BRITAIN/ANALYSIS: While the Liberal Democrats celebrated a by-election victory it was another night of humiliation for the Conservatives, writes Frank Millar, in London
Good, just short of spectacular, for the Liberal Democrats. Yet "satisfactory" for Labour, and "disastrous" for the Conservatives.
That was Health Secretary John Reid's take yesterday on the outcome of the Leicester South and Birmingham Hodge Hill by-elections. And on this occasion not even Conservative leader Michael Howard could accuse the minister of "spinning" his way out of trouble. For barely 10 months before an expected general election, the main opposition party trailed a poor third in seats where it came second last time.
A 21.46 per cent swing helped the Liberal Democrat's Parmjit Singh Gill overturn Labour's previously "safe" 13,000 majority in Leicester. An even bigger 26.75 per cent in Birmingham took the Lib Dem challenger to within just 460 votes of pulling off the double, while George Galloway's anti-war party, Respect, saved its deposit in both constituencies.
Labour called these by-elections quickly to prevent a Lib Dem bandwagon developing over the summer.
Yet given the circumstances of the week - renewed tensions between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown over the leadership, the damning revelations in the Butler report, and lingering questions about the Chancellor's capacity to keep spending without further tax rises - Labour could still have contrived to lose both seats.
The point is that they were only ever going to lose to the Lib Dems. Disillusionment with the Blair government is deep and wide. There is a protest vote "out there" to be won - and it is going to Charles Kennedy's party.
More worrying still for the Conservatives is that defeat in Hodge Hill - which the party held briefly in the 1970s - came despite an energetic and professional campaign.
Some 150 MPs visited the constituency over the past three weeks. Workers were delivering the last of hundreds of thousands of items of campaign literature at 3 a.m. on Thursday, hours before the polling stations opened.
Yet their experience, confirmed by one party manager yesterday, was that they could make "no connection" with the people in a constituency where the Liberal Democrats have been working the ground and the streets for 20 years. Or, as another campaign worker put it more succinctly: "We've got no f****** message, that's the problem." Nor was it that they failed to divine the issues of greatest local concern. While the war might have played more heavily in Leicester, the Lib Dems, like the Tories, also fought Hodge Hill on the familiar terrain of crime, health and education.
The Conservative problem, rather, appears to be that people simply don't understand their talk of health and education "passports." As brutally told yesterday by dismayed supporters, the message is simple: the voters think many senior Tories still live in a different world from the rest of us, and hear nothing that persuades them Mr Howard's party can, or will, do anything for them.
Years of Conservative organisational neglect, too, have contributed to what Mr Kennedy reads in his party's Leicester victory - the arrival of "two-party politics" in Britain's cities. It is impossible to conceive the Conservatives as an alternative government-in-waiting while they remain so conspicuously out of that fight.
Where Mr Kennedy is gilding the lily somewhat is in his prediction that the Lib Dems can now convincingly carry the challenge to Labour in a general election.
He knows that many of his party's best prospects lie in Conservative marginals, while any sort of Tory revival in a general election could see the Lib Dems actually losing seats.
They may be able to hold on to Leicester South next time, but it will still be very difficult for them to penetrate the Labour heartlands. That said, Mr Kennedy's advance should send a mighty tremor through the Labour establishment.
Mr Blair might hope the war will be forgotten come the election, that a successful transition to democracy there will liberate him to win a third term on the domestic agenda.
However, 12 months after Dr David Kelly took his last tragic walk in an Oxfordshire wood, "the war" remains shorthand for the public's loss of trust in the prime minister.
And for all the vindication ministers can find in Lord Butler's report, it has fuelled the belief that Mr Blair took the country to war on a false prospectus.
Dr Reid certainly was "spinning" yesterday when he claimed Lord Butler's verdict had cleared the government of acting in "bad faith" or with "bad judgment." True, the government was acquitted of "deliberate distortion" or "culpable negligence".
However Lord Butler's remit specifically prevented him from addressing the political judgments behind the decision to go to war - which was why Mr Kennedy refused to participate in the inquiry.
As for bad faith? In a biting comment yesterday, former Conservative foreign secretary Lord (Douglas) Hurd (who had combined opposition to the war with admiration for what Mr Blair was attempting in Europe) said Mr Blair was defending himself against an accusation no one makes: "We all know that he deceived himself first."
Courtesy of Lord Butler, even supporters of the war now know that Downing Street stretched thin and limited intelligence to "the outer limits", and compromised the intelligence services in the process.
Hence Mr Howard's potentially deadly observation on Wednesday that if Mr Blair divined another threat, the country would not believe him.
If only they had not supported the war so enthusiastically in the first place, the Conservatives would find the political landscape already transformed.
That is Mr Howard's difficulty, and Mr Kennedy's opportunity.