The seat in Wakefield was held by Labor for 87 years, but the party lost the district to the Conservatives in 2019. Now Labor has regained the seat. The Tiverton-Honiton district was known to be conservative, with the Tories winning a majority of 24,000 votes in 2019.
The midterm elections were seen as an important test for Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative party. The Prime Minister has come under heavy fire in recent months for the ‘party gate’ affair, in which it was revealed that government officials in Downing Street, among others, and including the Prime Minister himself, were not taking too seriously the lockdowns imposed by the government to combat declared the pandemic. Johnson survived a confidence vote within his own party earlier this month.