Britain’s Conservative Party suffered a double blow yesterday when it lost a key parliamentary seat to the Labour party and the Eurosceptic UKIP party recorded its best ever performance in a by-election.
The constituency is the first the Conservatives have had to defend since coming to power at the head of coalition government in 2010 and is a bellwether of UK politics whose voters have backed the winning party in every general election since 1983.
Ominously for the Conservatives, the UK Independence Party (Ukip), which promises to extract Britain from the European Union, had its strongest showing in any local poll since the party was founded in 1993.
The Labour candidate polled 17,267 votes to the Conservatives’ 9,476. Ukip came third with 5,108 votes.
The Conservatives’ governing coalition partners, the Liberal Democrats, came fourth and suffered the humiliation of losing their £500 deposit for not managing to win five pe cent of the vote.
Labour’s joy was somewhat tempered by a disappointment in the first elections for police commissioners in England and Wales.
Labour peer Lord Prescott lost out to a Tory candidate in a run-off in Humberside, in an election characterised by an extremely low poll. – (PA)