In the No. 10 Bar of Blackpool’s iconic Imperial Hotel in this once-famous party conference town, there are photos of prime ministers going back decades and mirrors with their names inscribed in the glass.

And after an emphatic by-election victory in Blackpool South that his MPs hope will put him a step closer to 10 Downing Street in the general election, what price on Sir Keir Starmer joining them one day?

The walls of the bar are adorned with historic images of Conservatives from Winston Churchill to Margaret Thatcher, John Major and David Cameron, and Labour premiers from Harold Wilson and James Callaghan to Tony Blair.

Politics live: Starmer hails ‘seismic’ by-election win

Sir Keir shouldn’t build up his hopes just yet, however, even if he does become prime minister later this year. There’s no mention of Boris Johnson or Liz Truss, but then they never stayed at the Imperial as PM!

But the Labour leader will raise a glass to his candidate Chris Webb’s resounding victory here at the seaside.

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Mr Webb polled nearly 11,000 votes with a 26% swing. The Tories were trailing on just over 3,000, barely 100 ahead of Richard Tice’s insurgents from Reform UK and their candidate Mark Butcher.

No wonder Sir Keir described the victory as a “seismic win” and claimed it was the most important result overnight.

He’s right about that. After all, this was a parliamentary election, not the pavements and potholes of town hall elections, and produced a damning verdict on Rishi Sunak and his government.

Sir Keir Starmer is no Tony Blair. But there’s something of the late Labour leader John Smith about him: the lawyer’s forensic style and the values of decency and doing the right thing.

And Blackpool South, while the Tory majority of just 3,690 was a modest hurdle to overcome compared with some of the massive 20,000+ majorities Labour has overturned in recent by-elections, is a significant step on Sir Keir’s journey to Number 10.

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There will be massive relief in the Labour Party’s high command that the campaign in this by-election was ruthlessly efficient and there were no slip-ups.

In his victory speech from the podium, Mr Webb made a more political speech than many by-election winners. It was also quite personal and emotional, talking about his wife and newborn child, and his parents now living in Australia.

The defeated Tory candidate, David Jones, who had the unenviable handicap of being chairman of Fylde Conservative Association – whose MP Mark Menzies landed the party in a scandal almost as embarrassing as that of former MP Scott Benton in Blackpool South – was surprisingly upbeat in a Sky News interview just before the result was declared at 4am.

He claimed he’d been the underdog here. That’s probably true. But he more or less admitted that, like those Tory mayoral big beasts Lord Houchen and Andy Street, he hadn’t put Rishi Sunak on his campaign literature or leaflets.

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Defeat in Blackpool South means the Conservatives have now lost 11 by-elections since the 2019 general election: four under Boris Johnson, the other seven under Mr Sunak’s premiership.

It’s almost as bad as the 15 by-election defeats suffered by Harold Wilson’s government in the 1966-70 parliament.

Mr Wilson, however, receives top billing in the photos on the walls of the No.10 Bar in the Imperial Hotel.

It seems that in the Imperial, it doesn’t matter whether you were a winner or a loser as prime minister.

But after Labour’s big victory in Blackpool South, Sir Keir is starting to look like a winner.

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