Boris Johnson’s local election results on Friday were “at the lower end of barely acceptable”, said one despondent former Conservative cabinet minister, surveying a scene of heavy Tory losses. After the events of the last few months, the prime minister will take that.
On the face of it Johnson should have been sunk into gloom by a day of Conservative defeats, which started early when the Tories lost their flagship London councils of Wandsworth and Westminster.
Conservative council leaders blamed Johnson for the setbacks that involved hundreds of lost seats, and one Tory MP said: “Good councils are being lost because significant numbers of our traditional supporters no longer trust the PM. He needs to go.”
Many Conservative MPs had seen the May 5 local elections as a key test for Johnson: could he still be a winner after the partygate scandal? Last month he became the first British prime minister found to have committed a criminal offence, after police fined him for attending a June 2020 birthday party in Downing Street during the first Covid-19 lockdown in England.
But Johnson was on bullish form on Friday, his allies mocking Labour’s patchy results outside London, which they claimed demonstrated party leader Sir Keir Starmer was incapable of winning the next general election. Labour notably failed to make major advances in its former “red wall” areas in northern England, and even lost Kingston upon Hull to the Liberal Democrats.
“The fact Labour lost Hull but won Mayfair tells you all you need to know about them,” said one Tory official, after an upbeat pep talk from Johnson’s team. “We were reminded that we are now on election war footing.”
There was a sense that things could have been worse in Downing Street even before an elated Johnson received the news at lunchtime that police were looking again at whether Starmer had broken lockdown rules by having a curry and beers with other Labour figures during election campaigning in April 2021.
One cabinet minister said: “The results are bad in London but Boris will be relieved with the outcome in the rest of the country. And given the Starmer beergate investigation, it’s been a good week for the PM.”
In the run-up to the local elections, Starmer had struggled with questions about the curry and beers gathering at the Durham Miners Hall last year, when indoor socialising was banned in England.
Labour has highlighted rules which gave an exception to the restriction on indoor gatherings when they were “reasonably necessary” for work purposes. Emily Thornberry, shadow attorney-general, said on Friday: “We are confident no rules have been broken.”
But the Durham Police investigation into Starmer could potentially help Johnson draw a line under the partygate scandal before it causes more damage to him.
Starmer, a former director of public prosecutions, has taken a tough stance on the affair, and both he and his deputy Angela Rayner called on Johnson to quit well before the prime minister was fined by the Metropolitan Police.
In January Starmer tweeted that “honesty and decency” matter in politics and said Johnson should resign immediately because he was “under criminal investigation for breaking his own lockdown laws”.
Johnson, who is still being investigated by police for attending other Whitehall parties during Covid restrictions and is also awaiting senior civil servant Sue Gray’s full report into the affair, eagerly seized on Starmer’s predicament.
“He thinks Starmer has been hoist by his own petard because of his constant moralising on the issue,” said one Tory close to Johnson. “Starmer’s a hypocrite,” added one Number 10 insider.
There was a growing sense at Westminster that partygate may not be the issue that brings the prime minister down. Conservative MPs showed little or no appetite following the local election results to make a push for a vote of no confidence in Johnson’s leadership by writing letters to Sir Graham Brady, chair of the 1922 committee of Tory backbenchers.
For Johnson, the dire state of the economy has become his biggest political threat, with the Bank of England this week warning of inflation exceeding 10 per cent, rising unemployment and a possible recession.
Tory MPs and cabinet ministers are urging Johnson both to cut taxes and to increase public spending to help their constituents. Chancellor Rishi Sunak has warned that more public borrowing and higher spending could simply push inflation higher.
Sir Ed Davey, Liberal Democrat leader, said his party’s local election successes across the country reflected public concern about the cost of living crisis and the NHS rather than parties in Number 10. Labour is now switching its attention to the economy.
For Starmer, electoral successes in London were quickly soured by the realisation that the party was faring less well outside the capital.
Starmer hailed how Labour seized control of Cumberland and Southampton councils as well as a trio of London boroughs: Wandsworth, Westminster and Barnet. “We’ve sent a message to the prime minister, Britain deserves better,” he said. Scotland was another significant bright spot for Labour.
But Labour’s results on Friday did not exactly give the impression of a government-in-waiting, and were flattered by a particularly strong showing in liberal, urban former Remain areas such as London.
“I would describe the results as solid,” said one member of the shadow cabinet. Other senior Labour figures use the same adjective to describe the managerial but not especially charismatic Starmer.
“He’s less of a showman than Johnson but what’s more important is for him to work out our response to the economic car crash, we are on the brink of something akin to a wartime economy,” said one trade union leader.
Chris Hopkins, associate director at pollster Savanta ComRes, said Labour’s national opinion poll lead had slipped since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and agreed that the economy would define what happens next at Westminster.
“It doesn’t feel at the moment that Labour are doing enough to win back voters on the cost of living crisis,” he added.
