From Liberator: Such people write about Lincolnshire as though they were Victorian explorers or missionaries

The new Liberator - issue 429 - is out and can be downloaded free of charge from the magazine's website.

As well as Lord Bonkers' Diary and a book review of mine, it includes this article. I wrote it in response to the local election results of 1 May.

In Search of Their Motives

Why did Reform UK do so well in the local elections? How should parties respond to their rise? Who exactly is voting for them?

Some would tell you to wait for the academics to crunch the numbers, but if you go to the research on how and why Leave won the 2016 European Union referendum then you find, as so often the case in academia, not a body of agreed conclusions but a loose bundle of continuing debates. So rather than wait for a consensus that may never emerge, I’m going to do what I can here to clear what seem to me widespread misconceptions about Reform and their voters.

To begin with, the success of Reform should not shock or even surprise us. Ukip polled more than any other party in the 2014 elections to the European parliament, receiving 26.6 per cent of the vote and electing 24 of the UK’s 73 MEPs. Five years later, the Brexit Party did even better, electing 29 MEPs and receiving 30.5 per cent of the vote, slightly more than Reform UK won in this year’s local elections.

These three successes were achieved by Nigel Farage under three different party names, which reminds us that the far right has always been prepared to form parties, break them up and form new ones until they hit upon an arrangement that attracts voters. It also reminds us that Farage has been key to their successes, but we should have grasped years ago that there is no reason to expect us to be immune to the rise of the far right that has taken place across Western Europe in recent years. Despite leaving the EU, Britain now finds itself with a thoroughly European party system that includes a substantial party that stands to the right of the Conservative Party. This may well be the new normal.

After the EU referendum, Leave’s victory was widely attributed to a desire for revenge by left-behind areas. This narrative had its appeal to some on the left, because you could argue that it made the disastrous outcome of that vote all George Osborne’s fault, but I was never convinced. It seemed rooted in a dated, even nostalgic, view of the working class as white, male and engaged until recently in heavy industry. Yes, big changes have taken place in working class employment, but they took place some decades ago. The Full Monty and Brassed Off came out in the mid-1990s, and both were looking back on a transformation that had already taken place.

Yet a disaffected working-class was the first explanation many reached for to account for Reform’s successes on 1 May. Liberal Democrat Voice, for instance, immediately ran an article that argued Reform is “hoovering up votes across the country by doing one simple thing: articulating the grievances of the working classes”. It was good to see an article on that blog which talked about inequality and social class, but I don’t buy its thesis that Reform’s vote came solely from an aggrieved working class. Even in Durham, where Reform swept away a previously solid Labour majority, the figures show that it won a large slice of the votes that previously went to Conservatives and Independents as well as taking votes from Labour.

What I found most striking about the local elections was the collapse of Tory Midland England. Staffordshire, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and Lincolnshire all fell to Reform, while Leicestershire now has a minority Reform administration. Even amid the Liberal Democrat triumph in Shropshire, Reform won enough seats to become the largest opposition group on the new council. While all these shires contain areas of widespread poverty and areas of Labour strength, it was the Conservative Party that took a hammering.

It seems to me that the Reform vote is best regarded as a protest vote – a concept we Liberals should be very much at home with, because we depended upon such a vote for survival and occasional upturns for decades. The late, great David Penhaligon was given to suggesting that a “Stuff Em All Party” would do well at the polls, and that is how Reform is seen by many voters, which is perhaps something we miss in our anxiety to condemn Nigel Farage’s views on race or the latest member found to have once espoused Fascist views on social media.

Whether you blame the economic situation it inherited or its lack of ambition, this Labour government is proving a sore disappointment to many who voted for it, while the thoughts of habitual Conservative voters can only be imagined. They now find themselves faced with a leader who is older than Tony Blair or David Cameron was when they came to power, yet comes over as a spiteful child. The majority of her MPs, meanwhile, hesitate to remove her for fear of who the party’s membership might land them with next. 

So you can see why there’s now a ready market for the Stuff Em All Party. Meanwhile, we Lib Dems can choose between being disappointed that our concentration in the affluent South means we are no longer viewed in that light, and taking this as a sign we are beginning to have a more coherent policy profile with voters.

