It is a mark of the recent reversals of expectation among Britain’s political parties that anything other than a Liberal Democrat victory in the Brecon and Radnorshire byelection would have been a major surprise. It would also have been a devastating blow to the new Liberal Democrat leader, Jo Swinson, who took over less than three weeks ago and promptly announced that she was not merely now the party leader but “a candidate to be prime minister”. That ambitious claim would have been dead in the water without Jane Dodds’ win on Thursday.
This widely anticipated result should do nothing to lessen the Lib Dems’ achievement. Brecon and Radnorshire was a target seat; the Lib Dems have now won seven of the last 10 parliamentary contests there, as well as holding the Welsh assembly seat with the same boundaries. But Chris Davies had won the seat by a thumping 8,000 majority for the Conservatives as recently as 2017, which was otherwise generally a bad election for the Tories in Wales. Moreover, the area voted to leave the EU and the Lib Dems are an explicitly remain party. The Tories had also just chosen a new and stridently pro-leave leader who was enjoying a modest boost in the polls. So it was no pushover for Ms Dodds to take the seat with a 1,425 majority over Mr Davies.
However, the Lib Dems enjoyed two unusual advantages in this contest. The first was the candidacy of Mr Davies. In March the now former MP pleaded guilty to two counts of forging his parliamentary expenses. In June, he was recalled as an MP by a petition. His local party nevertheless reselected him for this contest. Though he was well known, he was clearly also damaged goods. It will therefore be easy for the Conservatives to blame him for their defeat rather than looking more widely, including at Boris Johnson, for the explanation.
The second advantage was the electoral pact with Plaid Cymru and the Greens, giving the Lib Dems a clear run at the seat as the explicitly anti-Brexit, pro-remain party. Both the Lib Dem victory and its relative narrowness seem to vindicate that approach, and there will sensibly be similar pressures now in other elections. However, the success of the pact should not be overstated. The Greens did not stand in Brecon and Radnorshire in 2017, and Plaid Cymru took only just over a thousand votes. In addition, the Lib Dems did not highlight Brexit in the campaign, preferring to run on local issues. Some caution is thus needed before claiming the result as a full-throated remain triumph. But the Lib Dem recovery continues and a prospective byelection in Nick Clegg’s old seat of Sheffield Hallam may give it further momentum.
It is clear, however, that many Labour voters also helped to send Ms Dodds to Westminster. It bears repeating that until 1979 this was a Labour seat. In the 1985 byelection, Labour finished a very close second. Even in 2015 and 2017, Labour’s vote share was still in the mid-teens. But on Thursday, Labour was down 12 points to 5.3%. The Lib Dem vote, by contrast, rose by 14. Tactical voting by Labour supporters in Tory-Lib Dem seats is always a factor, but this was tactical voting by core Labour voters. The message for both the leave-supporting Jeremy Corbyn and for remain-supporting Welsh Labour is very stark.
Perversely, the Conservatives are likely to take some comfort from this byelection. Mr Davies was not blown away. Their vote, though down by nine points, held up far better than when the Liberals won the 1985 byelection. Most Tory defectors this time seem to have gone to the Brexit party, but with only 11% support, this byelection was no triumph for the Faragistes and, in contrast to the European elections, the bulk of the leave vote stayed with the Tories.
At the end of the day, though, the Tories have lost votes, lost another seat, their Commons majority is even more razor-thin, and any Johnson bounce – which is unlikely to get bigger – has been modest. The fanciful idea that the new prime minister is an election winner remains dubious and unproved. Above all, there is now one more vote at Westminster against no-deal. If there is a big message from Brecon and Radnorshire, it is not that the country embraces his no-deal lunacy – which it does not – but that Brexit can still be softened, and perhaps even stopped.
