Wow – nobody was expecting that.

Labour scraped through in Batley and Spen.

Dry the tears from your eyes and cash out those online bets. Kim’s going to close the loop and take her seat under the memorial plaque for her tearful maiden speech.

That’s a speech by a tearful maiden, by the way.

At least Labour will now finally have an MP who actually knew Jo Cox rather than the shameless shysters who for the last five years have been dining out on their fictitious relationship with her.

All the blather about a tremendous fight led by a great campaigner, though, is just bad spin in Spen.

This was seat-of-the-pants stuff delivered only by the full weight of the front bench, a candidate who had only an emotional connection to a former incumbent under her belt, and a Conservative candidate who never even showed his face. And all this rolled out during the tenure of the least competent government in living memory.

Still, a win is a win, but it hasn’t papered over Keir’s seismic cracks.

The defining moment of this risible by-election – unless you consider the dependance of Labour on the mediocre ghost of Jo Cox – was mid-campaign when some random bloke popped up and animatedly pushed Chairperson Kim for her views on LGBT issues.

Kimwumbaway lost her mental compass and went 0 – 60 in five seconds, berating the geezer for ‘shouting at a woman’ while herself shouting at a man and determinedly ignoring the question.

Oh dear. The mysogyny card never masks an intellectual vacuum, but you just can’t tell ’em. It’s a common standby for female Labour MPs to lodge formal police complaints about any online criticism, so you can already see how this one is going to roll.

It was an excruciating example of an inexperienced and weak candidate falling for the oldest trick in the book. A seemingly straightforward question with a touch of side that piqued every defensive insecurity within the candidate’s purposeless, token frame.

She just needed to answer it and put the guy back in his box, but she never even had a stock answer in her arsenal.

Swingingtheleadbetter was seemingly aghast, making the point that the antagonist was not from the area while seemingly forgetting that she is herself a complete stranger to politics.

Oh well, at least she was able to fall back on the key Labour policy of the campaign.

The good old thumbs up to the cameras.

Indeed, I cannot recall any clear political message from her supposed campaign. Such was her detachment from political reality, she steadfastly refused to speak to the press at all unless it was to an approved client journalist.

That struck onlookers as bizarre for a campaigning politician, but the Labour strategy was clearly to not engage. That was presumbly on the instruction of top political cuckoo, Sir Millionaire Kentish-Town, a Labour Party member himself for all of six years.

Unprecedented, though the Tory – if you can even recall his name – was arguably even less visible.

Joke Cox did however release a statement after polling slating the ‘unacceptable lows’ of the campaign.

She might well have been talking about her own candidacy. Labour would arguably have fared better by nominating Crazy Frog or even a Furby as a candidate.

All in all, it looked like a party hoping to slip in by default in the wake of their opponents’ catastrophic errors rather than by putting their best political foot forward.

And, arguably, they just about got away with it regarding the seat but not on a wider plain.

Putting up a terminally vacuous and clueless candidate and hoping to pull on the heartstrings of an electorate was desperation personified.

They won’t be able to pull that stunt in any of the other constituencies.

As if there was any doubt about it, Labour are so far out in the wilderness that they’d need a bus to get back to mere oblivion. People are even touting Flangela as a possible leadership challenger.

Guys, you’d be better off digging up Michael Foot and juicing him up with 240 volts.

Labour hard-centre-right droids have of course been rallying around Sir Drear, loudly proclaiming that ‘he’s going nowhere’.

Finally, we have more in common that what divides us.