 2023

Good Afternoon friends,

This week Rishi Sunak faces his biggest threat as an MP.

Selby in Yorkshire, Somerton in the South West and Uxbridge in the London suburbs: from rural to town, from north to south - the three by-elections up this Thursday will tell a bigger story of the state of our politics, with records up for grabs.

For a governing party, midterm elections are never comfortable, but this particular set could cast the die on his troubled premiership. Three by-elections in one day from a disparate set of battlegrounds and the Tories are bracing to lose all three.

Why is Rishi Sunak casting such a sombre mood? It's more ...

That would make Mr Sunak a record breaker in unwelcome ways. He'd be the first PM since Labour's Harold Wilson in 1968 to lose three by-elections in a single day, and he'd suffer the ignominy of being the PM that saw Labour overturn the biggest Tory majority in a by-election on record, should it flip a 20,137 majority to win Selby. A lot is at stake.

Selby is the Conservatives' 249th most vulnerable seat. If Labour wins that, who's to say they can't gain the 124 seats they need for a Westminster majority?

Labour sources agree that losing Selby would be "totemic", not just because Sir Keir Starmer would break a record, giving him even more momentum into a general election, but because of the psychology of what it does to Tory MPs.

We, at Common Sense will be watching this very closely.

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