Having managed to fake authenticity, Nigel Farage has made himself a better media performer than either Keir Starmer or Kemi Badenoch. It’s not so much that he comes over as being more fun to go for a drink with: it’s more that you can’t imagine the other two going for a drink at all. Added to that, now and then Farage does show political nous – he resisted the temptation to court Elon Musk and his money by embracing Tommy Robinson, sensing that one of his weaknesses is that he is already seen as too close to Trump and Putin.

In a thoughtful piece for Compass, Olly Glover, the Lib Dem MP for Didcot & Wantage, wrote of it becoming “increasingly common to encounter voters who are open about their intention to vote Reform. A surprising number of these were choosing between Reform and Lib Dem.”

He continued:

Voters’ reasons for considering Reform are more varied than might be assumed, with scepticism about net zero and climate change commitments now as common as concerns about immigration. 

Uniting them all is widespread cynicism and loss of confidence in the entire political system and the British state. This aspect is shared with many non-Reform voters too, but Reform have captured the bulk of the ‘anti-establishment’ sentiment.

And Dr Nathan Ley, a Lib Dem councillor from Abingdon, has written on his [now vanished] Substack that Reform is now:

The repository for some voters who are angry, dispossessed, downtrodden, as well as lots of people who are actually quite comfortable with their life, but feeling just a bit bored.

Labour is pinning its hopes on recovering these disaffected votes simply by governing better and producing visible improvements by the next election. This ambition does not seem to extend much beyond the NHS: elsewhere the government is continuing the austerity its members devoted fourteen years of their lives to condemning.

I wish Labour well in this endeavour, but they are going to have to find better communicators to put their case across. If Keir Starmer or Rachel Reeves gave a fireside chat, you fear the fire would go out.

It’s hard to know what to advise the Conservatives to do. The most significant voting pattern of the 2016 referendum has always seemed to me the way that great swathes of prosperous Southern England voted Leave. You can blame David Cameron – if a prime minister puts a choice to voters in a referendum, they are entitled to assume that both paths are reasonable ones for the country to take – and I wouldn’t discount Dr Ley’s observation that voters were a bit bored. But what happened to all those Southern Tories with a fat stake in the status quo and a determination to keep things pretty much as they are?

I would look to the disappearance of responsible clerical and middle-management positions to technology and cost-cutting, and to the difficulty most people now experience in getting on the property ladder. David Boyle wrote a book about these trends, Broke: Who Killed the Middle Classes?, back in 2014. [The link is to a radio programme based on the book.]

Beyond this, there has been a collapse in Conservative values to such an extent that it’s possible to argue that the Conservative Party’s fundamental problem is that it’s no longer Conservative. It was said of Margaret Thatcher that she hoped her policies would produce more men like her father, but she ended up producing more men like her son.

And for Liberal Democrats? We should be wary of habits that it is too easy to learn online. One reason I distrust the argument that Reform is winning on working-class votes alone is that it plays into a snobbish view of the working class held by some people who imagine themselves to be left wing. The working class, they believe, is, like anyone who disagrees with them, stupid.

Such people write about, say, Lincolnshire as though they were Victorian explorers or missionaries, complete with a party of native bearers carrying their aspidistra and upright piano, but instead of cleft sticks to send messages, they use smartphones. They paint the county as impoverished, sexist, racist and any other ist you care to mention. This view is backed up by some small-town boys who praise themselves for having escaped it.

Yet Lincolnshire voted in line with the rest of the country in the 1975 referendum on continued membership of the European Economic Community – two-to-one in favour. And, years after that, Liberal candidates piled up huge votes in coming second in constituencies like Gainsborough & Horncastle and East Lindsey. In the latter, which is largely the Boston & Skegness constituency now represented by Richard Tice, the deputy leader of Reform, the Liberal Alliance polled over 20,000 votes at the 1987 general election. 

Politics is rarely as simple as online debate makes it appear.

