This is a devastating day for Rishi Sunak
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So far, so terrible for Rishi Sunak.
Perhaps, as the count in the local elections continues throughout Friday, the prime minister will be able to glean a little comfort from the opening of ballot boxes. But if his party’s (and his own) fortunes were to be decided by the overnight results, he should consider calling in the removal men now.
Not that there haven’t been any crumbs of comfort for the Conservatives, even if such crumbs can’t be credited to Sunak or his party. Labour insiders are said to be worried by the loss of seats and votes to the Greens in Newcastle, where Muslim voters are reported to be abandoning their traditional party because – it is assumed – of Keir Starmer’s stance on the Gaza conflict.
In the city’s Byker ward, the Greens saw their support jump by an astonishing 42 per cent, while Labour saw theirs slump by more than 22. A similar pattern across the whole country would be worrying for Starmer, who needs to focus on his party’s successes in order to hammer home his preferred message that Labour is about to form the government. Distractions over policy in the Middle East would not be welcome.
Today’s results will reveal whether Newcastle is a bellwether that needs to carefully watched or an exception that those around the Labour leader can confidently dismiss.
Unfortunately for the Conservatives, the most significant result of the night was not in the local elections at all but in the Blackpool South by-election, where Labour managed an impressive victory with the third highest electoral swing in the seat since 1945.
The contest could hardly have presented a worse scenario for Sunak: Tory MP Scott Benton was suspended from the Commons after becoming embroiled in a lobbying scandal. It was exactly such a lobbying scandal, the party will want to forget, that triggered its current eye-watering polling deficit back when Boris Johnson was still PM, when the government sought to frustrate a report by the Privileges Committee into former cabinet minister Owen Paterson over his own relationships with lobbying clients.
Just as John Major tried frantically to escape the poor behaviour of his own MPs in the 1990s (and was notably unsuccessful in in his attempts), Sunak is finding it impossible to escape the gravitational pull exerted by the actions and instincts of his own team. Labour’s Chris Webb overturned Benton’s previous majority of 3690 to secure his own majority of 7607. Blackpool South was previously held by Labour for 22 years – from 1997 to 2019.
And just to make that particular result even more uncomfortable for the prime minister, Richard Tice’s Reform UK Party very nearly beat the Tories into third place, coming just one per cent behind the Conservative candidate and securing 17 per cent of the vote –the party’s best result since it was known as the Brexit Party. The potential for Reform to play havoc with the Conservatives’ general election results is now obvious – a prospect Labour is positively salivating about.
Elsewhere has been, so far, a tale of Labour strides forward. We will find out today the fates of the metro mayors, including high-profile Conservatives Andy Street in the West Midlands and Ben Houchen in Tees Valley.
Sunak needs some good news today following last night’s dreadful results. The Greens’ humiliation of Labour in Newcastle will have cheered him, but he can take no credit for that, and the general election will not be decided by the smaller parties or by Gaza.
And if the prime minister was hoping to gauge the wisdom of setting a polling date for the general election this side of the parliamentary summer recess, he will have been disappointed. Based on the (admittedly few) results to digest so far, no one will blame him if he concludes that voters shouldn’t be invited back to the polling stations until very late in the year.
