Don't panic

Looking at this morning's front pages, you would not know that yesterday, or in the early hours of Friday morning, the Conservative Party siffered not one, but two histroic defeats in by elections.

With such defeats, whether there is some kind of reflection, it is what lesson does the Party take from it?

Well, either the conclusion is that the party is not right wing and nasty enough, is too far to the right and must swing to the centre to reclaim their one nation Conservative name, or that they are aright and the electorate wrong and so must plough on regardless.

By-elections are odd things, stand alone polls on the current party leaderships nationwide, but does indicate where the nation is going. Doubly so in that South Bedofrdshire swng heavily towards Labour in 1996, a year before Blair's landslide win. So, yesterday the same seat voted heavily for Labour, indicating that the party is in a good place for the election at the end of next year, or maybe sooner.

If only things were that simple.

The Reclaim Party, the new harder, nastier UKIP recovered their deposit, and their votes more than exceeded the majority that Labout won by. So, by "appealing" to those voters, they might have won anyway.

Bearing in mind the Conservatives and Labour are pretty much to the right of the 2015 Conservative Manifesto on a number of policy areas, one would hope that at some point, normaility would return to UK politics.

Starmer isn't exciting. He's dull and knows what he is doing, and I think would be good if in power. But, he is so cautious not to say anything too radical, he sometimes ties himself in logial knots, like in his support for Israel this week. And there is the spectre of the left, that likes nothing more than fighting its hostorial enemy: not the Tories but Labour's centre and moderates.

Don't read too much into by-election results said the Government who abandoned net zero, HS2 and nother environmental policies because a few hundred people deomonstrated against ULEZ in Uxbridge.