Nigel Farage hits out over UKIP leader Paul Nuttall’s by-election campaign

In Stoke-on-Trent, where UKIP threw the party leader and the kitchen sink at the by-election, Paul Nuttall was comfortable dispatched by Labour’s Gareth Snell, who won with a majority of 2,621.

The Conservatives have dealt Labour a humiliating blow after snatching Copeland in a historic by-election victory.

Mr McDonnell defended Mr Corbyn, putting the party’s difficulties down to leadership challenges and the division these have sown.

It was also the first time since 1982 that a governing party had won a Commons seat from the Opposition.

Labour beat UKIP in one by-election on Thursday in Stoke-on-Trent, a working class and staunch Leave voting area.

For Corbyn supporters who dismiss what they see as the undue emphasis on winning elections or poll figures, it might be time for them to scrutinise the parlous state of original thinking in Labour. Labour “is in deep trouble”, Curtice said. The vote was a bitter defeat for Ukip’s new leader, the racist and serial liar Paul Nuttall. The only feature of Labour candidate Gillian Troughton’s campaign was that she was against the Tory attempt to close Copeland’s maternity service. The UKIP campaign was riddled with problems – Mr. Nuttall himself was involved in several controversies: first over the validity of his home address in Stoke registered for the election, and second over comments that he made about having lost “close personal friends” in a 1989 disaster, where 96 Liverpool fans were killed.

Despite the despondency on the Labour benches, there was little mood for a fresh leadership challenge, with MPs fearing it would lead to a repeat of last year’s crushing victory for Mr Corbyn.

The contests were triggered by the resignations of the sitting Labour MPs Jamie Reed, who left for a job at Sellafield, and Tristram Hunt, who quit to become director of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

The seat has been Labour since it was formed in 1983, but its majority has been steadily eroded by the Conservatives in subsequent elections, dropping to just 2,564 in 2015.

Tom Watson reminded his party it must win 100 seats at the next election to overthrow the Tories and that holding on to constituencies like Copeland should be “the easy bit”. The hype carried on despite the fact that polling evidence suggests Labour have lost twice as many votes to the Lib Dems since 2015 than to UKIP. We can’t afford to have that happen in England too.

The U.K. woke up Friday to the results of two bellwether parliamentary by-elections. With Britain in the process of leaving the European Union and Theresa May increasingly adopting tough rhetoric on Brexit and immigration, UKIP are struggling to find a goal, resulting in the traditional Labour voters they are so desperately courting either staying put or jumping ship to a Conservative Party that has shifted to the right.

He was a stalwart of the Labour Party, frontbencher, cabinet minister for more than 30 years, and Copeland was his seat.

The Deputy Labour Leader told the Scottish Labour conference in Perth: “I never thought I’d feel sorry for Paul Nuttall – and I was right”.

“Both constituencies, like so many in Britain, have been let down by the political establishment”. Former Labour leader Ed Miliband has returned to the spotlight, emerging as the party’s go-to critic of Donald Trump, appearing on television at a frequency unseen since his trip to the backbenches.

Mr Nuttall had hoped to capitalise on anti-EU sentiment in Stoke, dubbed the Brexit capital of Britain after last year’s referendum.