Heartland Heartbreak

Labour has lost an election in its former Welsh stronghold, Blaenau Gwent, twice in little over a year. In what Hazel Blears has excused as a “unique set of circumstances,” the Independent Dai Davis, last night beat the Labour candidate Owen Smith by a margin of 2,500 votes.

This defeat will further unsettle nervous Labour backbenchers who suspect that the party’s unpopularity, will most likely manifest itself with them being thrust into unemployment at the next General Election. Calls for regicide, with Blair’s head served on a platter (probably with radishes, and a side order of John Reid), will no doubt give the parliamentary sketch writers something to rant about in the tree-based-media this weekend.

Blears, however, is probably right. This defeat may well be a “unique set of circumstances,” after all, didn’t Labour win a General Election just 13-months ago? It seems so long ago, yet I’m sure I remember Blair delivering yet another bloody nose to the Tories. Maybe it was a dream? Blears et al, if they don’t want that dream to become a nightmare, would be wise to ensure these “unique set of circumstances” do not become “unique” to the rest of the British Isles.

The election victory last year may well be a faint memory, but the past 12-months of scandal and ineptitude, which have already defined this third-term, have had a stark impact in the polls, with Dave “tPod” Cameron, outflanking Mr. Blair.

Opinion polls are notoriously misleading however, just ask Neil Kinnock. In fact, in another by-election last night, in the “safe” South East England seat of Bromley and Chislehurst, where the Tories enjoyed a majority of 13,342, Cameron’s party saw a humiliating fall from grace, as their candidate limped over the line after a traditional Lib Dem by-election assault. With a majority of just 633, new Conservative MP Bob Neill, a former member of the London Assembly, will take the seat of former Tory Hero, the late great Eric Forth.

The ferocity, and suggested dastardliness, of the Lib Dem challenge has had Tory bloggers jumping about like rabid dogs, and the victorious Neill himself, declared their conduct as the “most vigorous and underhand example of cynical personal abuse” he had encountered.

So with Cameron trying to reconcile his promising opinion poll results with yet another electoral kick in the ghoolies, and Labour nursing yet another haemorrhage in its heartlands, next weeks PMQ’s are shaping up to be a stonking good watch.