- Conservatives are losing control of London councils
- The results are seen as a test of Johnson’s popularity
- Poor performance will increase the pressure on Johnson
LONDON, May 6 (Reuters) – The Conservative Party of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson lost control of traditional London castles and suffered losses elsewhere in local elections, early results on Friday showed, as voters punished his government for a series of scandals.
Johnson’s party was ousted in Wandsworth, a low-tax Conservative stronghold in 1978, part of a trend in the British capital in which voters used the election to express anger over the cost of living crisis and fines imposed on the prime minister for violating of its own rules for blocking COVID-19.
The Conservatives lost control of the Barnett area, which is held by the party in all but two of the 1964 elections. Labor also believes it won the council of Westminster, the county where most government institutions are located, for the first time. Read more
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“This is a warning shot from conservative voters,” said Daniel Thomas, leader of the Conservatives on Barnett’s council.
The total, due to be calculated later Friday, will offer the most important public opinion picture since Johnson won the Conservative Party’s largest majority in more than 30 years in the 2019 general election.
The ballot is the first election test for Johnson since he became the first British leader in living memory to break the law while in power. He was fined last month for attending a birthday party at his office in 2020, in violation of the social distancing rules then in place to limit the spread of COVID. Read more
The first results showed that the Conservative Party lost 92 seats on the council. The main opposition Labor Party won 23 seats and the Liberal Democrats 42 seats.
The loss of key councils in London, where conservatives were nearly wiped out, will increase pressure on Johnson, who has been battling his political survival for months and faces more police fines for attending other anti-blocking rallies.
Thursday’s election will decide almost 7,000 seats on the council, including all in London, Scotland and Wales, and a third of the seats in much of the rest of England.
Johnson overturned conventional British policy in the 2019 general election by winning and then promising to improve living standards in the former industrial areas of central and northern England.
But the loss of Wandsworth, Barnett and possibly Westminster symbolizes the way Johnson, who won two terms as mayor of London, lost his appeal in the capital. His support for Brexit is worth supporting in London, where a majority of voters supported staying in the European Union in the 2016 Brexit referendum.
The result outside the capital will probably be less clear. The Conservatives lost all control of the councils in Southampton, Worcester and West Oxfordshire.
But the party did not do as badly as some polls predicted. A poll on the eve of the election said the Conservatives could lose about 800 seats on the council.
John Curtis, a professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde, said early trends suggest the Conservatives are on track to lose about 250 seats. He said the results showed Labor could not be the biggest party in the next election.
However, some local Conservative leaders called on Johnson to resign after the party’s poor performance, blaming his fine and the cost of living crisis.
John Malinson, the conservative leader of Carlisle City Council, told the BBC he found it “difficult to return the debate back to local issues”.
“I just don’t feel that people already have the confidence that the prime minister can be trusted to tell the truth,” he said.
Simon Boscher, Portsmouth’s top Conservative, said the party’s Westminster leadership needed to “take a good look in the mirror” to understand why they lost seats.
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Report by Andrew Makaskil; Edited by Kenneth Maxwell and Stephen Coates
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