LONDON – Britain’s ruling Conservative Party lost two strategically important parliamentary seats in the election on Thursday, dealing a damaging blow to Prime Minister Boris Johnson and raising new doubts about his scandal-battered leadership.
Voters in Wakefield, a faded industrial town in West Yorkshire, and in Tiverton and Honiton, a rural area in the south west of England that is the heart of the party, evicted the Conservative Party from seats that had become vacant after lawmakers were brought down by their own scandals. †
In Wakefield, the Labor Party took a widely anticipated victory, by a comfortable margin over the Conservatives, in results announced early Friday morning. In the south, which was seen as a throw-in, the Liberal Democrat party won a huge conservative majority in the last election to win the seat, also by a solid margin.
The double defeat is a sharp rebuke to Mr Johnson, who survived a vote of no confidence in his party earlier this month, accelerated by a scandal over illegal parties held in Downing Street during the coronavirus pandemic. It is likely to revive discussion on a new vote of no-confidence, although under current party rules, Johnson will not face another challenge until June next year.
The defeats exposed Conservative vulnerabilities on two fronts: the so-called “red wall”, England’s industrial north, where Mr Johnson shattered a traditional Labor stronghold in the 2019 general election, and in the south west, a traditional Tory stronghold often called the “blue wall”.
As bleak as the electoral prospects for the Conservatives look, they could deteriorate further next year, with inflation galloping, rate hikes and Britain almost certainly headed for recession.
In Tiverton, where the Liberals won 53 percent of the vote and the Conservatives 38 percent, the victorious candidate, Richard Foord, said the result would “send a shockwave through British politics”.
Although the political contours of the two districts are very different, they share a common element: a conservative legislator who resigned in disgrace. In Tiverton and Honiton, Neil Parish retired in April after admitting to watching pornography on his phone while in parliament. In Wakefield, Imran Ahmad Khan was sentenced to 18 months in prison in May after being convicted of sexually assaulting a teenager.
Khan’s legal troubles, including multiple failed attempts to have his case heard in secret, meant that Wakefield had no functioning representative in parliament for two years. As a result, people in the city became deeply disillusioned, analysts said, not only about Mr Khan but also about politics in general.
“The whole unfortunate situation is about a broken political system that ignores voters and their wishes and politicians not doing the right thing or serving the people who brought them to power,” said Wakefield Express editor Gavin Murray. “This point is reinforced and exaggerated by the behavior of Boris and Downing Street.”
While there had been little expectation that the Conservatives would retain the Wakefield seat, the magnitude of Labor’s victory there suggested it could successfully compete with the Conservatives at the next general election.
The massive mood swings in Tiverton and Honiton, which the Conservatives had hoped to hold on to, was even more sobering for Johnson.
The Liberal Democrats’ sweeping victory in one of the Conservative Party’s safest districts suggested that even the most loyal Tory voters had become disenchanted with the serial scandals and non-stop drama surrounding the Prime Minister.
Last year, the Conservatives were stunned by the loss of a parliamentary seat in Chesham and Amersham, an affluent area northwest of London. Analysts said it suggested backlash against Johnson’s divisive politics and tax and spending policies.
The government has pledged to ‘raise’ and boost the economy in northern England, as a reward for voters on the red wall. But some analysts see significant risk of support breakdown among the traditional Tories in the south.
The Liberal Democrats specialize in fighting local issues in by-elections. They have a long history of achieving surprising results, and the success for them in Tiverton and Honiton confirmed the party’s strong performance in the local elections in May, where they also became the big winners.
In the days leading up to the two elections, Labor and the Liberal Democrats concentrated their resources in the districts they could win better at, one leaving the other freer.
Vince Cable, a former Liberal Democrat leader, said that rather than any official cooperation between the two sides, there was a “tacit agreement, relying on voters to arrive at a sensible outcome”.
Despite all the symbolism of the defeats, Mr. Cable, “this won’t hurt Johnson much in the short term” both because the prime minister recently won a confidence vote among his lawmakers and because the defeat was “priced in”.
“Since the economic outlook is so bad, especially for the next 12 to 18 months, I wouldn’t be surprised if Johnson did something very risky and went for fall elections,” said Mr. Cable at an election night briefing.
Kenneth Baker, a former Conservative Party chairman, said a defeat in Tiverton and Honiton would underline that “the position is quite bleak for the Conservative Party”, which won an 80-seat majority in parliament in the 2019 general election. .
“There is now a huge opportunity for the Liberal Democrats because neither the Labor Party nor the Conservative Party have any vision or strategy,” said Mr Baker, who is a member of the House of Lords. Johnson, he added, is now too polarizing a figure to lead the party successfully.
“If Boris continues to lead the Conservative Party,” he said, “there is no chance of the Conservatives gaining an overall majority.”
