All I can say is, wow. A majority of 7,860 on a 17.6% swing is an astonishing result, far ahead of what Edward Timpson or his campaign team could have dreamt of. Well done to all those who went to Crewe & Nantwich and gave him such tremendous support. Well done to the CCHQ campaign team who ran such a fantastic campaign too.
A new dawn has broken, has it not?
47 comments:
Sanity returns slowly to the UK after 11 years of dreams that turned as bad as some of us feared.
Hear Hear.
Well done Edward. Can we call him Eddie Baby MP?
Loving the full anti-Labour sentiment on the news now. I actually feel a little sorry for Chris Bryant
A fantastic result and congratulations to Edward Timpson and all concerned with this campaign. Thanks also for this Blog, which is outstanding.
This is massive. No make no mistake. I am not sure Labour will hold together after this. This is not midterm blues in a poor Labour stronghold. This is a lasting shift
What may help Brown is the Whitsun break, but it will be a lively Friday.
A new dawn has broken, has it not?
'Dawn' was May 1st. This would be breakfast.
New dawn?
Brings back memories of Ilford North 1978 and stagflation.
If you think a Tory government will result in prosperity dream on.
His majority is bigger than the late Mrs Dunwoody's! That's not just a swing, that's a completel turn-around and then some...
This is an amazing result for Labour. It really vindicates the hard work that Gordon and the Labour Party as a whole have put into the Crewe and Nantwich by-election and more generally to help the problems of the people of the United Kingdom.
blimey. 7850.
John McDonnell is the first Labour MP to stick the knife into Gordon Brown this morning. I doubt very much that he will be the last.
Chris Paul
You are quite right, of course. The Labour Party is the cause of many of the problems of the people of the United Kingdom, so anything that damages their government does help the people.
I would just like to put it on the record that the BBC election special team has just opened some champagne in the newsroom -- presumably provided by the management in recognition for a job well done, rather than anything else.
Bet they don't report that on Biased BBC, though!
Con 20,539
Lab 12,679
LibDim 6,040
NuLab have gone from being 13% down in the recent local elections to 19% down tonight.
Stick a fork in NuLabs arse, turn them over they're done!
Mind you, Calamity Clegg and the LibDims haven't got anything to bragg about, being completely ignored as a possible protest vote...
Excellent. Well done Edward and very well done your team. Having been involved the esprit de corps was outstanding and a credit to DC and his new-found spirit that persuaded helpers from all over the country to Crewe in droves! 3 points please:
1 Superb judgement that our new MP made Gwyneth and her contribution such a feature of his opening remarks.
2. How typically churlish and ignorant of the Diminished Dunwoody Junior not to congratulate her opponent on his victory. (How on earth did Bryant on the BBC think hers was a 'magnificently maganamimous speech' - p'raps he got the candidates mixed up?)
3. Already the talk is of Brown's position and a Labour uprising. We suggest that our stance is that 'the people of Britain will not allow Labour to play fast and loose with the Prime Ministership of our country by choosing a 3rd leader to suit their own ends. This is OUR country and OUR PM and we must all have a say at the ballot box...and soon!DREAMS TONIGHT WILL BE EXTRA SWEET!
Tomorrow Old Macavity will be nowhere to be seen. He'll have gone to ground. The next time we see him, in a week or so, he will be going on about combating "child poverty" (i.e. giving taxpayers' money to yobs) as if nothing had happened.
It's Tamsyn Dunwoody we should be feeling sorry for. She had high hopes of becoming the next Margaret Beckett. Now she will no doubt have to go and open a hairdressing salon in Wales.
The swings were 17.6% Labour to Conservative, 7.1% Labour to Lib Dem, and 10.5% Lib Dem to Conservative.
Were this to be repeated at a general election, it would give the Tories 47.3% of the vote, Labour 23.8%, and the Liberal Democrats 21.0%, which works out at a Conservative majority of 244.
Wonderful result... Final Score = 3 - 164
Tories = Locals, London, Crewe
Labour = At least 164 very worried MPs
Well done to all that did their bit for the Crewe & Nantwich campaign. Congrats to Mr Edward Timpson MP.
Had a look at BBC website at 5.35 this morning. 'Tories snatch Crewe from Labour'. But I look in vain for the voting figures.
