There are plenty more local election votes still to be counted, yet we’re already told that under the beleaguered leadership of Rishi Sunak, the British Conservatives have suffered their worst results in 30 years.
Just before midday, the Tories had lost 96 local council seats and Labour had picked up 58. (There’s a live count here of the 2,600 seats up for grabs.) Respected election analyst Sir John Curtice said the total number of Conservative losses could end up hitting 500. He added that while “some losses were inevitable … the scale of their losses so far will worry the Conservatives.”
Labour has also celebrated swiping the parliamentary seat of Blackpool South back from the Tories, after a lobbying scandal involving the area’s former Conservative MP triggered a by-election on the same day as the locals. Sunak’s new candidate for the seat barely scraped into second place, with Reform UK finishing just 117 votes behind, in a relatively disappointing result for the former Brexit Party.
It’s worth noting that Labour also hasn’t done quite as well as it might have hoped. The party’s infighting over the Israel-Hamas war has seen it do badly in areas with large Muslim populations, for example. It could even fail to take the West Midlands mayoralty from the Tories because “the Muslim vote has collapsed” in protest against Labour’s Palestine stance, party sources say.
But journalist Patrick Maguire noted that while some of the night’s results may not be “without their complications” for Labour, leader Sir Keir Starmer “can worry about that when he’s prime minister with a majority of 150.” Some described this forecast as understated.
Sunak has much less to be hopeful about. Even if his party wins some of the closely-watched regional mayoralty races (results out tomorrow for the West Midlands, Tees Valley and the East Midlands), critics will have no difficulty pointing out that the prime minister’s candidates have made efforts to distance their campaigns from … the prime minister. For example, while campaigning for the Tory mayoral hopefuls, former PM Boris Johnson—who yesterday forgot to take acceptable photo ID to the polling booth, despite having been the one to introduce new rules mandating them (a bit like how he introduced draconian COVID restrictions, then partied on despite them)—urged voters to “forget about the government” and “forget about Westminster.”
The horrific results might nudge a few more Tory rebels into action, but Tory insiders reckon that the party will still keep Sunak as its leader—albeit reluctantly—until the general election, not least because the alternatives are no less useless.
