Labour party

In the end, the threat from smaller parties came to nothing, and Labour easily retained all of the three safe seats it was defending yesterday. In fact, they extended their vote share in all three as well. Respect could only manage a distant fourth in Rotherham and sixth in Croydon North, where former Ken Livingstone adviser Lee Jasper lost his deposit. Instead it was Ukip who came second in Rotherham and Middlesbrough, and third in Croydon North. Both coalition parties saw their vote collapse in all three seats. The Conservatives ended up fourth in Middlesbrough and fifth in Rotherham (their worst results of this parliament), though they did manage to hold onto second in Croydon North. The Liberal Democrats fell to third in Middlesbrough, fourth in Corydon North and eighth in Rotherham.

As teams in secure rooms in Downing Street pore over the half dozen copies of the Leveson report, which arrived this morning, the Liberal Democrats are already starting to work out what they'll need to do if David Cameron and Nick Clegg find they cannot agree on the government's response. The Lib Dems have approached the Speaker to find out whether there is a possibility that Nick Clegg could give his own separate statement following Cameron's own response in the Commons tomorrow afternoon. Sources say they hope that this is an unlikely scenario, but add that 'he would like to be able to make his position clear in Parliament' if he does take a different stance.

The Leveson Inquiry will dominate this week. Inside Number 10 they regard it as ‘the most difficult’ of the three big issues dominating their time at the moment – the other two are the autumn statement and the EU Budget. But I suspect that voters will be far less interested in Leveson and the Prime Minister’s response to it than the media and political class are. I’d be surprised if Cameron’s handling of it changed the views of voters—as opposed to those of elites— of him. So, on The Sunday Politics today it was striking to see Liam Byrne, Labour’s welfare spokesman, trying to turn Cameron’s striver rhetoric back on him.

As Fraser reported at the time, Labour put up a deficit clock on its website last month, claiming that the government was borrowing £277 million more during Tory conference than in the same four days last year. It based this on the borrowing figures available at the time, which were for the period April to August. In that period, the government had borrowed £802 a second more than in the same five months of 2011, so Labour assumed it would continue to do so in October. But new figures out yesterday show that this was not the case. In fact, looking just at borrowing in October, Labour was lowballing it by about £67 million. The ONS says the government borrowed £8.6 billion in October 2012, £2.7 billion more than the £5.

When David Cameron made his surprise announcement about forcing energy companies to offer customers their cheapest deal, he added, as an afterthought, that the leader of the opposition had missed the chance to be on the side of the consumer when he was energy secretary. I would be surprised if the average voter knows that Miliband was energy secretary; but, from Cameron’s perspective, the line of attack makes sense: energy prices and the cost of living are vital political issues for this government.

The Sunday Papers and the broadcast shows are packed with accounts of Britain’s fractious relationship with the European Union, and what that means for David Cameron. The Observer gives space to a poll, the headline of which says that 56 per cent of Britons would ‘probably or definitely’ vote to leave the EU against 30 per cent who would probably or definitely vote to remain in the union. The Independent on Sunday carries a ComRes poll on the more immediate question of next week’s EU budget discussions. The findings will give Mr Cameron a headache: 66 per cent of voters want the budget ‘cut rather than frozen’. The voters will be disappointed: a cut is a fantasy. Even a freeze is looking unlikely because recipient countries are likely to oppose it.

Of the three main parties, Labour will be happiest with today’s results. They’ve won Corby, the contest that was always going to get the most media attention. But, I think, there are things to worry all three parties in the results. Last week, Labour sources were talking about how the big two tests for them of the night were Corby and the Bristol mayoralty. In Bristol, they’ve been beaten by an independent candidate. Ben Bradshaw is already complaining on Twitter that this defeat can be put down, in part, to the party’s resource allocations for these elections; the fact that Corby was prioritised above everywhere else. The Police and Crime Commissioner elections also haven’t been great for the party. John Prescott suffered a spectacular defeat in Humberside.

Tom Watson’s Twitter feed has gone a bit quiet recently. Strange, as he is normally quite vocal about media ethics and their failings. But his silence is well-judged: when he stood up in PMQs and referred to a 'a powerful pedophile network linked to Parliament and Number 10' and referred to 'senior aide of a former Prime Minister' he started a massive and tawdry guessing game, just as the Newsnight investigation did. And was his evidence any stronger? Harriet Harman has just been asked on BBC Sunday Politics, and she didn’t know.

Team Cameron, as my colleague James Forysth points out, are rather pleased with Obama’s victory. Downing Street’s finest have been pushing the idea that Barack Obama’s victory speech echoed, word for word, Cameron’s constant refrain that ‘we are all in this together’ and that the 'inherited economic mess' is slowly being overcome. Dave the Statesman, don’t you know? Obama has his admirers on the Opposition benches, as we know. The Labour Party was out in force at the two biggest victory bashes in central London last night: CNN’s opulent shindig at One Mayfair and the tackier affair at the US Embassy.

Ed Miliband's One Nation circus moves on to tackle low pay this week, with the Labour leader calling for more companies to pay their staff the Living Wage of at least £7.20 an hour. One of his most striking proposals comes from the Resolution Foundation's Commission on Living Standards, which is to force top companies to publish details of what proportion of their staff are paid below the living wage. Though Miliband isn't hinting at raising the statutory minimum wage to meet the living wage - clearly acknowledging the adverse impact that this hike could have on job creation when the economy remains so fragile - he still wants to name and shame organisations which fail to sign up to a voluntary scheme.

There’s no such thing as a safe seat in a by-election as Bradford West demonstrated. But it would still be a major shock if Labour lost Rotherham, a seat they’ve held since 1933. But the three by-elections coming up after Corby—Middlesborough, Croydon North and, now, Rotherham—will test how much Labour has learnt from the Bradford West experience. In all three seats, Labour has a large majority and no obvious challenger. Respect are already trying to repeat their by-election success, selecting Lee Jasper—the former Ken Livingstone adviser and chair of the London Race and Criminal Justice Consortium—in Croydon North. Respect have already declared that he’ll be 'targeting' black voters.

Cutting the EU budget is a very good idea. Much of it is spent inefficiently and its priorities are all wrong, 40 percent of it goes on agriculture. Given that a cut would also be popular with voters, why doesn’t David Cameron propose one? The reason is that there’s virtually no chance of getting agreement to it. If there’s no agreement, the EU will move to annual budgets decided by qualified majority voting—stripping Britain of its veto. But Labour’s tactical positioning in calling for an EU budget cut has been, as Isabel said earlier, extremely clever. It has left Cameron defending a complicated position which puts him on the wrong side of public opinion and many of his own MPs.