'Wellingborough, Wets and W*nkers': Many suspect it will all completely fall apart for Sunak this week. Again.

It was announced last week that by-elections in Kingswood and Wellingborough would take place on February 15.

There's not really much point in speculating over the results or what they might be; when it comes to these by-elections (or any future by-election for that matter), there's no point even speaking in a conditional tense any more. 

The Conservatives will lose both seats. It is inevitable.

This page takes an interest in the campaign in Wellingborough in particular because it is local to me [as mentioned here] but it also provides an insight into the ‘feeling’ in both local and surrounding areas of how deep the rancour towards the Conservatives goes. 

As it turns out, it goes very deep indeed.

Actually - 

Wellingborough is an excellent constituency for assessing the numerous problems that have been building up for months [even years] that have come to the fore under this modern incarnation of the Conservatives with the intrepid Rishi Sunak at the helm - mostly as a result of the ongoing cost-of-living crisis. 

I highlighted the problem when discussing Wellingborough in the context of, among many issues, the crumbling justice system here: 

Capital investment syphoned off to the private sector; staff retention and attrition rates in the prisons and probations service [which could translate to most other sectors - inc. public] alongside working pay and conditions; operating in a local authority that was already turned into a unitary council as a result of prior bankruptcy now on the precipice of facing the same fate once again in 2024; all against a backdrop of rising levels in deprivation, poverty, homelessness and general decline of social care services…

The issues are mounting in Wellingborough.

They are mounting in Northamptonshire on a much broader scale; neighbouring constituencies like Kettering or towns like Corby, all face the same issues that could easily be transferable across most other constituencies in the UK.

This is a national decline. 

As a sidenote, the area is, in this page’s humble view, the skeleton key to understanding the demographic fault lines - and seismology - of the predicted earthquake that awaits the Conservatives at the next general election, too. I’ll focus more on this in a future piece.

Beyond the inevitability of the defeat the Conservatives face in the area, however, is that even going into the by-election, the Conservatives seem to have resigned themselves to defeat. 

As noted before, they selected the partner of outgoing, disgraced MP Peter Bone to stand for them. If you are a political party determined to win, you should not be doing this. 

This is stupid. Really stupid.

Of course, they had to - according to reports, if they did not, Bone himself threatened to stand as an Independent candidate; effectively splitting the Conservative vote and making the inevitable defeat even more inevitable. It was likely one of the many reasons why Rishi Sunak himself refused to directly endorse the candidate. 

Funnily enough -