So Thursday came and Oxford went to the polls
And made its coward vote and the streets resounded
To the triumphant cheers of the lost souls –
The profiteers, the dunderheads, the smarties.
From Autumn Journal by Louis MacNeice, (1938)

The electorate quite often gets it wrong, even if we are not meant to admit as much. It certainly got it wrong at the Oxford by-election held in October 1938, when the left allied itself around a ‘Progressive Independent’ candidate in the hope of defeating the Conservative, Quintin Hogg (later Baron Hailsham, of course). Labour’s Patrick Gordon Walker and the Liberal party’s Ivor Davies had both been persuaded to stand aside, allowing the master of Balliol, Sandy Lindsay, to take the fight to the complacent idiot, Hogg.

It was gown versus gown, given that Hogg was a former president of the Oxford Union and the election divided the country between the intellectuals, especially the lefties and the commies – the ‘pansy left’ as Orwell sometimes dubbed them – who wished for our country to stand up to Hitler and the commoners who were simply crossing their fingers and hoping Chamberlain was right, or had their heads buried up to six feet in the ground. This was a year before the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, of course – at which point the commies all of a sudden became pacifists.

In 1938 Oxford made its coward vote and Hogg, a pro-Chamberlain appeaser, won comfortably

Anyway, exactly as MacNeice had it, Oxford made its coward vote and Hogg, a pro-Chamberlain appeaser of Hitler, won by a comfortable margin on a turnout of 76 per cent. The campaign had focused almost exclusively on what to do about Hitler and the electorate delivered a resounding answer – nothing. My own view is that the voters quite often get it wrong, especially in general elections: I would suggest they did so in 1951, 1970, 1992, 2005 and 2024.

The Oxford by-election was also the first time the left had banded together under a ‘progressive’ flag, ditching the footling sectarian hatreds which usually drove them apart. I was thinking about Oxford while looking at the latest poll on the Gorton and Denton by-election and wondering if the same thing might happen at the next general election – this time not to stop Hitler, but to thwart Farage. The left is even more riven with hatred and division than it was in the late 1930s, though – so Gorton and Denton, much like the Senedd by-election in Caerphilly, might give an indication of what the outcome might be if they do not do so. And the evidence, I’m afraid, is that the leftie voters – today equipped with social media and 24-hour news – are showing every indication that they are sufficiently nimble not to need a formal alliance.

When the by-election was announced, Labour quietly briefed journos that they expected the seat to be won by Reform. I looked at the stats and thought no, it will probably be won by the Greens. I may be wrong about that, we shall see, but the Caerphilly Principle means I think it will be very difficult for Reform’s Matt Goodwin to capture the seat. At Caerphilly, the press was predicting a Reform victory and when a Survation opinion poll was published one week before the vote it showed Reform in a fairly commanding lead over Plaid Cymru, with the Labour vote having collapsed to less than 20 per cent. I read that poll and thought: no, Plaid will win, because there was still a quite voluminous reservoir of votes for other parties and they will surely transfer to the unspeakably ghastly Welsh Nats. So it happened: Plaid won with some comfort and Labour was down to 11 per cent.

The Gorton and Denton poll was allegedly commissioned by a Labour donor, and fortuitously it presented exactly the picture the party wished to portray. It showed Goodwin with a 2 per cent lead over the Labour candidate, with the Greens well back in third. This enabled Labour to do a kind of Caerphilly reverse-ferret press release, telling voters that the only way to stop Farage was to vote Labour. The accuracy of the poll has to be doubted a little as it was based on a tiny sample, possibly all of whom were members of the Labour candidate’s extended Greek family, possibly not. But if true it left that similar reservoir of 20 per cent to see the writing on the wall and, perhaps, holding a patchouli-scented handkerchief to their nostrils, decamping for the day from Green to Labour. The Caerphilly Principle again.

Of course all by-elections differ. The first and most obvious point to make is that Gorton and Denton isn’t in Wales – and so there may have been a stronger anti-English nationalist sentiment at work in Caerphilly than there would be in a frowsy suburb of Manchester. I wouldn’t bet on it, though, given that in half of the constituency the Muslim vote accounts for 40 per cent and they are not known for their pro-English jingo-ism (unlike the Sikhs!).

Perhaps more pertinent, though, is this: left-wing voters may find casting a vote for Labour far more objectionable than the voters of Caerphilly felt when opting for Plaid Cymru. This is especially true in Muslim areas – and the Workers Party, George Galloway’s old lot, withdrew from the contest in order to endorse the Greens. If you were a blue-haired nose-ringed Pally-groupie keffiyeh-wearing Green-voting nutjob, would you feel happy voting for the party which continues – just about – to view Israel as an ally? I have my doubts.

The crucial question from Gorton and Denton, then, with respect to the next general election, will be this: can Labour candidates be as effective as Plaid Cymru or the Greens when it comes to harnessing the moronic stop-Farage, stop-the-fascists voter base? If so, Gorton and Denton may prove as decisive and depressing a by-election as we have seen since, oh, I don’t know, maybe Oxford in 1938. The good news for Kemi Badenoch, meanwhile, is that a Labour win probably means a longer life expectancy for Sir Keir Starmer.