By John Owens

Well, that was no surprise. It seems the only sense of real interest here was not if but how. Were the Conservatives going to utterly bury Labour, or just apply a thin layer of top soil? As it happens, this was of the 6 feet under , sleeping in concrete, professional hitman order. Though not quite up there with the 17.6% swing at Crewe and Nantwich , 16.5% is still a pretty thorough demolition job.

Having made the six trips to Norwich , or more specially, Norwich North, Cameron had put a fair amount into this by election and through the effort risked bursting his own little bubble of hype- anything dramatically less than the 13,591 votes garnered by Chloe Smith and the Tories may have looked like they were unable to squeeze the trigger of a gun which Labour had put to its own head.

By booting out Ian Gibson, who, based on praise he got on Question Time, possessed the ethical clarity of Gandhi with the rebellious zest of Guevara, the government shot itself in the foot. Attempting to be seen to do the right thing by electorate, it managed to be seen to do the wrong thing by the constituents.

I’m sure Chloe Smith is a capable (and, at 27, a record-breakingly young) MP. But this was less about her and more about voters who felt robbed. A thick haze of frustration that surrounded votes, the Gibson issue makes it difficult to draw particularly sturdy conclusions from what the events of today.

As I have said, it was almost a bit of a lose-lose situation for the Tories- do well, and it is in a specific context that will not be mirrored in the coming election, do badly (i.e not win by much) and all this talk of a resurgent party will seem like so much hot air.

Conclusions, then? That the Tories did well, as well as they could have in the situation, is not in dispute. But read too much into this specific by-election at your peril.