By-elections

Congratulations to the Conservatives, who on Thursday did something they achieve once every 30-odd years, and that is win a by-election seat off Labour.

The result will make Crewe & Nantwich one of those great (for politicos) by-elections such as Fulham, Dudley West, Orpington, Glasgow Govan, Newbury and Darlington.

By-elections have very little long term impact; they are very accurate snapshots of public opinion and excellent means to give the government of the day a slap. That this is the first by-election Labour has lost to the official Opposition since we were elected shows what a dismal state the Conservatives have been in for such a long time.

But some matter more than others. I think Crewe & Nantwich, convincing a Tory win though it was, has a lot of parallels with a by-election that happened a few miles south of Crewe in 1990.

Mid Staffordshire was a very safe Conservative seat, centred on the lovely cathedral town of Lichfield. In 1987, the Tories had won the seat by over 10,000 votes with Labour just edging second place from the then Liberal Alliance. But in the Autumn of 1989 the sitting MP, John Heddle, committed suicide.

In the by-election that followed, Labour's Sylvia Heal swept to victory: her swing of 21% and majority of over 9,000 was far bigger than that which the Conservatives managed in Crewe on Thursday. The image above is from the Daily Mirror the day after the by-election: a mirror image, if you'll pardon the pun, of the newspaper headlines yesterday and today.

Sylvia Heal is an MP today, but she doesn't represent Mid Staffordshire (or its successor seat: Lichfield). She was defeated in the 1992 General Election when John Major's government was re-elected. She didn't get back into parliament until 1997 for the nearby but very different constituency of Halesowen & Rowley Regis.

Just as at the time of the Mid Staffordshire by-election we have two years until a General Election. A lot can happen in that time, not least voters making a very different decision to the one they make in the mid term of a parliament.