Tory Propaganda - Voters Not Listening

With two by-election results not being declared until after the papers had published their first editions, something else had to be splashed across those front pages. No matter for the inmates of the Northcliffe House bunker, or those at the increasingly desperate and downmarket Telegraph, there was always a little Government propaganda they could use instead.

Your seat's on the line too, matey

In the case of the Mail and Tel, though, it was Israeli Government propaganda that adorned their fist editions. And thereby hangs a tale: the editorial teams of both papers ought to know already that the last time they did that, their readers failed to heed the instructions handed down. And when the by-election results finally came, it was clear the voters weren’t listening, either.

Both in Tamworth, where the appropriately named Chris Pincher had left in disgrace, and Mid-Bedfordshire, where (yes, it’s her again) Nadine Dorries had finally resigned, to the relief of many in the constituency who wished it had happened earlier, the Tories failed to defend five-figure majorities (19,600 and 24,600 respectively) and lost both seats to Labour.

The Election Maps UK feed on Twitter, X, or whatever Muskrat is calling it this week, sounded a “Just For Fun” klaxon, telling “How GB would vote if the Mid Bedfordshire By-Election swing was repeated across the country”. The Lib Dems would become the opposition with over 100 seats, Labour would be out of sight on 484 seats, and the Tories would be reduced to a rump of 20 seats.

What went wrong for the Tories? Perhaps the shorter answer would result from asking what didn’t go wrong. The Tamworth by-election followed Pincher losing his appeal against a proposed suspension from the Commons after he drunkenly groped two men. As for Mid Beds, Ms Dorries had not spoken in the Commons for more than a year prior to her resigning.

Worse, the Tories are now led by a Prime Minister so totally out of touch with ordinary voters that he uses private jets, or helicopters, to get around the country. The voters have to use their cars, or take the train (Mid Beds has a vocal commuter contingent who are well versed on the less than perfect service they can expect from Flitwick and Harlington).

Worse still, as Adam Bienkov pointed out, the Tories have not endeared themselves to voters recently: “So to summarise, the big messages from Rishi Sunak's party going into these by-elections were that: - We're scrapping our biggest levelling up project - Criminals will be spared jail - We're taking away your cigarettes - Parents struggling to feed their kids can ‘f*** off’”.

And as if The Blue Team could not make things worse, they, er, made things worse by both their losing candidates leaving the count before the winning candidates had made their acceptance speeches. If either of the losers stands for the seat next time, their opponents will have the Sour Loser acts on a tape loop. So what kind of excuses are the Tories deploying today?

“Labour got fewer votes in Mid Beds than in 2019”. Except the Tories got more than 26,000 fewer. “By-elections don’t matter”. Except they mattered when holding Uxbridge and South Ruislip. And education secretary Gillian Keegan claiming the results “did not show a swing to Labour”. Some remedial maths lessons needed there. Maybe she was arguing in her spare time.

Two people who should be ‘fessing up and saying sorry, but will not be, are party chairman Greg Hands and his deputy Lee Anderson. Instead, Hands told Sky News “the conversations I had in Mid Bedfordshire and Tamworth [show that] people were happy with the job that Rishi Sunak is doing as prime minister”. So happy they appear poised to eject him from Downing Street.

That, along with the propensity to resort to personal abuse rather too readily, is a significant part of why the Tories keep on losing. Thuggish behaviour from the likes of 30p Lee is also counting against them. Labour hardly needs to lift a finger; the Tories are doing their hard work for them. Rishi Sunak being out of the country pretending to be important is just the icing on the cake.

The Blue Team may be facing wipeout. Just rejoice at that news.

Enjoy your visit to Zelo Street? You can help this truly independent blog carry on talking truth to power, while retaining its sense of humour, by becoming a Patron on Patreon at

https://www.patreon.com/Timfenton