One big happy family

This week: some notes on common ancestors; some maps of the ice age; but first, let’s talk by-elections.

Towards the end of Our Friends In the North, quite possibly the greatest BBC drama series about municipal housing policy ever made, one of the leads sets fire to his bed. When asked why he did it, he looks sullenly up from beneath a mass of uncut hair and growls the words, “Labour party.”

From this we are meant to understand he is in the grip of some kind of breakdown. So believe me I know how it sounds when I tell you that the Labour party quite genuinely just gave me Covid, thus forcing me to miss my own birthday drinks last weekend. It may not be the worst thing they’ve done, even this week. But I’m far from the only person to have come away from conference with some bug or another, so what I would like to know is when will Keir Starmer take some responsibility and actually bloody apologise?

Thursday. FFS. 

Anyway, Covid or not, that’s enough about me, what of the party itself? This has the potential to be a huge week for Starmer’s Labour, with not one but two by-elections scheduled for tomorrow: 

1. Tamworth, a largely rural stretch of commuter hinterland north of Birmingham, whose last MP Chris Pincher resigned in a puff of nominative determinism following accusations he had groped two men while drunk (a scandal which ultimately led, in a roundabout manner, to the downfall of Boris Johnson as Prime Minister); and

2. Mid-Bedfordshire, a largely rural stretch of commuter hinterland north of London, whose last MP Nadine Dorries resigned, so far as one can tell, because she and Rishi Sunak don’t like each other very much.

I’m lousy at predictions, even when not ill. But if I were pushed, my guess would be that the Tories will keep both these seats. Both are – let’s not sugar coat this – absolute mountains for Labour to climb. The party hasn’t held Tamworth since 2005, and would need a 21 point swing from the Tories to win it now. It’s never held Mid-Bedfordshire, an area that’s been Tory since 1931, and only intermittently Liberal before that, and would need a 19 point swing to take it this week. 

Neither are particularly natural Labour territory, and that’s before you get into the fact that they are exactly the sort of seats in which my beloved “let’s rethink the green belt” policy might work against the party. Or the fact that events in the Middle East, and the obvious anger in parts of the Muslim community, could depress turnout. Or the way that, in Mid-Beds, the LibDems are fighting hard to prove they’re the main contenders in the Blue Wall, and while polling suggests they’ll come third, the split in the opposition, too, must work in the Tories’ favour.

So, while those kind of swings are possible at the moment – have been seen as recently as July, when Labour managed a 21 point swing against the Tories in the Selby & Ainsty by-election – if pushed I’d guess they’re not going to manage it in one, or possibly both, elections. Those “leaked” Tory memos explaining just how badly they’re going to get battered have the whiff of expectation management about them to me. 

This would not actually be all bad for the forces of vaguely progressive politics. History suggests that all anyone will pay attention to is the result: a huge swing against the Tories which results in them hanging on by their fingernails is going to be greeted, on the right, with ministers indulging in a festival of complacency and self-congratulation and client journalists doing the Snoopy dance. I do worry that, as with the shift against environmental policies that followed the failure to take Uxbridge, an overly cautious Labour party might take the wrong lessons from defeat in elections that were always a long-shot anyway. But really: a Labour near miss in a seat like Mid-Bedfordshire is not in any way good news for the Tories, and I’m pre-preemptively baffled by the inevitable attempts to treat it as such.

If Labour does win, though, it’ll lock in the mid-’90s vibes that were on display in the giant petri dish of a conference up in Liverpool last week. In 1996, after all, Labour’s Brian Jenkins became the first non-Tory MP to represent Tamworth in the 20th century, when he won the South East Staffordshire by-election on a 22 point swing. If history repeats itself tomorrow, it’ll be very hard for the right to remain calm, even if the Tories hold Mid Bedfordshire. 

Perhaps then the Tories might care to roll the dice on another leadership race, as a little treat? Go on. It’s my birthday. 

We are family: some notes on common ancestors

One of the most mindblowing things I have ever learned concerns the “genetic isopoint”. This concept, also known as the “identical ancestors point” (IAP), or “all common ancestors” (ACA), is the most recent point in a particular population’s past at which everyone then alive either has no living descendants left, or is the ancestor of everyone currently living. 

In an individual family, this point is obviously fairly recent: the genetic isopoint for you and any siblings you happen to have is one generation back, since there’s no one in the direct line who isn’t an ancestor of everyone in your generation. For double first cousins – not as messed up as it sounds – it’s two generations back. For the human race as a whole, though, you’re obviously going to look back rather farther.

But not, perhaps, as far as you think, which is where it gets mindblowing. In 2004 a group of statisticians, led by MIT’s Douglas Rohde, calculated that the genetic isopoint was no farther back than 5300BCE, and possibly as recently as 2200BCE – a long time ago, sure, but recent enough that Egyptian civilisation had already been running for nearly a thousand years, had built the pyramids, run through half a dozen dynasties, and was now thinking about falling into the first of its nice, relaxing dark ages.