Guess who’s back? Back again? Six months after their surprise victory in Chesham and Amersham, the Liberal Democrats have delivered another seismic byelection win, taking the deep-blue rural seat of North Shropshire on a whopping 34-point swing. This was an epic turnaround for the party, which started in third place in a seat which has returned Conservative MPs in every election but one since the repeal of the Corn Laws.
The swing against the Conservatives was the largest since Douglas Carswell’s post-defection win as a Ukip candidate in Clacton seven years ago, and the largest blue-to-yellow shift since Christchurch in 1993. The seventh largest byelection swing in history was not the Christmas present a beleaguered prime minister wanted.
The North Shropshire earthquake caps a remarkable turnaround for the Liberal Democrats after nearly a decade in electoral purgatory. Coalition from 2010 was toxic for the party, and Brexit hampered their recovery, with their enhanced appeal to remainers offset by intensified hostility from Leave voters. The massive swings in both Leave-voting North Shropshire and Remain-voting Chesham and Amersham suggest the party may at last have shrugged off the baggage of coalition and Brexit, and become once again a catch-all vehicle for voter discontent, able to ride local resentments to victory in widely varying political contexts.
The restoration of the Liberal Democrats as electoral gadflies is a major headache for the Tories. Incumbent governments build up grievances: whatever they do, it will have displeased someone. This is particularly true for the demographically diverse and ideologically incoherent current Conservative administration. Ed Davey’s party are already the main local competition for many government MPs, who until now could at least console themselves with the notion that Brexit had put sharp limits on their opponents’ support – Leave voters would not back the party of ultra-Remain. Now they face the prospect of opponents who, as in the 1990s, can successfully play whatever tune local voters want to hear. Suburban Tories in seats like Chesham and Amersham will have their opposition to planning reform and tax rises reflected back to them on the doorstep by activists in yellow rosettes, while restive rural voters will get leaflets on the Conservatives’ failure to support farmers. Tory voters looking for “levelling up” in poorer seats will hear how the government has spent too little, while small-state Conservatives in wealthy seats will hear it has spent too much.
One nightmare scenario for Tory strategists is having to fight the Liberal Democrats on two large fronts simultaneously. The third party has been moribund since its post-Coalition collapse in many traditional strongholds, places which often have Liberal roots stretching back a century or more. Though North Shropshire is not part of this lost liberal heartland, places such as Cornwall, which went from entirely gold to entirely blue between 2005 and 2015, or Somerset, where the Lib Dems are still the local opposition in all four of the seats they lost at the end of the Coalition, could be ripe for a revival.
A Liberal restoration in these far-flung, rural and often Leave-voting areas could come at the same time as a Conservative-to-Lib Dem realignment in a very different swathe of England – the wealthy, strongly Remain-leaning home counties seats where the third party surged into contention in 2019. These two battlegrounds are geographically and politically distinct, which creates major strategic problems for CCHQ in deciding how to distribute local campaigning resources and calibrate national messaging. A government already facing the difficult task of defending former Labour heartland seats north of the Watford Gap may also face a taxing game of Lib Dem whack-a-mole in a wide range of blue seats further south.
Success poses new strategic problems for the Liberal Democrats too. A smaller party with limited resources can throw everything at a byelection campaign in a single seat, but has to pick its fights carefully in a general election. The Liberal Democrats simply don’t have the money or the activists for intensive campaigns everywhere. Yet activists will now be clamouring for the opportunity to restore the party in its lost heartlands, a call which will only get louder if the party makes big gains in this terrain at next year’s local elections. Yet twice in the past decade, in both 2010 and 2019, the Lib Dems have been badly burned when an overexcited response to a polling surge led them to stretch resources too thinly. The risk of squandering a newfound electoral advantage on dozens of second place finishes is real. If local and byelection advances continue, the party will face some very tough choices in deciding which seats to target at the next general election.
While a government defeat is always a happy result for the opposition, Labour strategists will also be wondering about the broader implications of the Lib Dems’ revival. Keir Starmer’s team will be delighted if the return of vigorous competition diverts Conservative resources to seats Labour have no chance of winning, but not all seats can be so neatly divided. North Shropshire itself is an example – Labour started in second place but have now been shoved to the margins. Should Labour candidates who often start in second place in pre-coalition Lib Dem seats accept a Lib Dem restoration or contest it? Even if Labour decide to aid the Lib Dem fightback, it is not obvious how best to do this. Signals of alignment may help encourage tactical Labour-to-Lib Dem switching but may impede Lib Dem recruitment of disgruntled Conservatives. Association with Labour in a national “progressive alliance” could kill off nascent Liberal Democrat revival in deeper-blue areas. Both parties might be better served fighting the next election as frenemies, formally opposed but informally co-ordinating. This could help preserve the fragile recovery of the Liberal Democrats’ greatest electoral resource: being “none of the above”.
Robert Ford is professor of political science at the University of Manchester and co-author of The British General Election of 2019
