The byelection win has strengthened the hand of Keir Starmer: now he’ll be under pressure to marginalise dissenting voices
After an ill-tempered, hard-fought byelection campaign and what seems to have been a frantic last-minute get-out-the-vote operation, Labour clung on to Batley and Spen by the narrowest of margins – a mere 323 votes, down from 3,525 in 2019. At the very least, Labour’s victory was a (perhaps inadvertent) triumph of expectations management: with the Tories having been widely expected to take it, a tight win in a seat the party had held for the preceding 24 years is now presented as a personal vindication of Keir Starmer.