Labour MP jailed as former Reform Wales leader is charged with accepting bribes to aid Russia

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It's been a busy day in the courts for politicians, writes our legal affairs correspondent.

First, the Independent (formerly Labour) MP for Runcorn and Helsby, Mike Amesbury, was jailed for 10 weeks after punching a constituent in the street.

As Amesbury has been imprisoned, a recall petition can now be launched to remove him from the Commons if he doesn't do the decent thing.

Then Nathan Gill, who was a UKIP and later a Brexit Party MEP between 2014 and 2020, and briefly the leader of Reform Wales after that, appeared in court accused of accepting bribes to make statements in the European Parliament that would benefit Russia.

The Crown said the alleged offences were carried out during his time as an MEP and before the UK left the European Parliament, on 31 January 2020.

Gill was granted bail on the condition that he surrenders his passport and does not obtain international travel documents nor contact his co-accused, the retired Ukrainian politician Oleg Voloshyn.

The British Establishment is a House of Straw

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The witness before the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry these past two days has been has been Alice Perkins, who was chair of the Post Office board between 2011 and 2015.

She also became a director of the BBC in 2014, which made her position ticklish when Panorama began investigating the Horizon scandal.

As John Sweeney, journalist and now Liberal Democrat candidate for Sutton Coldfield, wrote in Byline Times in January, this mean that in May, June and July 2015, Perkins had:

lived with the mother of all conflicts of interest. I have trawled through the relevant BBC minutes for that period and I can find no declaration of it.

But I'm not alleging any wrongdoing here. Having listened to Perkins before the inquiry, I am sure that she will have simply forgotten that she was a director of the BBC.

Yes, she followed the pattern for appearing before the inquiry that was established by Post Office leaders. In a really tight corner, blame you underlings, and otherwise claim you don't remember.

If the Post Office is at all typical of the standard of British management, then this inquiry has laid bare a major reason for our poor economic performance.

Alice Perkins is married to Jack Straw, and is the mother of Will Straw CBE, mastermind of the useless Office Remain campaign in the EU referendum.

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Gaby Hinsliff reviews Tom Baldwin's biography of Keir Starmer: "The kind of overly simplistic working-boy-made-good stories politicians are coached to tell about themselves on the campaign trail invariably hide complicated subplots, in this case about those who will always be vulnerable or left behind in the most upwardly mobile families. If Keir Starmer still seems frustratingly hard to pigeonhole, maybe that’s ultimately our problem, not his."

"In almost every recent by-election, Reform have underperformed compared to what the Brexit Party's vote share in 2019 and current national voting intention would predict," say Paula Surridge and Sophie Stowers.

"Benefit sanctions imposed by the Department for Work and Pensions have become harsher amid the cost of living crisis, according to newly released government data - with the average penalty lasting a week longer in 2023 than in 2019," reports Chaminda Jayanetti.

Anthony Broxton on how middle-class voters fell out of love with Clement Attlee's Labour Party after 1945.

Polly Pullar celebrates the revival of the pine marten: "From a once detested varmint that polarised people’s perceptions, to an ambassador for an ecologically richer Scotland, the pine marten offers a glimpse into what else might be possible with a change in our attitudes."

"For two long decades, Australian rugby has rotted from its head office to its heartland. The once-proud and powerful code is fractured in so many places, in so many ways, few believe it can be rebuilt." Angus Fontaine dissects the crisis in Australian rugby union.

Photo by Dani Kropivnik

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Matthew Pennell uncovers the roots of the Post Office Horizon scandal: "The political origins for Horizon date back to 1994, with the idea of computerising payments and moving away from Girocheques being proposed by Social Security Minister Peter Lilley. It needs to be understood, however, that a brand new IT system for the Post Office and DSS fitted in perfectly with the New Labour ethos of using tech to transform anything and everything."

"The thing is ... this is not a new story. It’s a fairly old one, and in 2019, [Epstein victim Sarah] Ransome told New Yorker writer Connie Bruck that not only did she not have the tapes, but that she invented their existence." Robyn Pennacchia refuses to be excited by the dump of Epstein files.

