David Cameron’s first big by-election test was yesterday, in leafy, suburban Bromley & Chislehurst. He flunked it.
The late, great Eric Forth’s 13,342 General Election majority over Labour was reduced to a pretty desperate 633 over Ming Campbell’s Lib-Dems. The ground opened up and swallowed Labour, meanwhile - their vote-share dropping from 22.2% at the GE to a paltry 6.6% and 4th place behind UKIP.
Overall, the number of votes cast to the four principal players fell by 40%, which one might expect at a by-election. On the right of the spectrum the combined Tory/UKIP vote fell by a little more: 44%. But it was a slightly different story on the left. Despite Labour’s meltdown the combined Labour/Lib-Dem vote fell by 34%. The Lib-Dems’ vote actually went-up by 17%.
It is reasonable to conclude that, in this constituency at least, there is widespread disdain for the government but no particular seepage from left to right, and certainly no enthusiasm for the Cameron agenda. Indeed, there appears to have been an anti-Cameron vote - a case of the centre rejecting itself perhaps! The killer for him would be if he was actually losing votes to the Lib-Dems for reasons other than the fact that the latter is always the Party of protest. This, though, is impossible to determine based on numbers alone.
Meanwhile, Cameron’s carefully cultivated line on Europe has done him no good at all. It came apart in his hands in the days before the poll, utter confusion prevailing over his wish to withdraw his Party from the federalist alliance in the European Parliament and to scrap The Human Rights Act. It is difficult to see quite where he will go from here on Europe. It is important to him, being the positive means by which he aims to bind the right of the Party to him (the negative one being that they have nowhere else to go).
They have UKIP, of course. In Bromley & Chislehurst, Cameron’s Europe debacle surely helped Nigel Farrage to stem the decline evident at May 5th’s local authority elections. He increased the vote at the last GE by more than half - though at these low numbers small swings can appear more significant than they really are. UKIP might also have benefitted from the BNP’s reluctant endorsement, though we could only be talking about a hundred or two votes.
Cameron, then, and his little band of ambition modernisers have some thinking to do. Blair might as well not bother, and chuck it in now.
