UK

Boris Johnson told tide towards leadership challenge ‘unstoppable’ after loss of flagship seats in elections

Disgruntled Tory MPs have warned Boris Johnson that the momentum behind a challenge to his leadership is now “unstoppable” after a torrid set of local elections saw the Conservatives lose more than 340 councillors and a string of flagship authorities.

The prime minister admitted the Tories had experienced a “tough night” in London and the south, but insisted that the party had made “quite remarkable gains” elsewhere in the country as Keir Starmer’s Labour failed to make a breakthrough in the so-called Red Wall seats of the north.

Tories were also buoyed by Durham Police’s announcement of an investigation into an alleged breach of Covid regulations by Starmer, which they hope will offset future attacks on Mr Johnson over Partygate.

But this did little to settle nerves among MPs in traditionally rock-solid Tory seats in the affluent capital and the southeast, where the party saw Wandsworth, Westminster and Barnet fall to Labour after decades under Tory control and Woking captured by the Liberal Democrats.

Public anger over Downing Street parties was now permanently “baked in” to voters’ views of the prime minister, acting as a drag on the party’s performance across the country, warned Conservative MPs.

Tories lost overall control of John Major’s home council of Huntingdonshire and David Cameron’s West Oxfordshire, as well as Wokingham in Buckinghamshire – long represented in the Commons by John Redwood – as Lib Dems made big inroads into the so-called Blue Wall, with their overall tally of councillors boosted by more than 160.

Celebrating successes which also saw Lib Dems take Hull from Labour and gain control of new unitary authorities in Westmorland and Somerset, Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey said: “The tectonic plates of British politics are shifting. Now it is up to Conservative MPs to shove the prime minister into the abyss.”

Starmer said that results in London – as well as Crawley and Southampton, which they snatched from Tories, and Kirklees, Rossendale and Worthing, where they gained overall control – marked a “massive turning point” for Labour, whose overall gains topped 200.

But elections guru Sir John Curtice calculated that Sir Keir had performed worse outside the capital than predecessor Jeremy Corbyn did the last time the seats were contested in 2018.

Prof Curtice said that the BBC’s projected vote share of 35 per cent for Labour, 30 for Conservatives and 19 for Lib Dems from Thursday’s votes would give Tories “no prospect of being able to remain in office” after the next general election, and would set the scene for Starmer to enter No 10 propped up by Davey’s party.

One Conservative former minister told The Independent that shoring up support in the Red Wall cannot compensate for the crumbling of traditional strongholds.

“These are the Boris heartlands, but they are not the Tory heartlands,” said the MP, who is mulling a no-confidence letter in the PM. “It’s no good saving the soup if you lose the meal.”

Another ex-minister said that it was clear that that the party had been gearing up for a leadership contest in recent days, and that the local elections result would make no difference to that process.

And another said that, while the investigation into Starmer may stave off a challenge to Johnson’s position for some time, it was now “probably a question of when not if”.

Veteran backbencher Sir Roger Gale, the first Tory to announce no confidence in Mr Johnson, suggested a challenge could come within as little as three weeks, telling The Independent: “There’s a tide that’s flowing that’s unstoppable. Something has got to happen.”

While he avoided meltdown in this week’s election, Mr Johnson faces “danger ahead”, with the prospect of further police fines, the Sue Gray report into Partygate and difficult byelections in Wakefield and Tiverton & Honiton, all against the backdrop of inflation soaring as high as 10 per cent and “catastrophic” increases in energy bills, said Sir Roger.

With the Ukraine conflict now settling down into what could be a lengthy war of attrition, Sir Roger said that he no longer believed the crisis required Tories to hold back from a change of leadership.

Some 54 Tory MPs must send a letter of no confidence to the chair of the backbench 1922 Committee, Sir Graham Brady, to trigger a leadership challenge, which requires a majority of MPs to succeed.

Prominent backbencher Tobias Ellwood said that it was now time for all of the party’s MPs to confront the question of whether they want Mr Johnson to stay on in the face of evidence that Tories are “haemorrhaging” votes.

Xural.com

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