"It is unclear whether pints were ever available on the shelves of British shops, as opposed to direct supply, and, however supplied, it seems as if they had disappeared well before Britain joined the EU." Those near-mythical pint bottles of champagne are a good symbol of the wholly nonsensical and imaginary idea of sovereignty, itself predicated on a nineteenth century view of Britain and the world, that is shared by Brexit supporters, argues Chris Grey.

Vince Cable warns us not to underestimate the threat posed by Nigel Farage.

A report from Foundation for Common Land describes the results of heritage work carried out with volunteers on the Stiperstones during Autumn 2023. It focussed on Bronze Age cairns in the south of the site and the remains of post-Medieval smallholdings in the north.

Sarah Bertram presents a video obituary of the great JPR Williams.

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 Alexandra Hall Hall finds the Iraq war and Brexit share a thread of hubris: "It’s taken Americans 20 years to fully come to terms with the consequences of Iraq. I hope it does not take that long for Britain to truly realise the consequences of Brexit."

The Hunger Games bidding system, which saw councils competing against one another for Levelling Up cash, led to councils across the country paying millions to consultants. That's the finding a Daily Mirror investigation.

Are we building more prisons because of a projected rise in the prison population, or building prisons and then making sure they are filled? Faith Spear asks an important question.

Rachel Hammersley went to a conference marking the 50th anniversary of Christopher Hill's study of radical politics during the English Civil War and Commonwealth: "As one obituary of him noted, ... works like The World Turned Upside Down spoke not just to academics, but also to ordinary people. Moreover ... Hill also reached out in many different ways to a wider public through his involvement with organisations such as the Workers' Educational Association, the Open University, and the BBC."

Forgotten Television Drama posts a chronology of Dickens adaptations on British television between 1948 and 2023. A remarkable number survive and have been issued on DVD.

"RNAS Longside was active from 1916 to 1920. 1500 personnel were based at the station and the site boasted a swimming pool, a theatre, shops, a church and gas works. All of those buildings are long gone, but some things remain." Ailish Sinclair looks for the remains of a Royal Naval Air Station in Lenabo Woods, Aberdeenshire.

Former Brexit Party Westminster candidate gains Surrey County Council seat for the Lib Dems

Is it just me or are Wednesday by-elections becoming a little more common? Whatever the truth of that, there was one yesterday in a ward of Surrey County Council and it saw a Liberal Democrat gain. Congratulations to Harry Bopari and his team in Sunbury Common and Ashford Common.

To form a full appreciation of the significance of the week's local by-election results you have to read the previews written by Andrew Teale. He wrote a special one for yesterday's contest and you can learn a number of things from it.

The first is that Sunbury Common and Ashford Common was held by the Lib Dems between 2013 and 2017. 

Our victory in 2013 was a bit of a fluke, in that Ukip and the Conservatives split a large right-wing vote almost evenly in second and third places, but studying the results of previous contests in a ward can sometimes reveal that a trumpeted Lib Dem gain has done no more than get us back where we were a few years ago.

It would be interesting to know the results in this corner of Surrey before 2013, but as Andrew does not include them I assume there have been boundary changes.

He does, however, include information that suggests this was indeed a ward we should have looked to gain with the national polls as they are:

The Lib Dems, however, do have a base on Spelthorne council in the Sunbury Common half of the division; in 2019 this ward returned two Lib Dems and an ex-Lib Dem independent.

Second, our new councillor has an unusual political background for a Lib Dem councillor:

The Lib Dems have made the intriguing selection of Harry Boparai, who works for BA at Heathrow; I say “intriguing” because Boparai was a Conservative candidate in the neighbouring London Borough of Hounslow at the 2018 local elections before standing in the 2019 general election as the Brexit Party candidate for Hayes and Harlington. 

He was originally supposed to stand in December 2019 here in Spelthorne, before the Brexit Party party withdrew from Conservative-held seats. You don’t see many Brexit Party to Lib Dem defectors, but it takes all sorts to make a world.

And it takes all sorts of people to make a successful political party, so I shall not be questioning his selection.

