I woke up on Friday morning the other week to some unexpected news – not one but two Labour victories in the Telford and Mid Bedfordshire by-elections.

I wouldn’t have been overly surprised to hear Labour had overturned a massive majority with a huge swing to take Telford with the Lib Dems virtually signing a non-aggression pact but Mid Beds was a whole different kettle of fish.

It was gloves off all the way with all three major parties believing they could win and by all accounts, it was a pretty bitter battle.

What a lot of observers (and the bookmakers) had predicted was that Labour and the Lib Dems would split the left-of-centre vote, allowing the Tories to sneak in and take the seat.

It’s remarkable that didn’t happen.

It’s not unusual for the Lib Dems under leader Ed Davey to pull off outstanding by-election victories.

They seized the traditional Conservative constituency of Chesham and Amersham in a by-election in which Sarah Green overturned a 16,000 majority in June 2021 and then repeated a similar feat in North Shropshire in December 2021 when Helen Morgan overturned a 23,000 majority.

In 2022, they contested and won the Tiverton and Honiton by-election with its candidate Richard Foord, overturning a majority of more than 24,000 which broke the record for the biggest overturning of a majority in British by-election history.

The received wisdom is the Tories are irritated by Lib Dem by-election victories but not overly worried by them, dismissing them as mid-term protests by traditional Tory voters who could never bring themselves to vote Labour.

But last week’s results are seismic with the Tories losing huge majorities to Labour, the only party that can replace them in government.

Of course there were ‘special circumstances’ in those two by-elections. In Mid Bedfordshire there was palpable anger at the behaviour of Nadine Dorries, the previous MP, who resigned/didn’t resign/finally resigned after she wasn’t given a peerage in Boris Johnson’s resignation honours list.

While in Telford, the by-election was called when Chris Pincher announced his intention to resign as an MP after his unsuccessful appeal against an eight-week suspension from Parliament following allegations of inappropriate sexual behaviour.

These were ‘legacy issues’ the Tories were happy to blame for the defeats, casually forgetting the other ‘legacy issues’ of Liz Truss’s disastrous mini-budget, Boris Johnson partying while mishandling the Covid pandemic, VIP lane PPE contracts handed out to cronies with little in return and the absolute disaster of an ‘oven ready’ Brexit.

Or the ‘legacy issues’ of a broken NHS, a railways system that is barely functioning, a cost of living crisis, soaring energy prices, a devastated legal system, crumbling schools and hospitals and local councils going bankrupt.

This isn’t an exhaustive list and I’m sure you can add your own examples of 'Broken Britain' but you can see where I’m going with it.

Anyway, how did the Tories respond? Well, after lurching to the right under Johnson and basically being taken over by UKIP arrivistes, it looks like their answer is to…lurch even further to the right.

I read that letters of no confidence are already being submitted in an attempt to oust Rishi Sunak as prime minister and, heaven help us, there are calls for a new leadership ‘dream team’ of Suella Braverman and Kemi Badenoch.

There’s also increasing talk of withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights, thereby joining an exclusive club comprising Belarus and Russia.

And I’ve also seen calls from some people in the Tory hierarchy, who really should know better, that their route to holding on to power would be for Nigel Farage to become leader.

If that’s all a political party has to offer it has no right to be in power.

My plea to the Tory government is: Start fixing things, make the lives of ordinary people better and if you can’t, move out of the way and give someone else a chance.

It truly is time for a general election and then we can see what the people’s priorities really are.

On another topic, at the time of writing it looks like Cheshire East Council's strategic planning board will give the go-ahead for a new service station on the M56, run by the same company that owns Tebay and Gloucester Services.

I can’t begin to tell you how delighted I will be if it gets the green light.

Planning officers say the benefits of the proposed development clearly outweigh the harm to the green belt, bringing socio-economic benefits ‘including significant job creation during construction and operation, and specific benefits to the local economy’.

Regular readers will know I am a massive fan of Gloucester Services and I look forward to the day I can get one of their magnificent sausage rolls without having to drive hundreds of miles.