Wellingborough by-election: Labour overturns big Tory majority with second win of night
Labour has gained Wellingborough from the Conservatives, another big by-election victory for Sir Keir Starmer’s party.
Labour’s Gen Kitchen won 13,844 votes, while Tory candidate Helen Harrison polled 7,408, giving her a majority of 6,436.
Ms Kitchen revealed she cut her honeymoon short to campaign, telling Sky News the call to apply for selection came while she was on a Suffolk beach with her husband, dogs, and some fish and chips.
“We packed up the car and we went home. And we went ready to start campaigning for selection,” she said.
Labour wins by-election double header – live updates
Labour managed to achieve a swing of 28.5% – the largest swing of this parliament. The all-time record is held by the Dudley by-election in 1994 – which saw a 29.2% change.
Ms Harrison is the partner of ousted MP Peter Bone, who had represented the Northamptonshire constituency since 2005 and was re-elected with a majority of 18,540 in 2019.
He was removed from his seat last December after an inquiry found he had subjected a staff member to bullying and sexual misconduct, leading to him being suspended from the Commons for six weeks and facing a recall petition which he subsequently lost.
Mr Bone has denied the allegations.
Gen Kitchen cut short her honeymoon to campaign for the Wellingborough by-election. Pic: PA
Labour – which won the Kingswood by-election earlier in the night – had enough confidence for a party source to tell Sky News they had secured victory shortly after midnight.
Speaking after the Wellingborough result was announced, Sir Keir said: “These are fantastic results in Kingswood and Wellingborough that show people want change and are ready to put their faith in a changed Labour Party to deliver it.”
Ms Kitchen told Sky News there was “clearly an appetite for change and clearly an appetite for a fresh start”.
In her acceptance speech, Ms Kitchen said: “The people of Wellingborough have spoken for Britain. This is a stunning victory for the Labour Party and must send a message from Northamptonshire to Downing Street.”
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Labour wins Wellingborough by-election
Earlier in the night, a Conservative Party source rubbished the idea voters had swapped from the Tories to Labour – instead saying their support stayed at home following the “awful circumstances” of the Wellingborough vote.
Turnout was 38.1% of the eligible electorate – down 26 points from the 2019 general election, with 30,145 votes cast from an electorate of 79,372.
The by-election was seen as a two-horse race between the Tories and Labour, which previously held the seat in 1997 and 2001.
Labour needed a swing of 17.9 percentage points to overturn the Conservatives’ large majority – in other words, the equivalent of a net change of 18 in every 100 people who voted Tory in 2019 switching sides.
The Kingswood and Wellingborough results mean this Conservative government is now the worst performing Tory administration in by-elections since the Second World War.
Like the election in Kingswood, Reform UK – formerly the Brexit Party – gained thousands of votes and had more support than the Liberal Democrats.
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Safeguarding minister Jess Phillips has told Sky News that councils that believe they don’t have a problem with grooming gangs are “idiots” – as she denied Elon Musk influenced the decision to have a national inquiry on the subject.
The minister said: “I don’t follow Elon Musk’s advice on anything although maybe I too would like to go to Mars.
“Before anyone even knew Elon Musk’s name, I was working with the victims of these crimes.”
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Elon Musk. Pic: Reuters
Mr Musk had called Ms Phillips a “rape genocide apologist” in one of a series of inflammatory posts on X in January and said she should go to jail.
Mr Musk, then a close aide of US President Donald Trump, sparked a significant political row with his comments – with the Conservative Party and Reform UK calling for a new public inquiry into grooming gangs.
At the time, Ms Phillips denied a request for a public inquiry into child sexual exploitation in Oldham on the basis that it should be done at a local level.
But the government announced a national inquiry after Baroness Casey’s rapid audit on grooming gangs, which was published in June.
Asked if she thought there was, in the words of Baroness Casey, “over representation” among suspects of Asian and Pakistani men, Ms Phillips replied: “My own experience of working with many young girls in my area – yes there is a problem. There are different parts of the country where the problem will look different, organised crime has different flavours across the board.
“But I have to look at the evidence… and the government reacts to the evidence.”
Ms Phillips also said the home secretary has written to all police chiefs telling them that data collection on ethnicity “has to change”, to ensure that it is always recorded, promising “we will legislate to change the way this [collection] is done if necessary”.
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Operation Beaconport has since been established, led by the National Crime Agency (NCA), and will be reviewing more than 1,200 closed cases of child sexual exploitation.
Ms Phillips revealed that at least “five, six” councils have asked to be a part of the national review – and denounced councils that believed they don’t have a problem with grooming gangs as “idiots”.
“I don’t want [the inquiry] just to go over places that have already had inquiries and find things the Casey had already identified,” she said.
She confirmed that a shortlist for a chair has been drawn up, and she expects the inquiry to be finished within three years.
Ms Phillips’s comments come after she announced £426,000 of funding to roll out artificial intelligence tools across all 43 police forces in England and Wales to speed up investigations into modern slavery, child sex abuse and county lines gangs.
Some 13 forces have access to the AI apps, which the Home Office says have saved more than £20m and 16,000 hours for investigators.
The apps can translate large amounts of text in foreign languages and analyse data to find relationships between suspects.
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