What It Will Take For PM's Party To Lose Both Seats

Boris Johnson has survived the verdict of his own MPs - for the time being at least.

- John Curtice

But today he faces the judgment of the electorate in two key parliamentary by-elections at opposite ends of England, in Wakefield and Tiverton and Honiton.

The verdict from the ballot boxes may not be so kind for the prime minister. Certainly, his party faces a severe challenge in retaining the Wakefield seat. One of the so-called red wall seats that the Conservatives gained in 2019 - after not having been victorious locally since 1931 - the party is defending a relatively small seven-and-a-half point majority. A swing of a little less than 4 per cent from Conservative to Labour would be sufficient for Sir Keir Starmer to reclaim the seat and register his party's first by-election gain under his leadership.

Labour ought to have little difficulty in surmounting this hurdle. At the moment, the national polls are registering as much as a nine-point swing since the last general election - and byelections in the middle of a parliament often record markedly bigger swings to the opposition than those in the current national polls, as some voters use the by-election to express a mid-term protest. True, the Brexit party won six per cent of the vote locally in 2019, votes that the Conservatives might now hope to pick up, but even if they do - and there are plenty of other Eurosceptic options available to voters on the Wakefield ballot paper - this is unlikely to be sufficient to stem the outgoing Tory tide.