Rishi Sunak’s UK Conservatives lost scores of local council seats in a bruising first election for the prime minister, a result that suggests the ruling party is in danger of losing power in a national vote that’s expected next year.
(Bloomberg) — Rishi Sunak’s UK Conservatives lost scores of local council seats in a bruising first election for the prime minister, a result that suggests the ruling party is in danger of losing power in a national vote that’s expected next year.
The Tories lost more than 300 seats among the first 2,600 results announced Friday, a rate that could come close to even the worst-case scenarios discussed before the voting began across England on Thursday. The main opposition Labour Party gained more than half of those seats, while the Liberal Democrats chipped away at the Conservative rural heartland in the south.
The results, if extrapolated across the whole of the UK, implied that Labour could carry a national vote share of 35%, according BBC polling analysis. The Tories would have 26%, while the Liberal Democrats would come in third with 20%.
“The nine-point lead that Labour is projected to have over the Conservatives is the largest lead that the Labour Party have recorded on our measure since losing power in 2010,” said John Curtice, a BBC polling analyst who’s also a professor of politics of Strathclyde University.
With the bulk of votes from Thursday’s local elections yet to be counted, the early results suggest Sunak still has a long way to go to turn his party’s fortunes around after a chaotic 2022 that saw the Tories oust two prime ministers: Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. They’re also the first broad evidence that Starmer’s double-digit national polling lead is translating into results on the ground, which will give the opposition confidence ahead of a general election that Sunak must call by January 2025.
“Make no mistake: we are on course for a Labour majority at the next general election,” a jubilant Labour leader Keir Starmer told supporters in Chatham, southeast of London on Friday morning. “We’ve changed our party, we’ve won the trust and confidence of voters, and now we can go on to change our country.”
For several Tory MPs, the results confirmed concerns, discussed privately for weeks, that the party needs something more than Sunak’s promise of stability to save it from electoral oblivion next year. People feel nothing in the country is working and are voting against the Conservatives, regardless of whether it’s the party’s fault, said a Cabinet minister, who asked not be named while discussing internal party concerns.
The election suggests the post-Brexit political realignment that Johnson rode to victory in 2019 is shifting again, this time against the Conservatives. One veteran Tory official said it looked like a worst-case scenario in which northerners who voted to leave the European Union were returning to Labour while southerners who voted to remain were running to the Liberal Democrats.
“It’s always disappointing to lose Conservative colleagues,” Sunak told the BBC, while highlighting Tory gains in places like Peterborough, Bassetlaw and Sandwell. “The message I’m hearing from people is they want us to focus on their priorities.”
Labour made gains in the northern “Red Wall” areas of Middlesbrough and Stoke-on-Trent, where Johnson had seen success in the 2019 general election. Starmer’s party also won southern target areas such as Plymouth, as well as taking the Medway Council, in Kent, for the first time in 20 years.
The early results suggest the rest of the day “will be pretty brutal for the government,” Philip Cowley, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London said on Twitter.
The local elections mark the biggest test of political opinion in England ahead of the next general election, with Thursday’s polls held in 230 of England’s 317 councils or a total of 8,058 local authority seats. Mayoral elections were also fought in Bedford, Leicester, Mansfield and Middlesbrough. Northern Ireland holds local elections on May 18.
They are the first set of polls to take place with mandatory voter identification, which led to some voters being turned away from polling booths. The Electoral Commission said in a statement after polls closed on Thursday that it would examine the extent of the impacts and seek to draw lessons for future votes.
“We already know from our research that the ID requirement posed a greater challenge for some groups in society, and that some people were regrettably unable to vote today as a result,” the commission said. “It will be essential to understand the extent of this impact, and the reasons behind it, before a final view can be taken on how the policy has worked in practice and what can be learnt for future elections.”
The Liberal Democrats made an eye-catching gain in Windsor & Maidenhead in the southeast, winning the council from the Tories. The local election result bode badly for the Conservatives in Parliament, since the area is currently represented by two Tory MPs, including former Prime Minister Theresa May.
Read More: What UK Local Elections Will Say About Labour’s Bid for Power
Sunak’s Tories had sought to manage expectations ahead of the vote by embracing outside predictions of the potential 1,000-seat loss. But the results will be of extra concern because the Tories were already starting from a low base on the seats that were up for election on Thursday. They were last voted on in 2019, when both the Tories — then led by May — and Labour under Jeremy Corbyn took a hammering as voters opted for smaller parties and independents in protest against the Brexit paralysis that was then gripping Parliament.
Conservative Party Chairman Greg Hands acknowledged the defeat in a fundraising letter sent to supporters Friday afternoon, even as votes were still being counted in many districts.
“These local elections are a massive wake-up call,” Hands said. “If you want to stop Keir Starmer, then we have to come together now.”
–With assistance from Andrew Atkinson and Kitty Donaldson.
(Updates with projected national vote share in third paragraph.)
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