2023-10-20 18:14:00
The ruling Conservative Party in the United Kingdom suffered a severe defeat against Labor in two by-elections on Friday, a “disappointing” result and a bad omen for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak ahead of legislative elections scheduled for next year.
Labor leader Keir Starmer, whose party is credited with a large lead in the polls, hailed the capture of these two conservative strongholds as a “historic result”, which “redraws the political map”.
From the constituency of Mid-Bedfordshire, in the center of England, he hoped to convince voters that “the party of the future”, “of national renewal” is the Labor Party, which he has refocused since he replaced the very left-wing Jeremy Corbyn three years ago.
Asked in Cairo, where he was finishing his tour of the Middle East in the context of the war triggered by Hamas attacks against Israel, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said that these were “obviously disappointing results”, but that ‘it was “important to remember the context”.
“Mid-term elections are always difficult for existing governments, and there are local factors that also come into play,” he told the media.
The Labor candidate, Sarah Edwards, won by 1,316 votes the seat of Tamworth, in central England, formerly guaranteed to the Conservatives who had a large majority there since the last election.
The Conservatives lost the Mid-Bedfordshire seat by 1,192 votes, which they had won by 24,664 votes in 2019. It was the most crushing defeat for the Conservatives in a by-election since 1945.
This result constitutes worrying news for Rishi Sunak, who next week celebrates the first anniversary of his entry into Downing Street.
The 43-year-old ex-banker initially brought a semblance of stability after the scandals of the Boris Johnson era and the brief stint of Liz Truss.
But his popularity is lower and he is struggling to revive himself, striving to present himself as an embodiment of change even though his party has been in power for 13 years.
According to political science professor John Curtice, “we can reasonably think that the Conservative Party faces the prospect of losing heavily” the next legislative elections, scheduled for January 2025 at the latest.
This defeat promises to be “perhaps even more serious than in 1997”, during the triumph of Labor Tony Blair, the professor from the University of Strathclyde stressed on the BBC.
Johnson era
Neither camp displayed excessive optimism before the vote, which was held on Thursday.
Labor itself recognized that these two elections were held in a “difficult” context locally.
The president of the Conservative Party, Greg Hands, estimated that the British are “satisfied with the work that Rishi Sunak is doing”, linking these two defeats to a context which dated before the Prime Minister’s coming to power.
The departure of outgoing MPs in these two constituencies bears the mark of the Boris Johnson era, pushed to resign in 2022 after a succession of scandals, firstly that of parties organized in Downing Street in violation of anti-Covid rules.
In Mid-Bedfordshire, the legislative by-election was organized due to the resignation of Conservative MP Nadine Dorries, an ardent defender of the former Prime Minister. The former culture minister quit her post as an MP after being refused a seat in the House of Lords, and accused the current head of government of abandoning the “fundamental principles of conservatism”.
In the constituency of Tamworth, voters had to nominate the successor to Chris Pincher, at the heart of the affair which was fatal to Boris Johnson. The MP had grabbed the buttocks of one man and squeezed the private parts of another one drunken evening at the end of June 2022 at the very exclusive Carlton Club in London.
Subjected last year to intense pressure to say what he knew about Chris Pincher’s past on previous incidents, Boris Johnson admitted an “error” in appointing him a few months earlier.
After asserting the opposite, Downing Street ended up recognizing that Boris Johnson had been informed in 2019 of old accusations against Mr. Pincher, ensuring that he had “forgotten” them.
20/10/2023 19:16:47 – London (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
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