Boris Johnson says he will ‘keep going’ after double byelection loss and Oliver Dowden resignation – UK politics live | Politics

Keir Starmer was in Wakefield this morning to celebrate Labour’s byelection victory. He claimed it was a historic result that put his party on course to win the next general election. He said:

This swing is significant, 12.7% swing to Labour. That is huge. That tells you that the next government is going to be a Labour government, and the sooner the better because the country voted yesterday, in both byelections, no confidence in this out-of-touch, out-of-ideas government. So this is a historic byelection as far as we’re concerned.

For two years we have been changing the Labour party to make it into that confident party, that party that is facing the voters, that is laser-like focused on the issues that affect them. And that’s why people have put their faith in Simon [Lightwood, the candidate], put their faith in our Labour party. I couldn’t be prouder of this historic moment on the step towards the next Labour government.

Prof Sir John Curtice’s assessment of what the result means for Labour is not quite that positive. (See 9.11am.)

Steven Morris

Neil Parish, whose resignation as a Conservative MP over watching porn in the Commons triggered the Tiverton and Honiton byelection, said the Tories should “face reality” and accept Boris Johnson’s unpopularity. Parish told Radio Devon:

What is becoming increasingly necessary for the party and the MPs to discuss what is the long term position of the prime minister. The public are concerned.

You cannot ignore people. It was a very safe seat. I’m afraid at the moment there is too much distraction and we are not getting on with the job.

We are all expendable. That is the issue, is Boris a winner or isn’t he? That will be the issue for MPs going forward.

He can make that decision and he alone will make that decision. You cannot ignore people and you ask them their verdict – and it’s clear their verdict this morning and it is for the PM to look at it very seriously.

Parish said he was “very fond” of Boris Johnson but added: “The trouble is he does bluster and the time for blustering is over and we must really face reality now.”

He said the massive swing against the Tories was a “shock” but he claimed it was “very much a national vote” and added: “I’m afraid the party paid the price for it.”

Parish said of his own downfall: “It’s a shame I made such a terrible mistake.” But he said the presidential style of politics meant the PM was the main focus in the byelection. He said:

It is the leader of your party and their reputation that is up for trial, especially in a byelection.

Prof Sir John Curtice, the leading psephologist, gave his assessement of the significance of the byelection results to the Today programme earlier. He had bad news for both main parties.

• Curtice said the Tories were doing as badly in byelections now as John Major’s government was doing in byelections in the 1992-1997 parliament. Over the last year the Conservative vote had fallen by 20 points on average in the byelections where they were defending seats, he said. The Tories won Old Bexley and Sidcup, but lost the other four (Chesham and Amersham, North Shropshire, Wakefield, and Tiverton and Honiton). He said this had not happened since the Major era.

• Curtice said the Tories should also be worried by the extent of tactical voting against the Conservatives. This was crucial in Tiverton and Honiton, he said. The Labour vote there was down 16 points, he said, and the Lib Dems won by 14 percentage points. (See 6.52am.)

• But he also said the Wakefield result did not suggest “any great enthusiasm for the Labour party”. The decline in the Conservative vote was more than twice as big as the rise in the Labour vote, he said. (See 6.55am.) He went on:

It looks as though quite a lot of voters in Wakefield who were unhappy with the Conservatives took the opportunity to vote for an independent candidate who was a Tory councillor who resigned in March in part over Partygate. He got 7% of the vote and a lot of that probably came from the Conservatives.

• Curtice said there were 10 byelections in the 2010-15 parliament where Labour’s share of the vote went up by more than the eight percent points it did in Wakefield. (They were: Oldham East and Saddleworth, Barnsely Central, Leicester South, Feltham and Heston, Corby, Manchester Central, Middlesbrough and Wythenshawe and Sale East.) But Ed Miliband still lost the 2015 general election, he said. Curtice went on:

There still seems to be a question about the extent to which voters, many of whom clearly aren’t happy with the Conservatives, are necessarily as yet bought into Labour as an alternative.