The third thing we learn is whose constituency includes Sunbury Common and Ashford Common:

The local MP is Kwasi Kwarteng, and I must admit that when this vacancy came up I was looking forward to describing this by-election as the first of his chancellorship within his constituency. Oh dear.

Andrew has produced his usual Thursday preview for today's contests, which include a parliamentary by-election in Chester.

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Chris Grey discusses what the Conservative leadership contest tells us about Brexit: "There’s a dated feeling to the entire contest, especially in the constant invocations of Margaret Thatcher, perhaps reflecting the age and political reference points of the selectorate that will choose the next Prime Minister. It’s reminiscent of the way Conservatives still argue about whether Thatcher would or would not have supported Brexit, still vying for the imprimatur of the Iron Lady, or perhaps just for mummy's approval."

Alona Ferber dissects Liz Truss's clumsy attempt to win the votes of Jewish Tory members.

"While celebrities like Elvis Presley legitimized the vaccine in the eyes of a previously sceptical public, a few fervent anti-vaxxers rose to prominence, some using the same combination of fear mongering, pseudoscientific speculation, and conspiratorial thinking common to the smallpox era – and common, once again, in the time of COVID-19." Josh Jones finds Jonas Salk and his polio vaccine were more controversial than we've come to believe.

"The apology offered in anger or frustration will often condemn the other person. The classic example of this is the apology that says, “I’m sorry you feel that way.” This is not an apology, but a condemnation." Ade Mullen on what happens when institutions try to apologise and how they could do it better.

"As the rain turned to sleet it was soon evident this couldn’t go on much longer. Sparks were flying from the electrical instruments and equipment. Manfred Mann were waiting to go on but they never made it. The plug was pulled." ITV News looks back 50 years to Krumlin - Yorkshire's answer to Woodstock.

Marcus Liddell explores Heathrow's pre-industrial hinterland.

If Labour carry on like this they will lose the next election

'Were we better off in the single market than we are now?'

'How would you resolve the Northern Ireland Protocol?'

Andrew Marr challenges Labour Shadow Home Secretary @YvetteCooperMP.@AndrewMarr9 pic.twitter.com/Vofm0Pjy2u

— LBC (@LBC) June 7, 2022

Yvette Cooper is about the sharpest politician on the Labour front bench. I'm sure the Conservatives would fear her more as Labour leader than they fear Keir Starmer.

Yet her performance here is pitiful.

Marr's questions were perfectly fair and wholly predictable - Labour has had six years to sort out its response to the referendum result - yet Cooper had nothing useful to say in reply to them.

Come the next election, if they can't do better than this Labour will lose and deserve to lose.

Labour's moderate, sensible shadow cabinet should remember why Jeremy Corbyn won the Labour leadership. It was because the moderate, sensible candidates arrayed against him barely had an interesting sentence to say between them.

And they should remember how ineffective the moderate, sensible Remain campaign was too.

It's easy for those of us who oppose them to work ourselves up into a state where we believe the Tories' wickedness is bound to see them swept from power, but moral indignation will not be enough to win the next general election. Opposition parties will need to be able to answer uncomfortable questions too.

Road hauliers will soon need a permit to enter Kent

Remember how Brexit was meant to reduce red tape?

The Department of Transport has issued a document on proposed legislative amendments on enforcing Operation Brock, the scheme to have lorries queue for the channel ports inland if there is a need.

There you will find this gem:

From that point on, the legislation would require any haulier using designated roads in Kent leading to the Port of Dover and Eurotunnel to be in possession of a ‘Kent access permit’ (KAP), which would be digitally issued to drivers receiving a ‘green’ or ‘amber’ result from the SF service.

Each KAP would be valid for 24 hours to cover a single trip, and police and DVSA enforcement officers could issue penalties to hauliers found heading for Dover or Eurotunnel without one. Thus, travelling in contravention of a ‘red’ result (being advised not to travel) or failure to use the SF portal at all and so not having a valid KAP, would be a fineable offence.

That's right. Brexit won't just introduce a hard border with our European neighbours: it will, as far as hauliers are concerned. introduce borders within the UK.

