What the Chester by-election result tells us about state of Labour, the Lib Dems and the Tories

Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour will need to do even more than it managed here, says Sean O’Grady

Labour’s Angela Rayner with newly elected MP Samantha Dixon have a picture taken with a party activist in Chester (PA)

Even the dullest by-elections hold some interest because they are “real votes in real ballot boxes” as politicians like to say. This certainly holds true in Chester, where Labour held the seat, entirely as expected. The news has hardly troubled the headline writers, and the entire by-election attracted little coverage at the national level. You could well be forgiven for thinking, Labour held a safe seat – so what?

Well, the first thing to say is that, in a decent turnout by the standards of a by-election, the Labour swing was pretty good and broadly consistent with current opinion polling. The swing from the Conservatives in Chester compared with the 2019 result was about 14 per cent; a little lower than the national opinion polls that suggest a swing to Labour of 16 per cent. Either way, it would be even bigger than the swing Tony Blair enjoyed in 1997 (10 per cent), itself a post-war record. However, such is Labour’s low starting point from 2019 that even a Chester-scale turnaround in the course of one parliament, unprecedented as it would be, would merely make Labour the largest party. Talk of a Labour landslide was realistic during the brief Truss administration, with Labour leads of 30 percentage points, but not so much now. And we should bear in mind that even unpopular governments usually pick up some support as they head to polling day.

The swing is also in line with or better than other recent Labour performances, such as the 12.7 per cent recorded as they took Wakefield from the Conservatives earlier this year, and the 10.2 per cent in Old Bexley and Sidcup last year (10.2 per cent in relatively unpromising territory, albeit the Tories held the seat).