• He said, on the basis of the swing in Tiverton and Hontiton, there were 333 Conservative MPs who would lose their seats to the Liberal Democrats. Acknowledging that life does not work like this, Curtice said “slightly less nonsensely” the swing to Labour in Wakefield was “probably just enough to generate a Labour overall majority [at a general election]”.

Boris Johnson has not accepted any personal responsibility for the Tory byelection defeats in the open letter he has written responding to Oliver Dowden’s resignation. (See 6.44am.) Johnson told Dowden:

Thank you for your letter and I am sad to see you leave government.

As minister for the Cabinet Office, secretary of state for digital, culture, media and sport and co-chairman of the Conservative party, it has been a pleasure to work alongside you for the last three years.

In each of those roles you have given your best and focused on delivering for the British people.

Whilst I completely understand your disappointment with the by-election results, this government was elected with a historic mandate just over two years ago to unite and level up. I look forward to continuing to work together on that.

In his letter Johnson seems to be wilfully misinterpreting the message in Dowden’s letter. When Dowden said that supporters were “distressed and disappointed by recent events”, he was not referring only to election defeats. He also seemed to be referring to Partygate, and to Johnson’s own conduct. (Dowden’s language is very similar to the language used by many other Tory MPs when they sent emails to constituents who asked for their response to the Sue Gray report revelations.)

Johnson does not acknowledge this. Instead it sounds more as if he is saying that the person Dowden should be disappointed in is Dowden himself.

My colleague Heather Stewart has the full text of the letter.

Dominic Raab, the justice secretary and deputy prime minister, is on the Today programme. He is standing in for Oliver Dowden, who had been scheduled to speak for the government, but who resign instead.

Asked what would change as a result of the byelection defeats, Raab sidestepped the question and instead insisted the government had a “positive agenda”.

The opposition parties did not have an agenda, he claimed. He said their only strategy was to run an electoral pact.

At the general election the choice facing voters would be different, he said.

Nick Robinson, the presenter, said that in Dowden’s resignation letter he said the party could not carry on “with business as usual”. He asked Raab again what was going to change. In response, Raab stressed the government’s determination to tackle the problems facing the country. He went on:

We will be relentlessly focused on deliver … The change is not allowing anything to get in the way of that.

BBC News has now broadcast a fuller clip from Boris Johnson responding to the byelection defeats from Rwanda this morning. He said that he did not want to minimise the importance of what happened – but then went on to it was normal for governments to lose byelections in mid term. He said:

I think that what governments also have to recognise is that I don’t want to minimise the importance of what voters are saying, but it is also true that in mid-term, government, post-war, lose by-elections.

I think if you look back to last May the truly astonishing thing was we managed to win Hartlepool in very different circumstances.

What we need to do now is reflect on where voters are, and what they are basically feeling is that we came through Covid well and we took a lot of the right decisions there. But we are facing pressures on the costs of living.

We are seeing spikes in fuel prices, energy costs, food costs, that is hitting people. We have to recognise that there is more that we have got to do and we certainly will, we will keep going addressing the concerns of people until we get through this patch.

This is what Boris Johnson told broadcasters in Kigali this morning about the byelection defeats. He is in Rwanda for the Commonwealth summit.

Johnson implied that the cost of living crisis was to blame for what happened, not his own conduct or leadership. He said:

It’s absolutely true we’ve had some tough by-election results. They’ve been, I think, a reflection of a lot of things, but we’ve got to recognise voters are going through a tough time at the moment.

I think, as a government, I’ve got to listen to what people are saying, in particular to the difficulties people are facing over the cost of living, which, I think, for most people is the number one issue.

We’re now facing pressures on the cost of living, we’re seeing spikes in fuel prices, energy costs, food costs – that’s hitting people.

We’ve got to recognise there is more we’ve got to do and we certainly will, we will keep going, addressing the concerns of people until we get through this patch.

Johnson also thanked Oliver Dowden for his work as Conservative co-chair.