Nick Cohen gets The Lowdown from Professor Tim Bale of the Queen Mary University of London, who is widely looked on as the UK's keenest academic observer of the Conservative Party.

The Tories have been left reeling and predictably even more mutinous by their  catastrophic defeats in last week's two by-elections in their hitherto safe seats of Kingswood in south Gloucestershire and Wellingborough in north Northamptonshire.

Not only did they lose Kingswood with a 16.4 % swing, where Labour only needed a relatively modest 11-point swing. They also lost Wellingborough, where the swing was 28.5% - the second highest swing from Conservative to Labour in any post-war by-election.

Tim - @ProfTimBale - discusses the shatteringly few options now left open to an incompetent populist governing party that is becoming more and more loathed by voters.  Seemingly, all they have left to clutch are the meagre straws of their deranged Rwanda policy and the tattered flag of a failed Brexit project. So, will delaying Rishi Sunak's inevitable day of judgement only make a terrible situation even worse?

Tim's latest book The Conservative Party after Brexit (published by Polity) charts the Party's dizzying descent into populist and radical hard right Brexit populism.

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