A defeated and sleep-deprived Green Party leader Zack Polanski toured the media studios on Friday morning to explain his failure to stop a comfortable Labour hold in the Holborn & St Pancras byelection. One result in a safe Labour seat should not be over-analysed, but judging by national opinion polls his repeated vow to 'replace' Labour on the left of British politics is in serious trouble, as the 'Burnham bounce' in the polls is sustained. 

Polanski was already facing questions about his leadership after his party’s 'Zionism is racism' controversy, but he is not alone. On Friday it was reported that Liberal Democrat MP Charlie Maynard had resigned from his party's front bench to launch a leadership challenge against Ed Davey after months of flatlining poll ratings and an underwhelming conference season.  

Last week the Conservatives left their party conference in Birmingham in good cheer after an impressive speech by their party leader Kemi Badenoch, just as Labour's faithful had left Liverpool the week before. Both with renewed confidence that they could hold off the challenges from right and left.   

So as party conference season ends, and Parliament returns, does this mean that the old order of British politics has returned? Left vs right, Labour vs Conservatives, proving Tony Blair's famous maxim that general elections are 'won in the centre'?

Not quite.

First, political fragmentation is real. In the 2024 election the combined Labour and Conservative vote was 57.4%, the lowest general election total in 102 years. By April this year the main parties' polling average had fallen further still to just 36.6%, below Reform and Greens combined 42.4%.  Today’s rolling polling average puts the combined Labour and Conservative share back up to 47.3%, ahead of Reform and Greens combined 33%, but still well down on the last election.  

Second, multi-party politics (particularly in Scotland and Wales) is here to stay as the old class-based voting patterns continue to crumble.  Businesses can no longer rely on engaging with the two main parties alone.  On the same rolling average, even before the future impact of electoral reform, Labour would need the support of smaller parties to form a Government, and even combined the Conservatives and Reform would be well short of a majority. 

Third, the big change is the strategies the two larger parties are adopting to try to win elections. What appears to matter much more than it did in 1997 or 2010 is whether a party can unite the left or right of British politics, rather than appealing to swing voters in the middle ground.

In 2024 Keir Starmer's Labour secured a huge majority on an historically low (34.7%) share of the vote across Great Britain, as the 'right' vote was divided between the Conservatives and Reform.  Andy Burnham and Kemi Badenoch, whose parties are both polling below their 2024 vote share, know they have to see off challenges from left and right respectively, before they can hope to form a Government in 2028 or 2029.  

Last month YouGov found that since May, the share of 2024 Labour voters intending to vote Labour again has risen from 39% to 53%, and the share defecting to the Greens or Lib Dems has fallen from 28% to 18%. The Conservative polling recovery has been much less pronounced than Labour's since the spring, and in  most polls they remain third to Labour and Reform, but it does appear that Badenoch has stemmed the flow of defectors. Survation found that by last winter, only 64% of 2024 Conservative voters said they’d vote Tory again, with 30% going to Reform. Averaged across polls since mid-August, retention is back up to 69%, with 23% going to Reform.

So where does this leave each party?

For Labour, Burnham's strategy is to continue to attract votes from the Liberal Democrats and Greens (and the nationalists in Scotland and Wales), and to govern competently enough not to lose too many votes to the Conservatives and Reform.  Burnham's conference speech ticked many of the boxes for a Liberal Democrat voter: getting closer to Europe, electoral reform, and a future national care service.  So far, so good judging by the polls and the last two by-elections, but Burnham's early success could easily be blown off course by the US/Iran conflict, both in terms of difficult measures in the Budget on 28 October, and by expected energy price hikes this winter. Burnham has ruled out an early election, but he may rue his decision if economic pressures become even worse.

For the Conservatives, Badenoch appears to have moved away from a strategy of competing with Reform UK for those most motivated by immigration concerns, and instead to target younger, and more affluent voters worried about the economy and by the tax burden.  If the Conservatives can regain their position as the main party of the centre right, so the logic goes, many more Reform voters will be tempted back to the fold as a way of defeating Labour.  The first challenge is that as long as Reform stay above 15% (they are currently at over 23%), it will be very difficult for the Conservatives to win enough marginals from Labour and the Lib Dems to form a Government. Second, will enough socially liberal voters be attracted to Badenoch's party while it maintains its pro-Brexit, anti-ECHR and Net Zero-sceptic policy positions?  It will also be easy for Labour to scare moderates with 'vote Kemi, get Nigel' posters at election time.

As for Nigel Farage's Reform UK, the party's problems have been well documented, and only Zack Polanksi now rivals Farage for terrible personal ratings, but Reform remains in second place in most polls, and therefore a huge influence on British politics. If Labour struggles to navigate the economic headwinds successfully, a Reform-Conservative or Conservative-Reform Government is a real possibility, despite the genuine animosity between the two parties.

The Liberal Democrats who are hovering around 10% in the polls, now face a damaging leadership fight; have lost their status as the 'none of the above' alternative to Reform and the Greens, and having lost their deposit in both Makerfield and Holborn & St Pancras.  But their regional strength in the South West and South East means there a very few Labour/Lib Dem marginals in which to fight Labour for the 'progressive' vote, and so they could end up as part of a Labour Government even if they lost many of their current 71 MPs at the next election.

Which brings us back to the Greens.  What was also revealing about Zack Polanski's remarkable media performance last week was his stout defence of Jeremy Corbyn. Clearly Polanski believes his best strategy is to focus on the urban left vote alone.  By doing so he makes it almost inevitable that Labour will rule out a pre- or post-election deal with the Green Party.

Two-party politics may not ever return, but we are likely to see either a Lab/Lib or Con/Reform Government after the next election. Focusing engagement strategies on each of these four parties is the only sensible strategy.