This by-election disaster presages a Tory apocalypse. The only way the party can escape annihilation is to slash taxes while tackling sick-note Britain and the migration explosion, writes STEPHEN POLLARD

Today’s Wellingborough and Kingswood by-election results are more than merely worrying for the Tory party. They presage an apocalypse.

Not just because Labour won the former seat with a whopping 29 per cent swing — the second-largest Tory-to-Labour by-election gain since 1945 — and took the latter with a 16 per cent swing.

But also because the Conservatives’ restive nemesis, the Reform Party, managed for the first time since its transformation from the Brexit Party to replicate its opinion-poll ratings in a real vote.

Leader Richard Tice crowed with some justification: ‘It’s a defining moment — we’ve had our best two results without question. It shows we are a significant force now in British politics and that people have got to take us seriously.’

Labour Party candidate Gen Kitchen shakes hands with Conservative Party candidate Helen Harrison after being declared the winner in the Wellingborough by-election

If, across the country, Reform starts to win a similar share of the vote to the 13 and 10 per cent share it took respectively in Wellingborough and Kingswood, then the result will be a Tory wipeout.

So you’d think that the dolt-headed Conservatives would have started to realise this. Wellingborough’s outgoing MP, Peter Bone, enjoyed a majority of 18,000 – and Labour won the constituency by more than 6,000 votes. The message is clear: Tory voters are deserting their party.

Why? Well, it’s obvious. The economy is now in recession, migration is soaring and voters are wincing under the highest tax burden since World War Two. The electorate are not fools.

Every opinion poll and every by-election defeat sends the same message: too many of us feel let down, even betrayed, by this Government.

And yet, as if trying to embody the proverbial ‘definition of insanity’, ministers keep doing the same thing and expecting a different result.

That was demonstrated again this morning in a bizarre round of interviews with Conservative chairman Richard Holden. I waited for him to recognise that the Government was listening to voters, that it understood things have to change and that far too many in the country feel utterly disillusioned. No such epiphanies came.

Labour Party candidate, Damien Egan, makes a speech after being declared the winner in the Kingswood by-election

The message is clear: Tory voters are deserting their party, says Stephen Pollard

Instead, Mr Holden seemed almost to blame former Tory voters for not bothering to come out and support the party. The real cause of the by-election defeats, he insisted, was turnout – a mere 37 per cent in Kingswood and 38 per cent in Wellingborough.

The arrogance and stupidity of this claim is beyond bewildering. Does he actually think for a moment that, come the next election, those former Tory voters who stayed at home yesterday will sheepishly return to the fold?

It may now be too late for the Tories. But there is, just about, a glimmer of hope for them.

Voters are fed up. It is time to galvanise them. Slash taxes, cut the endless expansion of the state and tackle the scandal of millions languishing on out-of-work benefits while mass migration explodes.

If they are to escape annihilation at the next election, the government must pursue this path – and give voters a reason for hope. If they fail to, they will only deserve what’s coming to them.