A nasty shock for the Lib Dems

Nigel Farage and his band of merry men were the story of yesterday’s local elections and also of the byelection in South Shields. Yesterday this blog pointed to figures published by Peter Kellner of YouGov suggesting that Ukip would take around 22 per cent of the vote in the local council elections. Ukip ended up coming closer to 26 per cent in the wards where it fielded candidates.

Labour has held South Shields since the 1930s, and yesterday it won comfortably with 12,493 votes. But Ukip’s second place (5,988 votes), which pushed the Conservatives into third place (2,857), was a very strong advance for the party. Jokes abounded about how, if the Tories had not split the Ukip vote, Farage’s party might have won.

Some hesitation is required, however. As Nick Robinson pointed out on the Today programme, Ukip did not wake up this morning with any MPs in the Commons. They are still much smaller than any of the three main parties, and Nigel Farage is a very long way indeed from Downing Street.

So perhaps the real story of this election is not Ukip, but another party, one that came somewhat lower down the rankings than Ukip in both the council elections and in South Shields; that placed in seventh position in the byelection; that came in lower even than the BNP and two independent candidates; that registered a feeble 352 votes—with Howling Laud Hope of The Official Monster Raving Loony Party nipping at its heels with 197.

That party is the Liberal Democrats, for whom South Shields will act like a bucket of icy water down the back of the neck.

“We would freely admit that it was not a good result,” a Liberal Democrat spokesman said over the phone. In the background there was a sound like a herd of stampeding animals—frantic activity. “But there are many examples of government parties losing their deposits as we did there.”

That a party of government should lose its deposit is an unthinkable failure. In the Lib Dems’ defence, the spokesman pointed out that the party had held Eastleigh, Chris Huhne’s former seat, in a February byelection and had done so convincingly. A fair point. But even the most hardened Lib Dem fan would concede that pointing to a constituency from which a former potential party leader has been hauled off to jail and flogging it as a good news story has about it the faint whiff of desperation.

The South Shields result is a nasty shock for the Lib Dems, or as the spokesman preferred to put it: “Of course it’s disappointing. No doubt about it.” The problem for Clegg is that a large number of his party might also regard it as disappointing. Worse, they might even start looking for someone to blame.