Whereas Labour had held the seat and its predecessors for about a century and couldn’t even finish in second place
Only the 13th time that the incumbent party have fallen to third or lower at a by-election
In the unlikely event that anyone’s interested in where this stream of stats I’ve been trotting out have been found, they’re from this voluminous article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_by-election_records