Not many champagne bottles in the corridors of the BBC tonight, then.
Fortunately the prime minister will continue to take the right long-term decisions for a stable economy and also ... and also ... and also ... and also ...
He will be explaining this later today.
Well done to all, especially Eric Pickles. The burning issue now is how to bring forward the election date to stop the Labour wreckers having a field day before the inevitable. Will Brown show today? Or will something much more pressing (Tractor production?) occupy him?
How come Labour got that many votes?
Nick Clegg might also be vulnerable with Limps under 15%.
Brown has to be a gonner.
Magnificent win. Surpasses Labour's worst nightmare. Well done Edward Timpson.
This appalling, fag end Labour government and it's useless, dishonest, dead duck Prime Minister are imploding.
Obviously this is a disastrous result for Cameron.
He should have gained at least a million votes.
He needs to consider his position.
Another hard won victory for Gordon!
(Thought I'd save the Labour AstroTurfers the bother)
The country smells like it did in 1996. I would like to hear the Brownite line this morning. Where are our favourite partisan commenters? I thought that a Tory win was a psephological impossibility....
Will our new MP offer free shoe repair to his army of helpers? :)
Its a great result, and one that I wish I could have had a part in. Well done to everyone.
Conservative Majority of squillions..
come on people - it's a by-election. Get a grip. No new dawn.
MAC
The problem with new dawns is that you see them every day.
This is a great result but it's far from over.
My only slight disappointment this morning is that I've lost the pound I put into the office sweepstakes on the result. I'd guessed the Conservative majority would be almost exactly half of what it turned out to be.
The thing that really struck me this time is how disciplined and effective the Conservative campaign seems to have been. People used to talk about the fearsome LibDem by-election machine, but that seems to have been relegated to insignificance. This discipline will need to be preserved into the General Election, when resources will inevitably be spread thinner.
On a final note, I know this won't be a popular view here, but I can't help but feel incredibly sorry for Tamsin Dunwoody. To both lose your mother then fail to defend something that was very important to her within such a short space of time must really hurt. However awful she may have seemed at times during the campaign (probably acting on orders from No. 10), she has my sympathy. This shouldn't (and didn't) affect how people vote, but it makes it hard for me to feel really good about the victory. I think this just reinforces the message that Labour got it so very wrong when it decided to parachute her into this battle.
I see that Harriet Hamster is firmly in denial this morning. I guess her seat is at risk too...
Let me echo Chris Paul's thoughts on this wonderful result. Well done Gordon Brown and Steve McCabe.
I voted for the Blair cult in 97 but in the two generals since then, voted LibDem, during that time the Tories looked pointlessly obsessed with internal rows about Europe to me.
I do find Cameron is someone I could envisage voting for, as he seems a decent guy and a "broad-church" type of politician who is also intelligent. The lack of clearly defined policies and the willingness to suddenly shift ground when needed (for example the recent suggestion there will be tax cuts without explaining where the savings will be - the old Tory standby!) don't bode too well though.
Nobody but a complete Labour automaton would consider voting for Brown, who is obviously unfit to be PM. But I still worry about the alternative. Will the Tories under Cameron be a moderate party, or have they gone too far down the road of extreme rightwing madness over the years to be truly recoverable? I suspect once in office there would be many nutty policies coming out of Tory ministers. How tough is Cameron is the real question. That won't go away just from this one by-election victory, although I'm glad for the Tories that they won it, because it was a loathsome and stupid NL campaign and Brown needs to go, so perhaps this message will be acted upon.
It was Brown wot lost it.
A great result but, and there is always a but, the reason people voted Labour out is that the ordinary person out there is p****d off with the denial of a referendum,immigration & housing, pandering to islam, Post office closure, Bin tax and snooping, anti smoking laws and general nannying. They will realise very soon that although Dave will make calming noises and vague promises he is unable to do a single thing about it as our laws are made in another country and by other countries.
If you want to see a real protest vote and cry for change observe UKIndependence,s figures the day after the next REAL election.
Labour will call an election before or at the same time as the EU elections.
The actual number of votes for the Conservative Candidate went up from 14363 to 20,539- an increase of nearly 50%.
