Wandsworth, Westminster, West Oxfordshire – it is hard to think of more quintessentially Conservative places than Margaret Thatcher’s favourite council, the borough that is home to swanky Mayfair, or David Cameron’s back yard. Yet as the Conservatives wake up on Friday morning, they have lost all three – Wandsworth and Westminster to Labour, and West Oxfordshire to no overall control, as the Liberal Democrats march onwards in the blue wall. Scotland and Wales are yet to start declaring results, but Friday already looks like being a very bad day for Boris Johnson. Already, the Liberal Democrats feel vindicated in their argument that decent, longtime Tory voters are disgusted at Johnson’s record, and turning to them – not just in West Oxfordshire but in Merton in south-west London, too. When senior Conservatives repeatedly insisted in recent weeks that they could lose the longtime Tory boroughs of Wandsworth and Westminster to Labour, it was widely dismissed as expectations management.
But as Thursday approached, more and more MPs from both parties who ventured out canvassing reported that things were looking bad for the Conservatives. One senior CCHQ figure, asked for the mood ahead of Thursday, said “braced”. It seems they were right to be.
As the hundreds of new councillors settle down to the hard graft of ensuring vital local services are delivered, the postmortem has already begun for a Tory party reeling from Partygate and the rocketing cost of living. Ravi Govindia, the Conservative leader of Wandsworth council, made clear where he believes the blame lies, saying, “consistently on the doorstep the issue of Boris Johnson was raised”. While they were ready for losses in London and southern England, the Tories had hoped to show they are holding their ground – or even advancing – in areas where they took seats from Labour in the 2019 general election. There is scant evidence of that so far. Labour number-crunchers analysing the vote share in key battlegrounds that have already declared said these suggested they could be in line to take back Westminster seats, including Hartlepool, West Bromwich and Workington. The Conservatives had hoped to take Sunderland council; in the event they lost one seat, leaving the balance of power all but unchanged, with Labour comfortably in control. They retained control of Dudley comfortably – but lost two seats to Labour. Of course, the read-across from local to national polls is far from precise, and many results are still to come, not least in Scotland and Wales; but if Conservative MPs saw Thursday as a test of whether Johnson remains an electoral asset, he appears to have failed. One former cabinet minister warned last week that a poor set of results could act as the “tinder” for a potential move against the beleaguered prime minister. Judging by these early results, the mood in Westminster as MPs return next week may well be highly flammable.