Shortly after Owen Paterson resigned as the Tory MP for North Shropshire in early November, Helen Morgan, who had been trounced when she stood as Liberal Democrat candidate at the last general election, rang her party’s HQ in London with a message that took senior officials by surprise.
“She told us that we really had a chance in the byelection, that we had to throw everything at it. Initially there was a lot of scepticism,” said a party official. “Nobody really believed it.”
They had good reason to doubt her. In 2019, Morgan, a local accountant, had come a poor third behind the Tories and Labour in this rural seat that had been held by the Conservatives in all but two of the past 189 years. Paterson had mopped up 35,444 votes (62.7%), Labour 12,495 (22.1%) and the Lib Dems just 5,643 (10%). It was top of the safe Tory list, strongly pro-Brexit, and nowhere near being a Lib Dem target.
But such was Morgan’s insistence that within days Dave McCobb, the party’s head of campaigns, headed north with a small team to take a look for himself.
“We discovered that the Tory vote was even softer than it had been in Chesham and Amersham [where the Lib Dems had pulled off a stunning byelection win over the Conservatives in June in a seat that was overwhelmingly pro-Remain].
“We found a lot of disillusion and anger with Boris Johnson and the government. They were the kind of voters who we knew would never vote Labour but could come over to us. And this was before Peppa Pig and before ‘partygate’,” said the official.
The rest is history. Morgan was chosen as the candidate, and Lib Dem activists poured in from all corners of the UK in a way that only Lib Dems can do. Soon the campaign was taking off, and the Lib Dems knew they had a chance. “Farmers who had always put up blue signs in their fields were putting up gold Lib Dem ones instead,” said a party aide. “It was happening.”
By last Thursday, polling day, the Lib Dems were confident of at least running the Tories very close. “The expected range was from close defeat to close victory,” said an adviser.
In the event of it being the latter, Morgan’s team had racked their brains, thinking how they could get mass coverage on the scale they received after Chesham and Amersham, when party leader Ed Davey celebrated by smashing plastic blue bricks out of a wall with a mallet, a stunt which put him on every major TV news bulletin. “One idea was that Ed would get on a tractor and drive it through it a field, mowing down blue bails as he went,” said a member of his team. “But in the end we didn’t think that was practical.” (Not least because Davey had contracted Covid so could not be there.) Eventually, they plumbed for a big blue balloon, daubed with the phrase “Boris’ bubble”, which Morgan popped on camera.
Three days on, MPs of all parties are still trying to come to terms with the Lib Dems’ stunning victory, the scale of which shocked even them. Morgan stormed home by almost 6,000 votes in the early hours of Friday morning before declaring that the “party is over” for Boris Johnson. The 34% swing was the third biggest they or their predecessor party, the Liberals, had ever achieved, and the largest this century.
Byelection defeats for governing parties are often dismissed as short-term protests that will be reversed at general elections. But this was on a massive scale, in very unlikely territory for a Lib Dem success, and its potential, wider significance escaped few at Westminster. MPs began to think that if the Tories could lose in places like North Shropshire, they could lose anywhere. All bets were off.
In an interview with the Observer, Davey, ebullient but still recovering from Covid, drew immediate comparisons with the early 1990s. “I joined the party in 1989. Initially, it was a really bad period for us and then we have a series of byelections. We had Eastbourne, then in 1993 we had Newbury and Christchurch – that was the last year that we won two byelections off the Tories. Last night was the seventh largest swing in any byelection since 1945. There is something serious going on. I think the Tories are on the slide.”
Former supporters of the Conservatives had cast aside tribal loyalties in huge numbers for the first time in their lives, while some Labour voters had done the same and backed Morgan. In a seat that had voted heavily to leave the EU, Johnson had not been able to use Brexit as his protective shield any more. The Lib Dems, so closely associated with being pro-EU in the eyes of hitherto Tory-supporting Brexit supporters, and previously so disliked by many Labour voters because of their time in David Cameron’s coalition, were no longer off limits to either.
“We’re grateful for Labour supporters who decided to vote tactically to help us defeat the Conservatives. But it wasn’t through some sort of agreement or some sort of formal or informal pact,” said the Lib Dem leader. “Voters are pretty savvy and they work it out. The Labour vote got really, really squeezed.”
It is not only Lib Dems who feel that North Shropshire could be part of something much bigger. This weekend, such is the sudden slump in the credibility of the prime minister that many Tory MPs, including some with large majorities, are beginning to fear for their own seats, unless there is change at the top.
After weeks of allegations of Tory sleaze, triggered by Johnson’s disastrous effort to save Paterson, have come revelations of lockdown rule-busting parties at Downing Street, at first denied and then revealed to be true on leaked film footage.
On top of all this have been heaped revelations about Johnson asking a party donor to pay for refurbishment of his flat but failing to tell his own standards adviser the full truth in an inquiry into the affair. Then there were the endless promises to his MPs made privately and publicly that we were on an “irreversible road to freedom” from Covid, and that the pandemic was all but done.
On Tuesday – two days before the byelection humiliation for Johnson – he suffered a huge rebellion in parliament.
Ahead of the vote, the mood was little short of anarchic among Tory MPs. During it, Tory after Tory denounced the way they and the country had been misled over Covid. A senior Conservative source summed up the anti-Johnson feeling this way: “It is the lies and being misled that they don’t like. They can put up with things going badly because they do in government, but not being lied to.”
Well over 100 Tory MPs either voted against or abstained in a Commons vote on the introduction of vaccine passes – by far the biggest revolt of Johnson’s premiership. Red wallers and southern Tories, Leavers and Remainers, libertarians, old hands and those recently arrived ignored a three-line whip.
Johnson was left relying on the votes of Labour, which backed the plans, to get them through. One former Tory minister, who supported the proposals but describes Johnson’s leadership of late as “embarrassing and shaming”, said: “You could feel the moral authority draining from our side to Labour. The real leadership in recent times has been shown by Labour.” The same MP added that had it not been for the pandemic he would now be writing to the chair of the 1922 committee Sir Graham Brady calling for a vote of no confidence in the prime minister.
Many Conservative MPs believe Johnson has until the May local elections to rescue his leadership or he will be out by next autumn. Even loyalists like Martin Vickers, a member of the executive of the 1922 committee, are prepared to say publicly that something must change. Vickers wants Johnson to show leadership like he did before the Brexit referendum and the 2019 election. “I am confident he can do so,” he told the Observer. “But he has got to do so straight away.”
Almost every backbencher insists he must sort out his Downing Street operation, be more respectful of parliament, and listen more to his MPs. But few are confident he will. And as they look ahead, they see even more testing times for the PM. In the spring, council-tax bills will shoot up and National Insurance will rise just as higher energy bills hit householders, compounding a cost-of-living crisis.
Closer to home and the affairs of Downing Street, Johnson awaits the result of inquiries into all the alleged parties at No 10, a probe now being conducted by the senior civil servant Sue Gray (after the cabinet secretary Simon Case, who had been in charge but was revealed to have held a bash in his own office, requiring him to step aside). Other official investigations into the way the PM handled his Downing Street flat redecoration may be launched.
The general view among Johnson’s MPs is that now – with Omicron raging – is not the time to get rid of him. But most think that soon it may well be. “I think his flight path is set,” said a former Tory minister in a senior position in parliament. “The course is pretty clear unless he changes. We will arrive at a leadership contest in the second half of next year.”
