Keir Starmer should brace himself for bad news over the Batley and Spen by-election

Sir Keir Starmer must have been mightily relieved when the news broke of Matt Hancock breaking his own Covid-19 rules. The Labour leader must have felt the walls closing in as the media-political village was talking of nothing else but his stalled party and its imminent disaster in the Batley and Spen by-election next week.

The respite won’t last long, however. The by-election on Thursday is likely to be gruesome for Labour. Reports from the battlefield suggest that Kim Leadbeater, the party’s candidate, may even slip into third place behind George Galloway, running on a “Get rid of Starmer” ticket, while the Conservative government is likely to gain a second seat from the main opposition party after the Hartlepool by-election last month.

Even without the added humiliation of being beaten by Galloway, losing another northern Leave Labour heartland seat will be bad. Some exceptionally sunny “progressive alliance” types will point out that the government lost Chesham and Amersham to the Liberal Democrats last week, so a win in Batley and Spen would be two steps forward and one step back for the forces of Johnsonism.

But this is false reassurance. An analysis by Peter Kellner, the former president of YouGov, suggests that there are only 17 Tory seats that are realistically vulnerable to the Lib Dems – that is, seats that voted Remain in the EU referendum where the Lib Dems need less than a 10 per cent swing to win. “This would dent the Tories’ majority,” he comments, “but not wipe it out.”

By contrast, there are 93 seats that Labour could gain from the Tories on a similar swing, and those are the kind of seats that will make a difference at the next general election. (New boundaries will change these precise numbers – to Labour’s further disadvantage – but not the overall picture.) What’s more, Kellner points out that, of the 23 Liberal/SDP/Lib Dem by-election gains from the Tories since the war, the Tories regained 13 of them at the subsequent election, so a spectacular Lib Dem gain in a by-election is only about 50 per cent likely to translate into a lasting diminution of the Tory total.

Conservative gains as the party of government from the opposition, on the other hand, are a different matter. They are so rare that it is hard to generalise, but the Tory gain in Copeland in 2017 was held at the general election a few months later, and gains in Hartlepool and (probably) Batley and Spen would seem to be part of the same fundamental realignment of politics after Brexit.

Starmer has two options in fighting back. One is to try to go against the grain of that realignment and to win back working-class Leave voters. The other is to go with the grain, and to focus on continuing to expand Labour support among young graduate voters mostly in or around the big cities.

The trouble with the second approach is that, in many places, the Lib Dems have got there first. Labour came second in Chesham and Amersham once, in 2017, but in 2019 the Lib Dems came second, and efficient tactical voting in the by-election squeezed the Labour vote to next to nothing. All very progressive and alliancy, but Labour’s problem is that Lib Dem voters are unlikely to return the favour in significant numbers in its target seats.

Whereas Labour voters will happily turn out to vote for the candidate best-placed to beat the Tory, many Lib Dem voters would rather have a Tory MP than a Labour one, if forced to choose.

No doubt Starmer will try to pursue both approaches at the same time. That can be done to a certain extent, and of course Tony Blair did it successfully a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away from the post-Brexit universe. It was notable that Starmer got himself on page 20 of today’s Daily Mail with an attack on Boris Johnson for being “soft on crime, soft on the causes of crime”.

But it is always going to be hard to sell a Labour message simultaneously to Remainer graduates and to Leaver manual workers when the prime minister intends to fight a running post-Brexit battle with the EU for the remainder of this parliament. Just how hard will become clearer on Thursday. Next week’s by-election in Batley and Spen matters far more than last week’s in Chesham and Amersham.