UKIP’s Reckless win is a disaster for Cameron – but it was a painful night for Labour too

It was another long night waiting for the results to come in from Rochester and Strood, but when they did they confirmed what was already all but expected – UKIP had won and Mark Reckless had been re-elected to Parliament.

Let’s focus first on the fundamentals from the Rochester and Strood result. David Cameron has lost another by-election. A second MP has defected from his party, joined UKIP, stood against Cameron’s party and roundly thrashed him. This seat was number 271 on UKIP’s target seat list (unlike Clacton which the Kippers thought might be eminently winnable), leading Farage to claim that “all bets are off” when it comes to the general election. It may still be the case that much of UKIP’s vote deserts it in May next year, but UKIP voters still seem resolutely in their column with only six months to go.

That gives Cameron a real mountain to climb if he’s going to have any chance of being the largest party in May – nevermind his surely now extinguished hopes of winning the next election outright. He’s the real loser from last night, especially having said that he was “absolutely determined that we will take this seat”. The murmurings of discontent on the Tory benches will increase in volume now. Peter Bone has already written about how UKIP are a “good thing”. He says he won’t defect, but that’s a pretty remarkable bit of praise for an opposition party coming from a government MP. Other Tories clearly feel likewise.

Yet the thought of some in the Labour Party – even some senior figures – taking solace in UKIP winning a seat sets my teeth on edge. UKIP as a party are the polar opposite of what today’s Labour Party is about. We’re the party that’s meant to be about looking forwards whilst they’re the party that resolutely looks back. To vote UKIP is to feel that things got worse when Labour was in power, when we should feel – rightly – that the country was changed for the better.

And although it was a disastrous night for the Tories, it still ended up being a painful night for Labour. The result could have been worse – senior party sources were openly predicting that the Labour vote might be as low as 10% – although you sensed that was an element of extreme expectation management going on. In the end it wasn’t quite that bad, but it was still a lacklustre showing from Labour, racking up only 17% of the vote in a seat largely the same as one Labour held only a couple of elections ago.

A party full of vim and vigour, charging headlong towards an election and full of confidence, would have had a look at Rochester and Strood – and our excellent candidate Naushabah Khan – and said “I can have a good go at that”. Alas, at the moment Labour are not that party. Resources were preserved, there was a token effort, but this wasn’t the Labour Party going hammer and tongs to give a tough race our best shot. Of course in a by-election – especially where an MP defects from one party to another – the votes of other parties are going to get squeezed hard. The debate in the seat was about whether they should keep Reckless or keep the Tory party, and Labour were barely part of the equation. But we could and should have been telling the people of Rochester and Strood that they didn’t have to choose between two Tories.

Once again – as in Clacton and Heywood and Middleton – UKIP have united a chunk the electorate against the leading mainstream party. They have set themselves apart from the rest and hovered up the majority of the not the [insert name of incumbents] party. The fall in the Labour vote, the bigger fall in the Tory vote and the absolute annihilation of the Lib Dem vote (they got less than 1% and lost their deposit) is just another example of the electorates point blank rejection of mainstream political parties – an existential crisis that threatens them all.

But no-one in the Labour Party, or the Tories, can say they haven’t been warned – even if neither are yet quite ready to accept the scale of the challenge and smell the electoral coffee. Too many people feel that politics is too distant from them, that they don’t have a stake in how our country is run and that our politicians are too aloof, distant and different from them to listen to them. That’s where for so many UKIP’s appeal lies.

And it was into this toxic swamp that Emily Thornberry’s now infamous tweet – leading eventually, surprisingly, to her resignation – landed yesterday. As I wrote last night:

“The tweet appeared crass. It appeared to play into negative stereotypes about Labour MPs not understanding voters, their concerns and their lives.

But I honestly thought the decision for Thornberry to resign (whether her own decision or encouraged) was a mistake. Those close to the Labour leader have suggested – as Thornberry did in her resignation statement – that this shows a determination not to allow anything to get in the way of Labour getting out of opposition. I can see the argument there – and if this “no cock ups” strategy is to be implemented across the board it may have merit. But at present this seems like a wild overreaction.

Now the story tomorrow won’t just be about Cameron losing a seat and an MP to UKIP, it’ll also be about a Labour MP resigning from the Shadow Cabinet over a stupid, thoughtless tweet. That lets the Tories off the hook far too much for my liking, and makes me question whether this couldn’t have been handled better.”

Thornberry’s tweet was an all too convenient stick for Labour’s opponents to beat the party. And the reaction from some in the media – both those who dislike Labour and those who are more supportive – felt at times like North London having a freak out about North London. Too much of politics is aloof and distant these days, but Labour isn’t the worst offender on that score and neither by some distance is Emily Thornberry. We should at times like these stop and ask ourselves why the right wing media wished to talk about a Labour MP’s ill-judged tweet yesterday, rather than David Cameron’s annus horriblis in Rochester. And perhaps we should ask too if Thornberry’s resignation didn’t also play into their hands, turning this into a full blown “Mrs Duffy” level event, when we should be focussed on Cameron’s rejection by the electorate.

Because last night was a shocker for David Cameron and the Tory Party – and we shouldn’t let our opponents (or ourselves) use Labour’s painful night detract entirely from that.