As a beaming Rishi Sunak appeared for a fleeting earlymorning media clip in Ruislip's Rumbling Tum cafe in west London last Friday, anyone tucking into their fry-ups who was unaware of the results of last week's three byelections could have been forgiven for thinking that the prime minister had secured a huge breakthrough.
"The Labour party has been acting like it's a done deal - the people of Uxbridge just told all of them that it's not," he told the film crew in his brief visit. "When confronted with the actual reality of the Labour party, when there's an actual choice on a matter of substance at stake, people vote Conservative."
It was a bold claim for a leader who had just seen his party suffer an average swing against it of a whopping 21.4% across the byelections, on top of seeing the majority in Boris Johnson's old Uxbridge and South Ruislip seat slashed from more than 7,000 to less than 500 by Friday morning.
Yet against the distorting prism of Westminster's expectation game, the surprise Tory defence was the chink of light that Sunak needed to obscure the bleak raw data. And within the unusually idiosyncratic Uxbridge contest, he and his advisers scoured for the secret ingredient that could be used to reverse his party's fortunes nationwide in the months ahead.
About 300km away in the Selby and Ainsty seat, Keir Starmer was experiencing an equally confounding outing. When the Labour leader turned up at the ground of Selby Town FC to celebrate the party's victory in the North Yorkshire seat, he wanted the message to be about a historic Labour breakthrough in the Tory heartlands.
This story is from the July 28, 2023 edition of The Guardian Weekly.
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This story is from the July 28, 2023 edition of The Guardian Weekly.
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