The scale of the Tories’ by-election disaster dwarfs even Downing St’s grimmest nightmares

Kick in ballots

THE scale of the Tories’ by-election disaster dwarfs even Downing Street’s grimmest nightmares.

A 23,000 majority, blown away in a super-safe Leave-backing North Shropshire seat the Conservatives had held for most of two centuries.

Lib Dem Helen Morgan wins North Shropshire[/caption]

The winners, by a mile, the Lib-Dem ultra-Remainers who just two years ago came a lowly third after vowing to scrap Brexit without even a second referendum.

Governments often lose mid-term by-elections, but this calamity is of a different order.

It is the dire consequence of Boris Johnson sneakily trying to bend rules to get the constituency’s then MP off the hook over sleaze. The predictable result of illicit parties and other scandals at No10, of shambolic Covid messaging and his rambling Peppa Pig speech.

It is what happens when you are seen to have ditched core Tory policies: Low tax, crackdowns on illegal immigration.

Elected by a landslide, then boosted by his world-beating jabs programme, the PM has in a few bewildering weeks shredded a huge amount of the goodwill and authority he enjoyed. His poll leads have gone, handing ill-deserved hope to Labour’s rabble and their wooden, opportunist leader Keir Starmer.

It is terrifying rookie Tory MPs in former “Red Wall” seats. But it is a Christmas gift for vengeful and disloyal Tory Remainers, gleefully seizing every offer from the BBC and other EU-loving broadcasters to boot Boris.

He now urgently needs to fix it.

In the short-term he must send Chancellor Rishi Sunak out with a decent rescue package for stricken pubs and restaurants, deserted since Prof Chris Whitty’s impromptu outburst of Omicron doom on Wednesday.

Boris must then develop a credible long-term plan to live with Covid — and not be plunged by overwrought scientists into lockdowns with every new variant.

He must staunch the hourly flow of unforced errors from No10 and focus on voters’ daily concerns:

The soaring cost of living — with prices rocketing and our vast tax burden going in precisely the wrong direction. Crime, too. The illegal migrants cheating the system by sailing across the Channel.

We fear Sun readers are in for a tough few months. They need a PM focused on their lives, not distracted by crisis after crisis as his enemies drag him ever deeper into the quicksand.