RIGHT until the early hours of Friday, Downing Street was bracing for a triple by-election drubbing, wondering how on earth they would spin the painful blows.
“I’m not s****ing you,” one of Rishi Sunak’s top aides said. “We’re going to lose all three. No question.”
With his popularity ratings as low as Boris Johnson’s at the time the ex-PM was ousted, the term in Westminster was on course to end on a bleak note for the increasingly greying 43-year-old PM.
Despite some encouraging news on inflation, teachers ending their strikes and a major boost for Brexit Britain after car giant Jaguar Land Rover chose Somerset over Spain for a mega-battery factory, Tory MPs were mooching off on their hols down in the dumps.
No 10 dangled the prospect of a reshuffle all week to try to keep an increasingly strained Government on its best behaviour, but that threat faded away at 3am on Friday as an unexpected victory in Uxbridge quickly became a rallying point.