Late to the party on Eastleigh

I don't like by-elections very much, they tend to dominate the political coverage for weeks and the result is almost always massively over interpreted. The Conservatives taking Crewe and Nantwich in 2009 was their first by-election win for over a decade but they still didn't win a majority the next year and their 20 point polling advantage turned into a win of just 7 points.

Eastleigh however was an important by-election for a couple of reasons:

1. Nick Clegg's position is now a bit more secure and certainly more secure than it would have been had Mike Thornton lost. As Peter Oborne rightly points out, Clegg is arguably the most important individual in the coalition because he keeps the Lib Dems on side. A much needed morale boosting by-election win, even with the caveats that we'll get to below, will calm his troops and make it less likely that the Lib Dems will at some point pull out of the coalition and cause the government to fall.

2. The Conservatives came in behind UKIP despite Maria Hutchings being a text book UKIP candidate.

Unless governments have a tiny majority, by-elections matter more for their effect on internal party dynamics and how the leadership manages backbenchers. By-election win makes MPs feel confident about their party and theoretically less rebellious, by-election loss (particularly in a relatively safe seat) brings talk of "a change of direction" (I.e. a change of leader).

On the surface the Tory candidate being beaten by the UKIP candidate, in one of the key seats needed for a Conservative majority in 2015, should be disastrous for David Cameron and produce howls of outrage from the right. But the reaction so far has been remarkably muted and unless I've been neglectful in my news consumption seems like far less than the regular feeding frenzy that took place before the PMs Europe speech.

So while the Europe speech (as I think I touched on before) didn't have any discernible impact on the Tories polling performance or Mr Cameron's approval ratings, it may have helped insulate him from the criticism from the right.

Which is why the candidate was so interesting. Even though her views seemed perfectly placed to appeal to what the Tories believe UKIP voters believe, her terrible poor performance helps him to say "Look! Going to the populist right doesn't help! We tried it your way and it didn't work."

So maybe the interesting story from Eastleigh isn't that the Lib Dems can hold on in their strongholds (as Anthony Welles points out, it probably proves the opposite) but that David Cameron may have done enough to diffuse the right of his party. Well for now anyway, the Budget is less than two weeks away.