Mid Bedfordshire by-election: Labour wins seat from Conservatives
Labour has beaten the Conservatives and held off the Lib Dems to win the hotly contested Mid Bedfordshire by-election.
The seismic result has seen the party of Sir Keir Starmer overturn a huge 25,000 majority in a seat that has been held by the Tories since 1931.
It is Labour’s second win in a night of double by-elections, after also taking the Conservative stronghold of Tamworth.
The tense battle for Mid Bedfordshire was kicked off after the resignation of former culture secretary Nadine Dorries, whose long drawn-out resignation came in anger at being denied a peerage in Boris Johnson’s resignation honours list.
Labour candidate Alistair Strathern won 13,872 votes compared to the Conservative Festus Akinbusoye’s 12,680 votes.
In his victory speech he said the result “made history” and showed “it was time for change”.
“Nowhere is off limits for this Labour Party and tonight’s result proves it”, he said.
Speaking afterwards to Sky News, he said he began campaigning the Saturday after Ms Dorries announced her intention to quit “immediately” – although she didn’t formally vacate the seat for over two months after that.
He said the unusually long campaign allowed him to “speak to people and start building that connection and trust” in an area where voters were “deeply sceptical” of politicians.
“This was no longer an area that felt as though it was being treated [with] respect, both nationally and locally, by our MP,” he said.
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New Labour MP for Mid Bedfordshire speaks to Sky News
Labour ‘redrawing political map’
Sir Keir Starmer was also buoyed by this party’s gains – which come ahead of a general election expected next year.
“These are phenomenal results that show Labour is back in the service of working people and redrawing the political map,” the Labour leader said.
“Winning in these Tory strongholds shows that people overwhelmingly want change and they’re ready to put their faith in our changed Labour Party to deliver it.
“Voters across Mid Bedfordshire, Tamworth and Britain want a Labour government determined to deliver for working people, with a proper plan to rebuild our country.
“To those who have given us their trust, and those considering doing so, Labour will spend every day acting in your interests and focused on your priorities. Labour will give Britain its future back.”
The Lib Dems, who won 9,420 votes, also remained upbeat despite coming third place in a seat they had hoped to win.
Democrat Deputy Leader Daisy Cooper said the party had nearly doubled their share of the vote “which would see the Lib Dems win dozens of seats off the Conservatives” if mirrored in a general election.
She added: “The Liberal Democrats played a crucial role in defeating the Conservatives in Mid Bedfordshire, and we can play a crucial role in getting rid of this Conservative government at the next election.”
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Whitehall officials tried to convince Michael Gove to go to court to cover up the grooming scandal in 2011, Sky News can reveal.
Dominic Cummings, who was working for Lord Gove at the time, has told Sky News that officials in the Department for Education (DfE) wanted to help efforts by Rotherham Council to stop a national newspaper from exposing the scandal.
In an interview with Sky News, Mr Cummings said that officials wanted a “total cover-up”.
Politics latest: Grooming gangs findings unveiled
The revelation shines a light on the institutional reluctance of some key officials in central government to publicly highlight the grooming gang scandal.
In 2011, Rotherham Council approached the Department for Education asking for help following inquiries by The Times. The paper’s then chief reporter, the late Andrew Norfolk, was asking about sexual abuse and trafficking of children in Rotherham.
The council went to Lord Gove’s Department for Education for help. Officials considered the request and then recommended to Lord Gove’s office that the minister back a judicial review which might, if successful, stop The Times publishing the story.
Lord Gove rejected the request on the advice of Mr Cummings. Sources have independently confirmed Mr Cummings’ account.
Education Secretary Michael Gove in 2011. Pic: PA
Mr Cummings told Sky News: “Officials came to me in the Department of Education and said: ‘There’s this Times journalist who wants to write the story about these gangs. The local authority wants to judicially review it and stop The Times publishing the story’.
“So I went to Michael Gove and said: ‘This council is trying to actually stop this and they’re going to use judicial review. You should tell the council that far from siding with the council to stop The Times you will write to the judge and hand over a whole bunch of documents and actually blow up the council’s JR (judicial review).’
“Some officials wanted a total cover-up and were on the side of the council…
“They wanted to help the local council do the cover-up and stop The Times’ reporting, but other officials, including in the DfE private office, said this is completely outrageous and we should blow it up. Gove did, the judicial review got blown up, Norfolk stories ran.”
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Grooming gangs victim speaks out
The judicial review wanted by officials would have asked a judge to decide about the lawfulness of The Times’ publication plans and the consequences that would flow from this information entering the public domain.
A second source told Sky News that the advice from officials was to side with Rotherham Council and its attempts to stop publication of details it did not want in the public domain.
One of the motivations cited for stopping publication would be to prevent the identities of abused children entering the public domain.
There was also a fear that publication could set back the existing attempts to halt the scandal, although incidents of abuse continued for many years after these cases.
Sources suggested that there is also a natural risk aversion amongst officials to publicity of this sort.
Read more on grooming gangs:
What we do and don’t know from the data
A timeline of the scandal
Mr Cummings, who ran the Vote Leave Brexit campaign and was Boris Johnson’s right-hand man in Downing Street, has long pushed for a national inquiry into grooming gangs to expose failures at the heart of government.
He said the inquiry, announced today, “will be a total s**tshow for Whitehall because it will reveal how much Whitehall worked to try and cover up the whole thing.”
He also described Mr Johnson, with whom he has a long-standing animus, as a “moron’ for saying that money spent on inquiries into historic child sexual abuse had been “spaffed up the wall”.
Asked by Sky News political correspondent Liz Bates why he had not pushed for a public inquiry himself when he worked in Number 10 in 2019-20, Mr Cummings said Brexit and then COVID had taken precedence.
“There are a million things that I wanted to do but in 2019 we were dealing with the constitutional crisis,” he said.
The Department for Education and Rotherham Council have been approached for comment.
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