Why Aberdeen South does not herald a Tory revival

Amid all the headlines about Andy Burnham winning in Makerfield and Keir Starmer resigning as prime minister, there was another interesting story in British politics this past week. In Aberdeen South, the Conservative Party won its first by-election in Scotland since 1967.

An impressive achievement in isolation, no question. But it has prompted a predictable amount of hyperbole from the Westminster press. Two-party politics is back, pundits claim. Forget about Reform UK and the Greens, the next General Election will be all about Andy Burnham versus Kemi Badenoch for prime minister. Things have finally gone back to ‘normal’ in British politics.

This is highly unlikely to be true for many reasons. The first of which is that the thoughts and feelings that caused the rise of Reform and the Greens (and Restore, at least a little) have not gone away. In fact, they are spreading to more and more people across Britain every day. The second is that the Tories are still in a lot of trouble electorally, and Aberdeen South proves that in its own, interesting way.

The Conservative Party has become a smaller party, a bit like the Liberal Democrats, without really noticing it. A party that no one thinks will be in government anytime soon, at least not with a majority. Its results since the 2024 General Election certainly suggest as much. They continue to be strong in a select number of places around the country, while being pretty much dead everywhere else.

Let’s take a look at the numbers. The Tories got 49.5 per cent of the vote in the Aberdeen South by-election. On the very same day, they got 2.2 per cent in Makerfield. In the May local elections, the Tories did well in specific parts of southern England (places that tend to be well-heeled), where the Labour vote has declined, and where there was no Reform threat.

Yet wherever they faced Reform as the main challenger in May, the Tories were completely destroyed. In Norfolk, they went from 52 seats to a mere eight. They are now fifth in terms of seats in Norfolk, one behind Rupert Lowe’s Great Yarmouth First. In the 84 seats contested there, the Tories only got more votes than Reform in the eight seats that they won. Again, strong in a select group of places, invisible everywhere else.

All of this brings us back to Aberdeen South. There are two big reasons why the Tories were able to win so handily there, neither of them good for their prospects of winning the next General Election. The first is that they ran on an extremely local issue on which they had decent credentials – namely, North Sea oil and gas jobs. This is a very Lib Dem thing to do, to go hyper-local and make yourselves the champions of an issue near and dear to the community. It’s not something replicable at scale for obvious reasons. In other words, it’s not a great ploy for a party looking to win at least 326 seats at the next election.

The second is that they are now seen as a minor party by most voters, which takes a lot of the former sting out of voting Conservative for people who aren’t natural Tory voters. A lot of people who normally vote Labour went for the Conservatives in Aberdeen, mostly as a protest vote against both Labour and the SNP over their handling of oil and gas jobs in the city. But they could do that because voting Tory doesn’t feel as icky to them as it used to, mostly because, in their minds, the Conservatives are a minor party with no real prospect for government.

A few years ago, voting for the Tories would have felt like an endorsement of the party in government. But now the optics for the party have changed dramatically. Voting Tory feels ‘safe’ for a lot more people – like an old-fashioned protest vote. This only really applies, however, in places where they have a strong local presence and can run on hyper-local issues.

I don’t believe the by-election victories for Labour and the Tories last week signal the re-emergence of the old party duopoly. In fact, I think we will probably look back on last week’s results in a few years’ time and see them as the last hurrah of the old politics before a new era truly began.

Nick Tyrone is the author of The Rise of Reform, published by Swift in September 2026.