Politics is a funny business. For 10 days now the talk in Westminster has been how Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer has been laid low, first by a u-turn on plans for green investment in the first term of a Labour government last week and then by the more recent re-emergence of claims of anti-Semitism among the party's future Parliamentarians.
Not surprisingly the Conservatives have been quick to pounce on these missteps as evidence that Labour is not fit for government.
Yet despite all this, it appears that large parts of the country are not really listening, judging by Labour's resounding overnight wins in the Wellingborough and Kingswood by-elections.
These results will be deeply worrying for Rishi Sunak and his team, as they suggest that voters have turned the Tory volume knob down to zero and are only really paying attention to the Labour Party.
Sunak’s efforts to keep the Tories in power after the general election have never looked more challenging
PA
The Tory message - as set out by Sunak at Monday's People's Forum for GB News - has been not to risk the progress made by Sunak to turn around the country's fortunes by risking it all with a Labour government.
Yet that is a difficult message to land when the status quo under the Tories appears so unpalatable, with the country slumping into recessions, millions waiting for NHS treatment and interest rates punishing mortgage holders.
The mood here in Wellingborough is that voters feel things are not working for them, and they want to blame someone.
Little wonder that the new MP for Wellingborough, Labour's Gen Kitchen, tapped into this when she said that she would spend her time at Westminster arguing vociferously for more spending on potholes.
Sunak's hope is that at the general election the Tories who have been sitting on their hands over the past two years will come out in support of the governing party, amid concern about what Labour might do in Government.
Yet his job is made even more challenging by the rise of Reform UK, which took 10.3 per cent and 13 per cent of the votes in Kingswood and Wellingborough respectively.
This is impressive, considering that Reform does not own data on where their supporters live from years of canvassing, unlike the main parties, and that Reform's predecessor - the Brexit Party - did not stand a candidate in either seat at the 2019 general election.
Reform now feels that it is on the march, although critics point out that the party did not take more than the 19.6 per cent of the vote won by the UK Independence Party under Nigel Farage at the 2015 general election.
The question now is whether Reform's strong showing in the by-elections are a staging post or a high water mark. The party might need the injection of a certain Nigel Farage in a hands-on leadership role to go any higher in the polls.
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Were that to happen, and Reform UK surged even higher, then the prospect of Tory MPs defecting, possibly "in a block" to Reform, becomes a real possibility, Reform sources tell me.
Some told me they are "amazed" by the number of Conservative MPs who are now in talks with Reform about switching sides. Until now I had discounted the possibility of defections to the Reform from the Tory backbenches. Not any more. Sunak’s efforts to keep the Tories in power after the general election have never looked more challenging.
