Cameron has lost Rochester and Strood. Let’s make sure the story is his disaster

Tomorrow (Thursday 20th November) I will be taking a day off work to head down to Kent and help Get Out the Vote for Labour candidate Naushabah Khan in the Rochester & Strood by-election.

I hope you will join me. If you can’t come down during the day but you live in London or the South East even heading over to help for a couple of hours in the evening after work will help maximise Labour’s vote.

The easiest of the five Labour campaign centres to make your way to is at 177 Rochester High Street – just turn right as you leave Rochester train station and you won’t be able to miss it. There is knocking up from 9am and for early risers leafleting from 6am (!).

I don’t think it is a huge secret as there have been a couple of constituency specific opinion polls that Labour is not going to win the seat. But we have fought a spirited campaign with limited resources (in order not to pull staff and money away from key marginal seats in the South East, which incidentally all the constituency polling says we are on track to win). Naushabah has been a fantastic candidate who has won plaudits from across the spectrum and been cited by the media as easily the most impressive of the runners. Malcolm Powers and his team at South East Labour have worked their socks off and the local CLPs in the Medway area are an inspiration – full of hard-working and passionate campaigners. They deserve our time and effort on Thursday to help them get the best result possible.

As regular readers will recall I made a strong argument right at the start of the campaign to try to turn it into a three-way fight but this didn’t turn out to be possible.

Instead what has happened is a classic by-election scenario where the media have settled on a two horse race narrative as they can’t cope with anything more complicated, and it has become a bit of a self-fulfilling prophesy. They focused on the human interest story of Mark Reckless defecting from Tory to UKIP and now it looks almost certain his seat will follow him.

The Tories look like they are set to take a major beating in Rochester & Strood despite throwing the kitchen sink at it with four prime ministerial visits (the convention used to be that PMs didn’t campaign in by-elections), “carpet-bombing” with leaflets (their phrase), day trips by 1000 activists (their claim), spending like there was no tomorrow, and the whips demanding, but failing to get, every MP to go three times. As recently as 13 November Tracey Crouch, the next door MP, claimed “This by-election is really competitive”.

This is an existential moment for them. If UKIP can take a Tory seat that is number 270-ish in terms of winnability, the Tories are really facing a war on two fronts in May and will struggle to cover both the marginals Labour is attacking and what they thought was their East Coast heartland. This is in contrast to Labour’s messy but successful fending off of UKIP threats in Wythenshawe & Sale East, Heywood & Middleton, and the South Yorkshire Police Commissioner. If a few more Tory MPs feel emboldened to defect to UKIP it could be Cameron who faces a real leadership challenge just weeks after Ed Miliband overcame his post-conference wobble.

Cameron’s extraordinary personal commitment to trying to win this by-election and his grovelling appeal for tactical votes (translating basically as please choose the Tory frying pan rather than the UKIP fire) were certainly foolhardy but perhaps explicable when his leadership may be at stake over losing.

Exactly a month ago The Daily Telegraph reported that:

The minister said the closely fought Newark by-election, which the Tories won in June, would pale by comparison to the fevered efforts being made to win in the Medway towns on Nov 20. “It will be like Newark on crack cocaine,” the minister said. “The PM has concluded that losing Rochester and Strood would be so damaging to his reputation that he has to throw everything at it.”

Now it looks like he has lost it.

His ambition to be the first Tory leader to win an overall majority since 1992 certainly seems to be sunk. There is no path to a Tory majority if they cannot even hold their 143rd safest seat.

This by-election has not been Labour’s finest hour. We should have had more self-belief and hit it really hard in the first few days in a bid to derail the UKIP vs Tory narrative. And we should have been putting far more organisational and political focus for the last four years on the volatile North Kent seats and the kind of voters who might churn about between Labour, Tory and UKIP. Belatedly I think the penny has dropped as recent policy announcements and a more pugnacious campaigning style have come into play. Too late to get Naushabah in as the the MP on Thursday but one day Rochester & Strood will have a Labour MP again, perhaps sooner than expected.

But if it hasn’t been our finest hour, it is very near to being doomsday for the Tories and Cameron personally. Buy some popcorn tomorrow, they are going to have a bad night. It couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of people.