Editorial: Back to Westminster
In the end, Yorkshire did not speak for England. The Haltemprice and Howden byelection will be remembered as a local curiosity, not a national sensation. Its progenitor, David Davis, has been sent back to Westminster, where the battle against 42-day detention can actually be won and he must adjust to a lower level of significance. Honour was satisfied by a turnout of 34% and a majority of 15,355 - good for a contest in which he faced no real opposition and, because of broadcasting laws, received minimal television coverage. But if extended detention is defeated in the Lords, as it should be, it will be because the government is weak and peers both resolute and right, not because of the contest.
The oddity of Mr Davis's campaign was that he felt the need to leave parliament to further a cause that already has underlying majority support in both houses. A good whips' operation and a deal with unionists that Gordon Brown insists was not a deal was enough to get the bill through the Commons by nine votes. But if the Lords votes against resoundingly in October, and sticks to that, the government will find it hard to win votes needed in the lower house before the Parliament Act can be deployed.
So whatever the motives for Mr Davis's actions - attention-seeking, unhappiness with David Cameron, genuine outrage at the government's illiberalism - he cannot have felt that parliament was doing its job badly. As a forthcoming Hansard Society report points out, parliamentary scrutiny is more effective than most people think and has got better in recent years. Few other parliaments in the world would give a government with a secure majority such trouble over a piece of security legislation that it believed to be essential.
One consequence of that, and of last week's appalling vote, led by Labour MPs, against expenses reform, is tension inside the Labour whips' office. That will not help a prime minister struggling to persuade even his own party that he should stay. But Mr Cameron faces tensions of his own, too. The Haltemprice byelection did not blow up in the Conservatives' face, as Labour had hoped - the Tory leader's handling of Mr Davis's departure was too adroit for that. But the once and future MP for Haltemprice stood for a strand of bloody-minded Englishness that has little time for the more highfalutin aspects of Cameronism - hoodies, huskies and general wellbeing. The ghost of Christopher Wyvill, the 18th-century Yorkshire clergyman who took on metropolitan Whiggery, hung over his campaign. In tougher times for the Tories such tensions could matter. For now it is Mr Brown who has all the problems and 42 days is not even the worst of them.