If Boris Johnson’s Conservative critics were waiting for proof that “partygate” and a U.K. cost of living crisis have damaged his premiership beyond repair, Thursday’s local elections did not provide it.
The prime minister’s ruling Tories did indeed suffer losses — most notably in London where it lost two totemic councils, Wandsworth and Westminster, to Keir Starmer’s opposition Labour party — but not on the scale feared by some in the party after months of turmoil in Downing Street.
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Johnson will be buoyed by Labour’s failure to make emphatic advances in key districts of northern England and the Midlands, where the prime minister’s appeal among voters gives him so much sway in the Tory party.
Results as of Friday afternoon put the Conservatives on course to lose about a quarter of their seats up for grabs in England and Wales, below predictions. Electoral Calculus had projected they would lose about a third.
All of which means that for now, the premier is safe in his job: in interviews with Tory MPs as the results filtered through, there was no sense of any imminent rush to call for a leadership contest.
Yet there were still warning signs for Johnson, and the picture that emerges is of a prime minister limping along without enthusiastic backing. Speaking privately, several Tories said Johnson had put the party in a perilous position.
Ousted Tory councilors were quick to blame Johnson and the various scandals surrounding him, including being fined for a birthday party in the pandemic — making him the first sitting premier found to have broken the law.
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More worrying for Johnson will be criticism of his overall strategy. Two senior Tories, one current and one former minister, said the real battleground ahead of the next general election — due by 2024 at the latest — is in affluent southern England, where surging support for the Liberal Democrats showed that middle-class Britons are turning their backs on the prime minister’s party.
Johnson has made it a priority to “level up” the country, by focusing investment in northern England where seats in former Labour “red wall” heartlands swung to his Tories in the general election in 2019. That helped Johnson to a large parliamentary majority, and he aims to keep that support.
Yet the strategy carries risks for some Tory MPs. The Liberal Democrats have won two recent parliamentary elections in what were regarded as very safe rural Tory seats: Chesham and Amersham, southeast England, and North Shropshire in the West Midlands.
In Thursday’s vote, the Liberal Democrats added more English council seats than any other party. The trend is likely to worry Conservative strategists, given some prominent Tories including Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab hold parliamentary seats that will be key Liberal Democrat targets in a general election.
The Green Party also made gains across England, taking seats from the Tories.
The prime minister conceded it had been a “tough night” in some parts of the country. His party not only lost control of Wandsworth Council — an iconic London authority that was a favorite of Margaret Thatcher — and Westminster, where the Houses of Parliament are based. It also ceded power to Labour in the London borough of Barnet, and in the southern city of Southampton.
The Conservatives had been bracing for major losses, as local elections typically offer voters the chance to lodge a mid-term protest against the government. Johnson had given them plenty ammunition with “partygate.”
Starmer called the elections a “massive turning point” and said Labour is “back on track now for the general election” after a crushing defeat in 2019 under Jeremy Corbyn. The party captured the new regional authority of Cumberland in northwest England, which includes the town of Workington that became emblematic of Johnson’s gains in 2019.
Overall, though, the results are likely to disappoint the party’s strategists. Starmer’s problems mounted further on Friday when police in Durham, northeast England, announced they will investigate him over claims that he too had broken coronavirus regulations.
Labour’s struggles play into Johnson’s hands, removing an obvious rallying cry for would-be Tory rebels. Having fended off efforts to oust him just weeks ago — aided by a shift in focus to Ukraine — the premier has been trying to show colleagues he’s still the leader they want heading into the next national vote.
Conservative Party Chairman Oliver Dowden told Sky News it was not time for a new leader, and that the results across the country proved Labour was “certainly not on the path to power.”