Jacob Rees-Mogg drops baffling take after Kingswood by-election loss

Two more massive Tory majorities were overturned in the early hours of Friday morning, when Labour won two more by-elections in Wellingborough (a majority of 18,540) and Kingswood in Gloucestershire (a majority of 11,220) – meaning the Conservatives have now lost more by-elections than any government since the 1960s.

Damien Egan is Kingswood’s new MP, while Gen Kitchen won Wellingborough with a swing to Labour of 28.5 percentage points, which is the second largest swing from Conservative to Labour since the Second World War.

The Kingswood by-election came about after Chris Skidmore resigned in protest over his party's approach to green policy, while Peter Bone lost his Wellingborough seat following a bullying and sexual misconduct inquiry.

And now, as the Conservative Party tries to make sense of its tenth defeat since the 2019 general election, senior Tory and GB News host Jacob Rees-Mogg has waded in with some rather odd political analysis.

The North East Somerset MP, whose current constituency seat will scoop up parts of Kingswood and become Somerset North East and Hanham at the next general election, rocked up at the Kingswood count on GB News business.

Though his remarks to BBC News on the result raised eyebrows, as he gave his take on another humiliating Tory defeat.

He said: “It’s not as bad as I’d expected, because if you add together the Conservative and Reform Party vote, it’s more than the Labour party vote. Labour didn’t get over 50 per cent.”

Reform UK, the party previously known as The Brexit Party and led by Richard Tice (with Nigel Farage as an honorary president) had its best performance yet at a by-election in the Wellingborough contest, with 13 per cent of the vote.

It received a vote share of 10 per cent in Kingswood, which was its second-best result.

As for Rees-Mogg’s comments, Twitter/X users have ridiculed the politician’s explanation of what happened in Kingswood, and the idea of adding party votes together until you get your desired result, suggesting he may actually be expressing support for proportional representation instead of our ‘first past the post’ voting system:

And it’s not the first time that Rees-Mogg’s electoral analysis has required a double take, as back in May at the National Conservatism conference, he said his own government’s rollout of voter ID backfired as a form of “gerrymandering”.

“Parties that try and gerrymander end up finding their clever scheme comes back to bite them – as I dare say we found by insisting on voter ID for elections.

“We found the people who didn’t have voter ID were elderly and they by and large voted Conservative, so we made it hard for our own voters and we upset a system that worked perfectly well,” he said.

Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter

Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.