The Wakefield by-election raises vital questions about the future of the Conservative Party

At any point before one minute past 10 on 12 December 2019, the idea of describing a Tory by-election defeat in Wakefield as a disaster would have been absurd. It is still more shocking that they won it in the first place than it will be when they (almost certainly) lose it on Thursday. What will be more shocking still is that, as things stand, they are also expected to lose Tiverton and Honiton to the Liberal Democrats. That would mark the biggest ever majority lost at a by-election, in a seat that was considered to be unloseable.

Even so, losing Wakefield is likely to worry Conservatives even more than losing Tiverton. Since the 2016 referendum, and also since Donald Trump’s shock election victory, political scientists in both the UK and the US have liked to talk about the “realignment”. By this they mean that working-class people have embraced right-wing parties and right-wing politics, having been ignored or taken for granted by left and centre-left parties that have become far more interested in niche cultural issues that bear scant relation to their lives.

When Mr Johnson won in 2019, he said several times that he had been granted the power to govern through votes that had been “borrowed” from Labour, and that he would do everything he could to hold on to them. For people who believe in this idea of a realignment, the nature of the 2019 victory showed how far down that path the country had already gone.

The Tories are expecting a truly crushing defeat on Thursday, and should that come to pass, they will have to have the courage to ask themselves who they are as a party. Who are their voters? What is the coalition of people that can win them the next election? Is the so-called red wall permanently lost? Several polling companies have been warning for some time that the damage done by Partygate is permanent, and cannot be redressed until Mr Johnson is gone.

Too much is always read into by-elections. When voters vote in them, they know the outcome will have no bearing on who is in government. The same is not true at a general election.

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But even so, for believers in the realignment, to see it going backwards is a bit of an earthquake. If those borrowed votes are being returned to their lenders, while simultaneously the safe rural Conservatives in places like Tiverton are too disgusted by Mr Johnson to vote for him, then Conservatives have good reason to panic about who, exactly, is meant to be voting for them now.

It also reveals a deeper contradiction. David Cameron and George Osborne successfully rebranded the Tories by embracing liberal, metropolitan values that, since Brexit, their replacements have ostentatiously abandoned. But if they are serious about “levelling up” – about convincing the sort of person who would have left Darlington for London that actually they can stay there – then they have a serious problem. If levelling up succeeds, then it creates more of the kind of socially liberal, metropolitan voter that they are fighting culture wars against in an effort to agitate their new supporters.

They are, in short, in a mess. On Thursday, they may find the red wall looking worryingly rebuilt, and the blue one looking decidedly shaky. If they carry on like this for two more years, it will become very hard indeed for almost anyone to remember what is they’re meant to like about the Conservative Party.