Why didn't business leaders speak out sooner? We heard little from during the referendum campaign.

I suspect they could not believe any government could be this mad. Even Vladimir Putin is wondering if he hasn't gone too far.

Former Labour councillor who joined Lib Dems before announcing she was defecting to The Brexit Party has now become a Conservative

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Ladies and gentlemen. we have our Headline of the Day and our Councillor of the Day.

Well done to Rochdale Online and Cllr Kath Nickson.

Former Brexit Party parliamentary candidate joins Lib Dems

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Who? Where? What?

Kent Online reports:

Evie Martin, who stood as the Brexit candidate for Sittingbourne and Sheppey in the last general election, has joined the Liberal Democrats. 

She said: “Although I disagreed with the Lib Dems on Brexit, I have always supported their key policies on electoral reform, environmental improvements and affordable housing."

In fact Martin did not stand for the Brexit Party anywhere. Because, as the article later admits, she was ordered to stand down for Nigel Farage to help the Conservatives.

Some will be aghast at this news, but I remember Peter Sloman's concept of 'the liberalism of the left-behind'.

When I blogged about it just after the general election, I wrote:

In the far-off days when I was a Liberal activist and then councillor, there was a definite populist strand to our campaigning. 

We were the people who stood up for the unfashionable end of town. We were the people who stood up for the voters against council ruling groups and senior officers. 

I remember doing a survey on council house repairs here in Harborough and being told the next day that the council offices were thronged with people we had encouraged to make complaints. I was proud of that.

If there is to be a Liberal Democrat revival, I suspect it will involve adopting something of this approach again and not involve browbeating people who disagreed with us on Brexit.

Boris Johnson will destroy the Conservative Party if he doesn't destroy the country first

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I came across two article today which argue that Boris Johnson's adoption of populism may in the long run prove disastrous for the Conservative Party.

On The Conversation, Andy Knott notes how the approach for Johnson's government marks a complete break with traditional Conservatism:

For conservatism, protecting “what is” (in other words, the institutions that have been handed down to us) is a joint project between conservative politicians and the people, their constituents. Together they have been engaged in this project for centuries. 

This means there is a seamless bond between the people and the elite (or establishment, or government, or parliament, or judiciary), which enables them to rule and the people to view the Conservatives as the natural party of government and their proper representatives. 

Populism, in stark contrast, operates by breaking that bond. It decrees that the elite has abandoned the people, and acts against their interests.

Johnson may think he can control the definition of the elite - judges, civil servants urban liberals - but sooner or later the people will notice that he is supported by the super-rich and adopt their own definition.

Once they do he will be finished and the tissue of interests the Conservative Party represents ripped to shreds.

Over to the Guardian, where William Davies argues that this Conservative ideology has long been in decline for 30 years:

There was one force in Britain’s public life that never gave up on the Tories: the press. All those resentments that took the place of conservative ideology – the loathing of multiculturalism, Brussels, Blairism, immigration, and the vast riches being made in London – were given a safe space in the pages of the Daily Mail, the Daily Express and the Daily Telegraph. 

With their constant attacks on all symptoms of liberal globalisation, these papers provided the incubator for the rage currently sweeping British politics, during the long years when national borders and rural England were out of political fashion.

The result is that those newspapers now have one of their own as prime minister.

And the Conservatives?

The current poll lead feels precarious; 59 per cent of Tory members have already voted for the Brexit party once (in the European parliament elections), and many could well do so in future. The Conservatives are now to the Brexit party what cocaine is to crack: more acceptable in polite company, but ultimately made of the same stuff.

Davies reaches a similar conclusion to Andy Knott:

The forces behind Brexit will need new scapegoats soon – and Johnson, Cummings and the Conservative party could be next in line.

All very encouraging if you wish to see the Tories destroyed, but the worry must be that they will destroy the country before that stage is reached.

Brexit Party candidate for Rutland believes Britain can increase its wealth by discovering new lands

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Over to the Grantham Journal to hear the platform of the newly selected Brexit Party candidate for Rutland and Melton:

 "I will campaign tirelessly for a clean break Brexit as this will give us the greatest chance of world-class free trading success. Let’s not forget, in the first Elizabethan era, we discovered new lands, vanquished malevolent enemies and brought untold wealth back to our fantastic island. 

