Boris Johnson’s leadership is facing fresh peril after senior Conservatives blamed him for losing swaths of the party’s southern heartlands to the Liberal Democrats and flagship London boroughs to Labour. In a punishing set of local elections for the Tories, the party lost about 400 council seats, ceding control of Westminster and Wandsworth in London to Labour for the first time since the 1970s, and plunging to its worst position in Scotland for a decade. Conservative MPs and council leaders questioned Johnson’s leadership, demanding action to tackle the cost of living crisis and rebuild trust in the wake of the Partygate scandal after a damaging series of losses across the “blue wall” in Somerset, Kent, Oxfordshire and Surrey. However, the scale of the Tory backlash was tempered by a mixed picture for Labour, which showed progress, but not enough yet to suggest a landslide for Keir Starmer in a general election. A BBC projection for a general election based on Friday’s results put Labour on 291 seats, the Conservatives on 253, the Lib Dems on 31 and others on 75. Labour had a very strong result in London and took some southern councils such as Worthing, Crawley and Southampton, gaining about 250 seats in total. It pushed the Tories out of control in their only council in Wales, Monmouthshire, and took over as the party with the second largest vote share in Scotland, where the SNP remained dominant. But in the north of England and the Midlands, Labour struggled to make gains in “red wall” areas it had lost at or since the 2019 election, despite a convincing win on the new Cumberland council. Conservative HQ was also buoyed by the news that Starmer is now being investigated over allegations of Covid rule-breaking at a Durham campaign event, muddying the waters over Johnson’s own fine for a lockdown gathering. Starmer said the results were a “big turning point” for his party. “From the depths of 2019, that general election, winning in the north, Cumberland, Southampton. We’ve changed Labour and now we’re seeing the results of that.” The Lib Dems also had a clearly successful election night in England, adding at least 189 seats. They took control of the new unitary authority in Somerset, previously a Tory stronghold, edged out the Conservatives in Portsmouth, and pushed them out of control in West Oxfordshire. The Greens also performed well, winning 81 seats – more than doubling their number of councillors – as voters also turned to independents and residents’ associations. Read more from my colleagues Rowena Mason, Heather Stewart and Aubrey Allegretti here:
We’re closing this blog now. Thanks so much for joining us today. You can follow our global liveblog here: