Prime Minister Boris Johnson has had a terrible month. On June 6th, he had to face a Tory rebellion which threatened to eject him from Downing Street. He only narrowly won the confidence vote by 211 to 148—a majority among his own MPs of just 59%, worse than the 63% achieved by Theresa May back in December 2018 when a similar Tory uprising was sparked by her unpopular Brexit withdrawal agreement.
Given her slim margin of victory, May’s position was untenable and she had to resign six months later. Many commentators are now speculating that Johnson, due to his even less decisive triumph earlier this month and with 41% of his own MPs against his leadership, is destined for the same fate. The consensus is that the Prime Minister’s downfall is only “a question of when, not if.”
Indeed, predictions of Johnson’s demise have only been strengthened amid news of the Conservatives’ failure to hold on to their two constituencies in Wakefield and Tiverton & Honiton. Won by the Tories in December 2019, both of these Parliamentary seats became vacant earlier this year and were therefore put to the voters in fresh by-elections held on June 23rd.
The results became apparent in the early morning of June 24th. The Conservatives lost Wakefield (Yorkshire) to the Labour Party and were completely trounced by the Liberal Democrats in Tiverton & Honiton (Devon). The only consolation for Johnson is that the confidence vote was triggered before these two landmark electoral defeats. Had the Tory rebellion been organized to take place immediately after such a disastrous Tory showing, Johnson might well have lost the poll among his own MPs and a Conservative leadership election would now be underway. A second Tory confidence vote could indeed take place, although it would require a rule change to the procedures of the 1922 Committee which oversees these internal affairs. Presently, the rules are such that a second confidence vote cannot be triggered until at least a year after the first one. But that custom, as the political journalist James Forsyth explains, can be amended by a simple majority. Conservative chairman Oliver Dowden has stepped down in response to the by-elections, writing in his resignation letter that “somebody must take responsibility” for the defeats.
In Wakefield and Tiverton & Honiton, the results were decidedly more anti-Tory than pro-Labour and pro-Liberal Democrat respectively. This voter apathy is reflected by the pitiful turnout in both cases. In Wakefield, there was indeed a 12.7% swing from Conservative to Labour, but only 39% of the constituency bothered to vote at all, compared to the 64.1% of people who took part when the Conservatives gained the former Labour stronghold back in 2019. Britain’s most eminent psephologist, Professor Sir John Curtice, explained on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that the Tory loss in Wakefield does not indicate “any great enthusiasm” for Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party. “The decline in the Conservative vote,” according to Curtice, “is more than twice as big as the rise in the Labour vote.”
The Liberal Democrat victory in Tiverton & Honiton, it must be said, was slightly more impressive. It involved overturning a prior Conservative majority of over 24,000 won by Johnson’s party in 2019. The Liberal Democrats’ candidate, Richard Foord, beat the Conservatives’ Helen Hurford by 22,537 votes to 16,393. Still, as in the case of Wakefield, turnout was untypically poor: only 52% of constituents showed up to vote, compared to the 71.9% who cast ballots in the overwhelming Conservative triumph of 2019.
The Prime Minister has vowed to continue as leader, claiming he understands that his government must “listen to what people are saying.” He referred in particular to the upset caused by the cost-of-living crisis, as well as emphasising the need to “cut taxes where we can.” Sir Keir Starmer argues, not very convincingly, that these results show that his own Labour Party is effectively a government-in-waiting. The Conservatives, said Starmer, must “get out of the way for the next Labour government because what happened here in Wakefield was people exercising their judgment on this Conservative government and voting no confidence.”
The important question is whether the anti-Tory apathy and unusually low turnout in the Wakefield and Tiverton & Honiton by-elections is merely the reflection of a difficult few months for the Conservative government. Or, more alarmingly, might these results be a harbinger of things to come when the wider country goes to the polls in 2024?
