Boris Johnson’s leadership faces a new threat after senior Conservatives accused him of losing parts of the party’s southern heart to the Liberals and London’s leading neighborhoods to Labor.
In a punitive series of local Tory elections, the party lost about 350 seats on the British council, ceding control of Westminster and Wandsworth in London to Labor for the first time since the 1970s and collapsed to its worst position in Scotland for a decade. .
Conservatives and council leaders have questioned Johnson’s leadership, calling for action to tackle the cost of living crisis and restore confidence after the Partygate scandal following a devastating series of losses through the Blue Wall in Somerset, Kent, Oxfordshire and Surrey.
However, the scale of the Tories’ reaction has been mitigated by a mixed Labor picture that has shown progress, but is still not enough to offer a crushing result for Keira Starmer in the general election. The BBC’s general election forecast based on Friday’s results put Labor in 291 seats, the Conservatives in 253, the Liberal Democrats in 31 and others in 75.
Labor had a very strong result in London and took some southern councils such as Worthing, Crowley and Southampton, winning about 50 seats in England. He also seemed to be doing well in Wales and took control of the Tories as the party with the second largest share of the vote in Scotland, where the SNP remained dominant.
But in the north of England and the Midlands, Labor struggled to succeed in the areas of the Red Wall that they lost in or after the 2019 election, despite a landslide victory in Cumberland’s new council.
Keir Starmer in Carlisle. Photo: Anthony Devlin / Getty Images
The Conservative headquarters was also backed by news that Starmer is now being investigated on charges of violating Covid’s rules during a campaign event in Durham, obscuring the waters for Johnson’s fine for collecting in a blockade.
Starmer said the results were a “big turning point” for his party. “From the depths of 2019, this general election, victory in the north, Cumberland, Southampton. We changed the work and now we see the results. “
However, it was the Liberal Democrats who had the most successful election night in England, adding more than 150 seats. They took control of the new unitary government in Somerset, formerly a Tory stronghold, overtook the Portsmouth Conservatives and pushed them out of West Oxfordshire. The Greens also performed well, winning 54 seats – more than doubling the number of their advisers – as voters also turned to independents and residents’ associations.
Lib Dem leader Ed Davy called the results “an all-powerful shockwave that will bring down this conservative government.” He described the result in Somerset, where his party took 56 seats compared to 29 for the Tories, as a “political earthquake” and said rural communities were tired of taking it for granted.
Ed Davey at Wimbledon Common. Photo: Aaron Chown / PA
There were also dramatic results in Northern Ireland, where Sinn Fein seemed poised to get the largest share of the vote for the first time since the Democratic Unionist Party suffered after the Brexit agreement.
As the results got worse for the Tories all Friday, Johnson MPs considered whether the result was terrible enough to justify a new attempt to overthrow him. Conservative critics of the prime minister said they would call over the weekend to see if the scale of the discontent was enough to defeat Johnson in a no-confidence vote. They will need 54 letters from Tory MPs to provoke a contest, and 179 votes against the prime minister to overthrow him.
Even if they decide to wait until Partygate’s investigations are completed before acting, a Tory MP from one nation has said there will be pressure on Johnson to consider recruiting more figures from the party’s centrist wing, such as Jeremy Hunt and Greg Clark. in response to the resurgent threat from the Liberal Democrats.
A blue-walled minister said: “The prime minister can certainly repel any threats from ordinary suspects who have never supported him and are simply trying to find opportunities to challenge him, hurting the whole party in the process. But the chairman of the party [and] CCHQ [Conservative campaign headquarters] they really need to explore their battlefield, because the election is here, in the south, not in the north, and it’s not all about Labor, who is still not making enough breakthroughs to form a majority government.
Robert Buckland, a former justice minister, said that as long as voters do not blame ministers for the cost of living crisis, the government will be judged by his response. “The danger for the government is that it will be perceived that it has not done enough to feel the pain and alleviate the people’s pain,” he said.
Buckland said opposition attempts to portray the Tories as heartless were gaining momentum, but would be even more damaging if their competence was also called into question. “That’s why I don’t think the government can just look at these results and say, ‘It’s okay, we can go on as usual.’ They will have to signal that they understand and offer more help. “
Wimbledon MP Stephen Hammond, who saw Democrats taking seats on the council at the expense of conservatives in his hometown of Merton, said: “It should be a bell ringing on Downing Street to make sure we focus on spending. Asked about Johnson’s future, he told the BBC: “I think he needs to prove his integrity to the country.”
Many ordinary Tories blamed Johnson for the loss of their seats. John Malinson, the conservative leader of Carlisle City Council, told the BBC that he had “lost some very good colleagues” in the Cumberland local elections and found it “difficult to bring the debate back to local issues” during the campaign due to Partygate and the crisis of the cost of living.
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He said: “I don’t think it’s just Partygate, there is a problem with integrity. In principle, I just don’t feel that people already have the confidence that the Prime Minister can be trusted to tell the truth. “Asked if Conservative MPs should remove Johnson, he said:” That would be my preference, yes. “
Labor has dismissed speculation that it is making no progress, saying its share of the vote has risen in key battlefields when measured against its disastrous performance in the 2019 general election. to win back to 26 seats that voted to leave the EU referendum, including Carlisle, Gramsby and Workington.
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