The political tectonic plates are shifting a little and the Liberal Democrats are back

All politics is local, so the old saying goes, and at first sight the result of the Chesham and Amersham by-election amply demonstrates the worth of the adage. The swing was of historic proportions, yet the local factors were also exceptionally powerful, and stacked against the Conservatives.

The controversies about HS2 and the relaxation of planning rules certainly worked against the Conservatives; the voters directed their protest in an intelligent and effective way.

Sir Ed Davey’s party may not have re-established its status as a party of government (he is one of the few with government experience in the Commons), but it is clearly a party of protest, which is something. Rather than splitting the vote three ways or more between the Lib Dems, Labour, the Greens and even Reform UK (who had another bad night of it), the Lib Dems scooped the pot.

The Tories also seem to have lumbered themselves with an unusually entitled and graceless candidate who kept complaining loudly about the result – ie, the electorate – and the Stakhanovite effort the Liberal Democrats put into the constituency, as if he had nothing to do with the failure and sheer scale of his humiliation. He was not an asset.

Aside from those special factors, though, the constituency’s social and political profile also worked in the Liberal Democrats’ favour, and should also help them in similar places elsewhere in the country. The pro-European Remain constituency, like the Brexit one, “remains” strong in areas and, after all, comprises a rough half of the country.

Wealthier parliamentary seats and those with a larger proportion of professional workers with degrees, sometimes dependent for their success on that dreaded word “globalisation”, have long since fallen out of love with Boris Johnson’s Conservatives. They view the petty corruption, chumocracy and borderline racism with distaste, and have no great appetite to get stuck into culture wars about immigration, states and “taking the knee”, all of which they tend to place in a more sensible perspective. They are “nice”, decent people, neither Thatcherite nor populists, and for some time have been left homeless by the revolution in the Tory party, the post-Coalition collapse of the Liberal Democrats, and a Labour Party led by Jeremy Corbyn, a man seemingly determined to make life even worse for them.

To borrow a topical phrase, then, they are “coming home” to the Liberal Democrats. A decade after Nick Clegg made the fateful blunder of joining the Tories in a coalition government, with the gross betrayal on tuition fees, the electors are cautiously ready to listen to the Liberal Democrats again. Jo Swinson made another strategic blunder in 2019 when she granted Mr Johnson his early “get Brexit done” election, when she gambled that she could mobilise the Remain vote behind her party, and lost.

Now, though, politics seem to be coalescing in a better fashion for the opposition parties. It is at least possible that, as in the 1990s, the Liberal Democrats and Labour can campaign in such a way to deliver a pincer movement on a Tory government, with Labour mostly concentrating on the north and the Midlands, plus rebuilding in Scotland, while the Liberal Democrats focus on the southwest, home counties and the leafier suburbs of the big cities.

In time, as the baleful effects of new trade deals, such as the one with Australia, become visible to the farming community, the Liberal Democrats might also make some spectacular gains in deeply rural seats too. The Greens, as a sort of guerrilla movement, can build up support in their current pockets of impressive local strength. Some exceptional local pacts might facilitate some progress, but mostly voters cannot be treated as sheep to be ordered into the politicians’ favoured pens.

For now, though, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens are both on single figures in the polls, Labour is around 10 points behind the Conservatives, and the boundary commission has added a little to the Johnson government’s prospects of being re-elected. But the tectonic plates are shifting a little, and the Liberal Democrats are back.