In the past few days, voters at opposite ends of the English-speaking world have squibbed opportunities to validate prevailing media narratives about the state of the electoral horse race.

When Britain’s first byelection since the general election in May was held on Thursday, in the Manchester constituency of Oldham West and Royton, the general expectation was that the result would repudiate a bitterly divided Labour Party and its radically unelectable new leader, Jeremy Corbyn.

Few expected Labour to lose the seat, but it was at least anticipated that the party would be run uncomfortably close by the anti-immigration Eurosceptics of UKIP, whose candidate had boasted that the terrorist attacks in Paris would prove to be a “game-changer”.

Instead, Labour’s candidate romped home with 62.1% of the vote amid what was, by the standards of British byelections, a surprisingly healthy turnout.

Byelections in Australia aren’t a part of the furniture in quite the way they are in Britain, where there are 650 constituencies rather than 150, and parties have not adopted the practice of sitting it out in seats they can’t win.

Nonetheless, Malcolm Turnbull has managed to face two byelections in his less than three months in office, and neither has delivered the ringing endorsement his standing in the polls might have led him to expect.

The Canning byelection of September 19 was held just five days after Turnbull made his move against Tony Abbott — which, conservative folklore would have it, was forced on the Turnbull camp by its concern that Abbott’s stocks were about to be boosted by a strong performance at the byelection.

On Turnbull’s newly established watch, the two-party swing to Labor was 6.5% — not worse than informed observers were anticipating in Abbott’s final weeks in the job, but not better either.

Saturday’s byelection in North Sydney differed fundamentally from Canning in that it was forfeited by Labor, whose candidate at the 2013 election was outpolled by Joe Hockey by a factor of three to one.

Nonetheless, the Liberal primary vote managed to fall from 61.0% to 47.5% — a result that has not escaped the notice of Turnbull’s internal foes.

Certainly the result is evidence of deep concerns with the state of the Liberal Party, even if the concerns don’t precisely align with those of anti-Turnbull conservatives.

The Canning result may well have pointed to a certain trepidation towards the new Prime Minister among voters on Perth’s unglamorous southern fringe, but it’s hard to believe this sentiment had much traction in North Sydney, which ranks second to Turnbull’s own electorate of Wentworth as the wealthiest in the nation.

What really seems to have stung the Liberals was their candidate and the manner of his preselection, and the concerns raised about not just the Liberal Party, but the political system more broadly.

Trent Zimmerman achieved the level of prominence within the Liberal organisation needed to secure one of its most prized seats through a long history as an operative for the moderate faction, in which capacity he helped marshal numbers in favour of Turnbull’s fateful preselection bid in Wentworth before the 2004 election.

That Zimmerman’s factional muscle had so much bearing in North Sydney was largely owed to the rejection of a party reform push when its state council met in early October, but for which the matter would have been determined by a ballot of the local party rank-and-file.

This reform plan was pushed by the party’s religious right faction, which is frozen out of the factional alliance that dominates the New South Wales party’s internal affairs.

Much of the angst expressed about Zimmerman’s preselection should accordingly be seen in the context of conservative outrage over Tony Abbott’s demise.

However, it wouldn’t take an ideological warrior of the right to find resonance in the accompanying message that an undemocratic process had served up a living example of what most ails modern parties: a factional machine man with no life experience outside of politics.

The principal beneficiary of the slump in Liberal support was independent candidate Stephen Ruff, an orthopaedic surgeon at Royal North Shore Hospital, who outpolled the Greens to finish second with 18.8% of the vote — nearly twice as much as he managed when he ran in the corresponding seat of North Shore at the state election in March.

But what really stands out from the result is that contenders who weren’t in the field at the 2013 election — two independents, along with seven micro-parties ranging from Liberal Democrats to the newly established Australian Cyclists Party and Arts Party – accounted for fully a third of the vote between them.

In this respect, the result can be seen to echo the recent form of Senate elections, in which masses of voters have proved ready to plump for micro-parties if only given a sufficiently diverse range of options to choose from.

Further evidence of this may have been provided by weak showings even from the established minor parties, with the Greens unable to significantly increase their vote despite the absence of competition from Labor, and the Palmer United Party taking out the wooden spoon with, by the latest count, 317 votes.

So while North Sydney tells us nothing worth knowing about Turnbull’s capacity to secure the government a second term, which is presumably as strong as polling suggests, it does indicate that the bolshiness that has encumbered the government with such a problematic Senate is not going away.