Heavy defeat for the Conservatives in Britain in two by-elections

The Conservative party, in power at United Kingdomtoday suffered heavy defeats in two by-elections by the Labor party, a result characterized bad omen for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak ahead of the 2024 election.

Labor candidate Sarah Edwards won the seat of Tamworth by 1,316 votes, overturning a majority of almost 20,000 votes (19,634 to be exact) at the previous general election in 2019.

While in Mid-Birdfordshire, a seat also considered safe for the Coalition as the constituency had elected Conservatives to parliament continuously since 1931, Labour’s candidate Alistair Stradhern won by 1,192 votes, overturning a Tory majority of almost 25,000 (24,664 to be exact) previous elections.

The two votes came as the popularity of the British prime minister, 43, a former banker, has sunk to its lowest point since taking office a year ago.

The official opposition, which is recording a wide, double-digit lead in opinion polls ahead of next year’s parliamentary elections, stressed that the seats it won today were “safe” for the conservative faction and considered little chance of winning them. However, the Tories also acknowledged that the two local contests were held at “difficult” times.

The departure of two MPs, which led to the by-election, bears the stamp of Boris Johnson, who had no choice but to resign in the summer of 2022 after a series of scandals, mainly over parties organized in Downing Street in breach of the measures to deal with the pandemic.

In Mid-Birdfordshire, an election had to be called because Nadine Dorries, a Conservative MP and staunch defender of the former prime minister, resigned. The former culture minister resigned after being denied a seat in the House of Lords and after accusing the current head of government of abandoning “fundamental principles of conservatism”.

In Tamworth, voters were being asked to nominate a successor to Chris Pincher, the star of the scandal that proved fatal for Boris Johnson. In the summer of 2022, there was an uproar when the MP was accused of sexually harassing a man in a high-society club, after which many other incidents of the same nature were revealed. Asked last year if he knew his background, Mr Johnson admitted he had made a “mistake” by selecting him a few months earlier.

After long claiming otherwise, Downing Street finally acknowledged that Prime Minister Johnson had been aware of the allegations against Mr Pincher since 2019, but that they had been “forgotten”.

The Conservatives, who have won the last four elections, are now increasingly in doubt whether they can repeat it in 2024. Today’s double defeat is just the third in two by-elections in one day for a sitting prime minister since 1991. .

Labor leader Keir Starmer spoke of “unprecedented” results, judging that the victories of his faction’s candidates “in Tory strongholds” show that the people “want a large majority of change and are ready to trust our transformed Labor Party to bring her.” Mr Starmer has in recent years steered the party towards the centre.

On the other is Mr Sunak, who has recently sought to portray himself as a bold reformer, shedding the image of the cautious technocrat who restored Britain’s solvency after Boris Johnson’s scandals and the economic storm under Liz Truss – the shorter-lived prime minister in the country’s history–, he sees the time and opportunities available to him to close the gap running out. And at this moment when more and more Britons are expressing their outrage at high inflation, economic withering, huge delays in serving citizens in the national health system.

Source: News Beast

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