Saturday 2nd March

In the end it wasn’t maybe the shock we were all expecting, but it was a shock after all.  The Lib-Dems held the seat, despite Chris Huhne’s guilty plea, and the Chris Rennard revelations, or should we say hung on to the seat.  This was one of their safest seats; they had done an incredible job building on their by-election success in 1994.  Over twenty years they had managed to hold every single council seat and seemed rock solid secure.   Labour, despite the proximity of Southampton had a very low share of the vote – just 10% which they just about managed to hang on to last night.

But this used to be a Tory seat for years and years.  And it was one of their target seats for 2015, where if they are to ever govern on their own they will need seats just like this.

The shock of the night of course was that UKIP came in second and beat the Tories into third place.  The election was called with unseemly haste, just 21 days to select and canvass and get their message across to the electorate.  Most commentators think that if the campaign had lasted a week longer then UKIP would have won the thing, and on the day they did get most votes, it was the well-oiled postal vote machine which won it for the Lib-Dems.  And good luck to them.

Both the Tories and the Lib-Dems lost over 14% of their 2010 vote.  So, it seems an anti-coalition vote, with a gathering coalescence around UKIP as the preferred alternative.  Which is a warning which Labour cannot totally ignore either.

Famously by-elections are notoriously bad bell-weathers for the ensuing general election, and the big three parties will all dismiss this as just another freak result.  But you never can tell, especially in elections.  It is just possible that we are seeing at long last a break-up of the grand coalition that the Tory party has become.  At one time they commanded over 50% of the electorate, but now opinion polls put them regularly at only 30%.  The Tory party is almost an anachronism, there is the hard core of old-fashioned right wingers who are really in the wrong party, and may well defect to UKIP if the bandwagon rolls on, there is also the soft middle who see the need to modernize the party, but cannot really find a theme that distinguishes them from either labour or Lib-Dems.

We will just have to wait, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the local elections in May produce a big surge in UKIP support.  And that could be a problem for every party.  In 2015 we may look like Italy does today.