"And with a clean break Brexit, we can do exactly the same again, bringing huge prosperity into our midst, amongst many other things, helping our cash strapped public services achieve unparalleled proficiency."

I am reminded of a 2016 diary entry by Lord Bonkers:

I recently heard a Conservative politician who has been Members of the European Parliament since they were 14 say that Brexit will make us a “buccaneering” nation again. Well, we remember those days hereabouts and dark they were indeed. 

Merchant vessels carrying Stilton and pork pies out of Oakham across Rutland Water were set upon by pirates, who stole their cargo, made the crew walk the plank and went “Arrr!” in a most annoying fashion. (I suppose they wanted they wanted the foodstuffs to feed their parrots.) 

I grant you those days were not without glamour: every Rutland schoolboy knows the story of how one of my ancestors ordered a footman to lie down in a puddle so that Queen Elizabeth would not get her pretty shoes muddy. Yet every fair-minded person will admit that the elimination of piracy in Rutland is one of the European Union’s greatest achievements and entertain no wish to see its return.

Six thoughts on Brecon and Radnorshire

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Well done the Liberal Democrats

Brecon and Radnorshire may have looked like an inevitable Liberal Democrat gain – we have held the seat for 20 of the past 34 years – but an enormous amount of work went into winning.

Even to force the by-election after the sitting Conservative MP was committed of fraudulent expense claims required us to collect the signatures of more than 10 per cent of the constituency’s electors. In the event we achieved 19 per cent.

Then we flooded Brecon and Radnorshire with workers for the six weeks of the by-election campaign and overturned a Tory majority of over 8000 votes.

Well done the Liberal Democrats. Well done us.

The Remain Alliance helped…

The Green and Plaid Cymru stood down in favour of the Lib Dems so there was only one Remain candidate.

It was a helpful decision and one the Lib Dems should reciprocate in the few seats where it might have an effect. But it may not have been a decisive one.

At the last general election there was no Green candidate in Brecon and Radnorshire and the Plaid candidate’s vote was (just) lower than the majority Jane Dodds achieved last night.

…but the unofficial alliance with Labour voters was decisive

From what I saw on Twitter last night it was when the boxes from Ystradgynlais were sampled and found to be strongly in favour of the Lib Dems that it became clear we were going to win.

This willingness of Labour voters to abandon their party if another has a better chance of defeating the Conservatives is an important development and an encouraging one for the Lib Dems.

An anti-Brexit vote or an anti-Tory vote?

Brecon and Radnorshire came out for Leave in the EU referendum, but that does not mean that the issue is of overwhelming importance to the constituency’s voters.

Back in June, a YouGov survey found that Leave voters feel less strongly about Brexit than us Remainers do.

Which makes me think that our victory yesterday was more of an anti-Tory vote than an anti-Brexit vote. Brexit was far from the only issue we campaigned on.

The local Tories are to blame

That is what the national Conservative machine was saying. The local party had assured them that Chris Davies was still popular and would win the by-election. They were wrong.

My impression that local Tory officials are increasingly out of touch with the wider electorate has only been strengthened by this contest.

And the national Tories are no better

I have seen tweets from the Conservative Party today telling off people for voting for the Brexit Party.

The idea that you own your supporters’ votes - and that the way to win them back if they stray from the path of righteousness is to attack them – comes straight from the Hard Left.

It will do the Tories no more good than it has done Labour.

YouGov opinion poll puts Liberal Democrats in the lead

Tomorrow's edition of The Times carries a Yougov opinion poll on people's voting intention at the next general election.

This is what it finds:

Liberal Democrats  24 per cent
Brexit Party            22 per cent       
Conservatives        19 per cent
Labour                   19 per cent
Greens                    8 per cent

The usual warnings about not making too much of one poll apply. Remember Cleggmania. Your tenancy may be at risk if you don't vote for Lord Bonkers.