Sleaford by-election: Labour is haemorrhaging voters to both sides of the Brexit divide
Leave voters are sticking with the Tories.
This was an incredibly good result for the Conservative party. Its vote fell by just 2.7% from the general election last year, its best by-election result while in government since the Falklands War.
While last week's Richmond by-election showed the Tories are losing votes in Remain-leaning areas to the Liberal Democrats, in majority Leave areas, such as Sleaford, their vote is holding up amazingly well. Theresa May's message that "Brexit means Brexit" may have attracted widespread ridicule among commentators, but it is clearly cutting through with its intended audience.
The UKIP surge has stopped, for now.
There was some expectation last week that the selection of Paul Nuttall as UKIP's new leader could push the party towards big new gains in the Midlands and the North.
It is still very early days, but there is zero evidence of a Nuttall honeymoon in this result. In a seat in which 62% of voters backed Leave in the EU referendum, UKIP's vote share actually dipped slightly from its 2015 result. As ever with UKIP, its weak ground game may have played a part. With most of its membership in the South East, UKIP often struggle to rise to its potential. The fact that the party could not even get the name of the constituency right on its campaign banners, symbolises the problem the party faces.
But the bigger problem for the party is finding a new purpose. Since the EU referendum, May has moved her party heavily onto UKIP territory. Her speech at Conservative conference, in which she railed against the establishment, attacked immigration and backed Grammar schools, could easily have been written by a UKIP leader. This lurch to the right caused furious reactions from the business community and more liberal Conservatives, but it has clearly been a hit with the party's core vote. Nationally the Tories continue to retain double digit leads over Labour, with little sign of that starting to slip.
Labour is in serious trouble.
What is the point of the Labour party? That is the question the party needs to start addressing after yet another dreadful by-election result.
The party, which came second in last year's general election, slipped to a miserable fourth place behind UKIP and the Lib Dems. It was not quite as bad a result as last week's Richmond by-election where they party lost their deposit, but it was not far off.
Of course neither seats are exactly targets for the party.
Labour failed to win in Sleaford, even in its 1997 landslide, although it came close. It is also not unprecedented for an opposition party to do so badly in a by-election. The Tories also slipped from second to fourth place in two by-elections in the last decade, several years before they went on to form the coalition government. But it is not common and the problem for Labour is that such results are becoming worryingly routine.
But what both the Sleaford and Richmond results really demonstrate is that Labour has nothing to offer either side of the Brexit divide.
If you are an older Leave voter in a rural seat such as Seaford and North Hykeham then the Corbyn-led Labour party clearly looks as appealing as a sack of rotten fish. This would not be quite as much of a problem if the party was instead successfully appealing to the 48% who voted to Remain in the EU. But as the Richmond by-election showed, Labour is failing to appeal to these voters either.
In fact Labour is now in the unenviable position of losing votes both to Leave-supporting voters and to Remain-leaning voters as well. In Sleaford, the only major party to increase their share of the vote was the Liberal Democrats. As their Richmond victory clearly shows, Tim Farron's decision to position the Liberal Democrats as the unashamed champions of the 48% is paying dividends.
And it is paying dividends largely because Labour is so reluctant to make an appeal to these voters itself.
Jeremy Corbyn's long-standing Euroscepticism, combined with Labour MPs beset by constituents angry over immigration, is crashing up against a membership which is overwhelmingly pro-EU. As a result, the party is stuck in paralysis and unable to appeal to either side of Britain's new Brexit divide.