A Heartland Gone, Just Like That
Tommy Cooper is Caerphilly’s most famous son. Before his aunt bought him a magic set, before the fez and the act and the laughter, there was Caerphilly. And now Labour follows Cooper in a very public demise. Is it a blip? Or is it really proof that our two party system has now, truly, been administered the last rites?
Plaid Cymru, Wales’ left-wing nationalist party, won the Caerphilly by-election for a newly vacant Senedd seat. But they aren’t the only winners from last night. The race ended up being an existential - and vicious - battle between Plaid and Reform. Two outsider parties, neither of whom has a long track-record in government, fighting to represent a town that has always, always, voted Labour. Plaid came through, securing 47% of the vote versus Reform’s 36% - leaving Labour on just 11%.
What does this mean? Of course there are the local factors; Plaid ran a candidate who had stood, in the seat, in every available election since the eighties. He’s a popular and well known figure. And Plaid successfully convinced Caerphilly’s electorate that this was a two-horse race between The Party of Wales and The Party of Nigel. In the General Election, just over a year ago, tactical voting delivered part of Labour’s historic majority. In this election, it proved to be Labour’s undoing. A lot of voters will put their cross in any box, so long as it stops Farage. The significant eventual lead over Reform signals that while there is a very significant constituency for the emergent new-Right, there is (in many places) an even more compelling bloc of opposition. Caerphilly represents the latest sharpening of one of the most important emerging trends in British politics; the propensity of voters to switch their choice on the basis of who they do not want to represent them, rather than on who they might ideally wish to form a government.
Winning in a tactical voting election is much like performing a magic trick. It’s a confidence game. Meet the audience’s eye, talk them through the illusion, make sure they’re not watching your hands. It is to Plaid’s credit that they pulled it off - convincing Caerphilly that this was a straightforward choice between them, and Reform. And it renders visceral the central political argument at the heart of this struggling government.
Is the Labour Party’s path to electoral success winning back the voters and the seats that it feels it has ‘lost’ to Reform? Or is it about uniting the anti-Farage coalition that is emerging in the Country to block the threat of a Reform government?
It is that question that is the real issue on the ballot of this week’s other big democratic process - the Labour Deputy Leadership. Bridget Phillipson is running for steady-as-she-goes - Morgan McSweeney’s strategy is (broadly speaking) to fight Reform on their own terms and (somehow) to win. Phillipson is McSweeney’s candidate. Lucy Powell, on the other hand, urges a ‘course correction’. Her argument is that Labour can’t possibly hope to ‘out Reform Reform’ and that seeking to ape Farage simply confuses and turns-off voters who might otherwise be persuaded to back Labour in order to head-off the Teal Wave. The result of that contest will be announced at lunchtime on Saturday - and will tell us a great deal about whether the Labour Party agrees with its present leadership about the best way of fighting Farage. All the polling - including the final, landmark poll from Lodestone’s polling partners at Survation - suggest that it does not.
“I used to be indecisive, but now I’m not so sure” - Tommy Cooper knew how to construct a gag, and this famous catchphrase feels uncomfortably apt today. Labour needs to decide on a strategy. The problem is that they are led by a man whose instincts conflict with the advice he receives and whose convictions are hard to discern or to trust. His party looks to Caerphilly and sees others reaping the rewards of clear, full-throated opposition to Reform. It sees a future death by a thousand cuts as Labour’s vote is squeezed to its Left - by Plaid, by the SNP, by the Greens and by the nascent comedy double act that calls itself ‘Your Party’. But Keir still looks to McSweeney - mastermind of his own leadership election and of the thumping triumph at the ballot box just over a year ago - and to a different future, where Reform collapses because he has tackled the very issues that breathed life into their support in the first place.
Politics is a living, breathing thing. You don’t often get the space or the time to really test a theory to death because your members, your activists, your MPs and councillors have the misfortune to end up collating feedback in real time. Keir Starmer may well believe that, in the end, his and his Chief of Staff’s analysis is correct. Maybe it’s right that Labour’s long-term interests lie in standing on stage, reading out Farage-adjacent lines and hoping that the audience likes the material enough to forget about the delivery. But Caerphilly shows the dangers of that approach, as will local elections in May.
We end this note with a final quote from Tommy Cooper, Caerphilly’s greatest export. Because it sums up how many Labour members feel this morning and because it nails the pathos of this historic defeat. “There have been times that I have known disappointment, even despair. The public never realised because I was laughing on the outside while I was crying on the inside. Very dangerous that - you could easily drown”.