It is important, in the cold light of day, not to get carried away with the result of the Eastleigh by-election. The outcome of by-elections is seldom repeated in general elections, especially shock surges for smaller parties. UKIP is not going to come second in the general election.

There are, though, some straws in the wind, and pointers for each of the parties. The Liberal Democrats deserve to be congratulated for their victory. It highlights several things about them. They can still muster a formidable by-election armada, capable of carpet-bombing an area with leaflets until it screams for mercy. This has been their stock-in-trade for decades, probably since Orpington, and finessed by their by-elections guru Chris Rennard.

They chose their candidate wisely. A party with no black or Asian MPs might have used the opportunity to promote a non-white candidate. A party which stands to lose most of its women at the next election, and where the by-election came about because of a husband bullying his wife, might have selected a woman. The Lib Dems avoided both obvious options, and instead selected a white man for whom the phrase ‘bland and inoffensive’ might have been minted. The Guardian writer Patrick Wintour suggested that he is ‘dull enough to make stones play dead and birds fall out of the sky.’ Others dubbed him ‘Interesting Mike’, a nickname I sincerely hope no one adopts for the rest of his parliamentary career.

The Lib Dems prove the necessity of a political sub-structure of councillors to win parliamentary seats. In Eastleigh they hold every council seat. This is an important lesson for Labour: every council seat gained, such as the one in Wirral last night, is a step towards Downing Street. The Lib Dems also showed how they intend to run candidates at the next election in direct opposition to what their own MPs are doing at Westminster, as part of the coalition. They are simultaneously part of the coalition, and against it. Classic doublethink.

For the Tories, Eastleigh is a disappointment, but not a total disaster. This was not a Tory seat. To be beaten by UKIP must be annoying for them. The biggest mistake they could make is to listen to the frothing anti-EU forces within their own ranks, and the press, and try to out-UKIP UKIP. The Tory candidate Maria Hutchings was pretty much a UKIP candidate anyway. Her last day leaflets appeared in UKIP colours. Her rightwing views chimed with UKIP’s – yet she came third. Politics has been cruel to Maria Hutchings. It seduced her, played her along, spent all her money, and has now publicly rejected her. She left the count last night refusing to talk to journalists, surrounded by Tory minders. I suspect she will be leaving the Conservative party quite soon.

As for Labour – we may take some comfort from a spirited campaign, an excellent candidate and a share of the vote slightly higher than the 2010 general election. But doing as well as we did in our second-worst-ever election defeat is not much consolation. At the 1994 Eastleigh by-election, on the road to the landslide, Labour came second in Eastleigh, and the governing party came third. We were never going to win this time, but that there were no signs at all of a switch to Labour is a huge cause for concern.

The important lesson is that to win in the south, we need a distinct appeal to southern voters. It is a mistake to assume southern voters are the same as voters in Southampton, where we narrowly hold both parliamentary seats. Southampton is a city which shares more characteristics with cities in the Midlands and north than it does with other areas of the south. The southern seats Labour needs to win are in towns: commuter towns and coastal towns. Brighton, of course, is both home to thousands of London commuters and on the coast, and is rightly designated a city. In these kinds of places – in Sussex, Kent and around the M25 – Labour must break through, and the signs are that little progress has been made since 2010.

Labour’s old-time religion around greedy millionaires and the ‘bedroom tax’ doesn’t really resonate in the same way. The voters Labour needs to win over are not affected by welfare cuts, nor do they view wealth as an evil. They work for private sector firms, sit on trains or in cars for long periods, and worry about the mortgage. They’ve never heard of Tolpuddle or Aneurin Bevan. They’ve never been to Scotland or Wales. They don’t read the Guardian.  They’re nice people – you should get to know them. And despite what some Siren voices will tell you, we need them to vote Labour at the next election to win a majority.

The lesson from Eastleigh is that this aspirational, English, middle-class voter has yet to be persuaded that he or she was wrong not to vote Labour at the last election. The good news is that they’ve also rejected David Cameron, and may well do again in 2015. It is all to play for.

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Paul Richards writes a weekly column for Progress, Paul’s week in politics. He tweets @LabourPaul

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