After another by-election disaster, the Tories must face facts – the British public is done with them

Editorial: The Conservatives have grown too distant from the mood of the nation they presume to serve. It is a collective failure of a party that’s been in government for too long

Rishi Sunak must take responsibility for what has befallen his party – though much was the fault of his predecessors (PA)

A national mood is an amorphous, elusive thing, but you can recognise it when you collide with it. For Britain, this is one such time, and it is something that is making its political presence felt to the governing party. The mood is summed up in the social media sphere as #GTTO – get the Tories out. It is quite tangible, even in Middle England.

Despite valiant attempts by Conservatives to blame the electorate for their own failures, the dismal showing by the party in a run of parliamentary by-elections cannot be put down to bad weather, local factors, and an ephemeral protest vote. All those things did no doubt have their psephological effect in Tamworth and Mid Bedfordshire; but the sheer scale and the nature of the Conservative collapse cannot be so easily explained away. The way figures such as Greg Hands and Gillian Keegan talk about the routs in Staffordshire and Bedfordshire, it is as if it’s the voters who’ve let them down by not turning out to save them from humiliation. That is, of course, precisely the wrong way around.

The Tory party has to take responsibility for what has befallen it, and needs to make a much more serious effort to understand why people dislike the government so very, very much. Some hate the Tories, some view them with contempt, others have given up. As ever in a democracy, the fault lies with the elected and not the electors. When a governing party starts to get mixed up about such basics, a rude awakening is inevitable. That happened, again, in the early hours of Friday morning.