This victory was not just caused by Labour abstentions but by several thousand Labour and several hundred Lib Dem voters crossing stright to the Tories
I commented the other night this would be the telling factor in the quality of the victory and as such has demolised is advance any excuse such as the previous MPs personal vote, Labour voters staying at home, a crass campaign that Labour Spin doctors had no doubt been planning to use
@ howard
Mid-term blues are a myth. In every parliament since 1979 there has been a mid-term dip in Tory fortunes. This has applied even when they weren't in power.
They polled higher in '83 than '81, higher in '87 than '85, higher in '92 than '90, higher in '97 than '95, higher in '01 than '99, higher in '05 than '03.
In other words - there is no such thing as "mid-term blues".
Cameron will start polling in the 50s %age wise within a month or so and will poll about 50% in the GE itself.
Goodbye Labour scum.
Start packing your bags for Belarus or some other socialist hellhole of your choice. Actually, don't. I want to see you all arrested and severely punished.
Well done Iain, I understand you were there twice, and dueing the week when the help was needed, not just weekends.
To which I'd like to add the sweet words of Nina Simone...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJA69C6SlRk
Look at that AMAZING result for the English Democrats! A stunning 0.7% of the vote!!!!
The result in Crewe shows that the English people will never vote for the Scottish David Cameron. With their fantastic vote share of less than 1%, the English Democrats are surely on course to form the next government, and have proven beyond doubt that the most important priority for the English people is an ENGLISH PARLIAMENT NOW!!!!
I notice that Gordon is meeting the Dalai Lama today. No doubt he'll be in need of some spiritual guidance.
Congratulations is in order for Tamsin Dunwoody who actually managed to wash her hair and scrub her teeth for election night.
Mrs Timpson is an absolute babe. I most definitely would.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/multimedia/archive/00343/crewe7385_343124a.jpg
"Woof woof! She's got a tongue like an electric eel and she likes the taste of a man's tonsils - Lord Flashheart
A new dawn has broken, has it not?
You know if you keep using that line it'll have no meaning by the time it actually becomes relevant...
Does anybody really believe that this was a Tory victory and not a Labour loss? Did people vote Tory because they, in a Labour heartland, now have entirely different politics? Or was it, like in 97, they just want to give the government a good kicking?
Keldorn said...
"I know this won't be a popular view here, but I can't help but feel incredibly sorry for Tamsin Dunwoody."
I think Dunwoody would sell her own mother if she could... Oh!
Sorry, but I have very little sympathy for her. I do understand where you're coming from but it was her choice to stand.
I happen to believe she'd have been an awful MP. So willing to invoke her mother's name and yet conveniently ignoring her mother's actual record. Does anyone seriously believe that the Dunwoody 'pretender' would have voted against the Government on ID Cards or 42 Days or any of the other substantive policies that Gwyneth (to her credit) stood against?
"The thing that really struck me this time is how disciplined and effective the Conservative campaign seems to have been."
I agree. This was undoubtedly the signature of this by-election. I hope when the excitement about the headline numbers has subsided we will all remember what actually got us to these heady heights.
Another thought for you... while Labour were able to call on some support for this single seat election, how will they cope with a multiple seat General Election? There are now whole areas of the country where Labour barely exist in any great numbers. I think they'll stuggle next time and certainly won't be able to match the feet on the ground that the Tories can now call on.
bj said...
"I would just like to put it on the record that the BBC election special team has just opened some champagne in the newsroom -- presumably provided by the management in recognition for a job well done, rather than anything else."
Most likely making sure they use up as much taxpayers money as possible just in case the useless tories actually thought of doing something about Al-beeb.
Oscar Miller said...
"I notice that Gordon is meeting the Dalai Lama today. No doubt he'll be in need of some spiritual guidance."
That's Tibet down the pan then!
A new dawn? Let's hope so - this should herald an end to new Labour, a return to Labour values, and in 2 years, a Real Labour government re-elected on a true social democratic platform. No-one likes Tories, they just don't like New Labour - how many people in Crewe do you think could name a single Tory policy? I know I can't name any, except leaving the welfare state to be run by charities. Socialism is going to be back on the agenda in Britain - this should be the start of something big for Labour.
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