Keir Starmer is the king of the monster swings, beating Blair and Thatcher

The Wellingborough byelection was the Labour leader’s fourth mammoth turnaround, as the Tories suffered a record fall

The Wellingborough byelection is one for the record books. The fall in the Conservative share of the vote – an enormous 37.6 percentage points – was the worst the party has ever suffered in a byelection.

The previous record, established in Liverpool Wavertree in 1935, had stood for nearly 90 years, but the swing of 28.5 percentage points from Conservative to Labour was the second-highest since the 1930s, after Tony Blair’s triumph in Dudley West in 1994. It came on the heels of other Labour gains in the last year with monster-sized swings of more than 20 points: Selby and Ainsty, Tamworth and Mid Bedfordshire. Thatcher and Blair in opposition managed two such gains each; Starmer has notched up four.