The clearest words about what had happened that night came from Roger Gale on Friday morning. Gale, 78, has served as the Tories MP since 1983, when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister; he is a thoroughly conservative, a party member for nearly 60 years. Gale is considered an opponent of Brexit and a critic of Johnson, but in the high-profile vote on the new corona restrictions a few days ago, in which 99 conservatives voted against Johnson’s proposals and thus also against their prime minister, Gale gave an “aye” Yes, and it was, if you will, for Johnson.
Now Gale was asked on BBC radio how he viewed the election results that night, Gale said: The voters had sent “a clear signal to Downing Street” that they were dissatisfied with the government. One must see this election “as a referendum on Boris Johnson’s performance”. “I think,” said Gale, “the Prime Minister is now in his last round. He’s already taken two blows. One more and he’s out.”
By the two blows Gale meant on the one hand the vote in the House of Commons, in which more Conservatives voted against a proposal by Johnson than ever before in his term of office, and on the other hand now the by-election in North Shropshire. The constituency is in the west of England and has been in existence since 1832; Since then, the Tories have always won there, often with a comfortable lead. In the last election in 2019, the then Tory candidate won with almost 63 percent of the vote – now the Tories got just 32 percent, 31 percentage points less than two years ago. Helen Morgan, a Liberal Democrat MP, won with 47 percent.
The British media made various historical classifications on Friday to clarify the meaning of the night, for example: Only once since World War II has there been an even more pronounced defeat for the Conservatives than the ruling party, in 1993, when the Liberal Democrats took Christchurch and the Tories Compared to the previous election, a little more than 32 percentage points of the votes were lost.
“Boris Johnson: Your Party Is Over”
There is, however, another historically comparable event, one that was not long ago: In June of this year the Liberal Democrats won the constituency of Chesham and Amersham, where the Conservatives were also unchallenged for a long time. Ed Davey, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, was filmed enthusiastically with a giant plastic hammer to destroy a wall of blue cardboard boxes: the “blue wall”, the blue wall of the blue conservatives, as which the region in the middle of England was long considered . Only: A majority in Chesham and Amersham was against Brexit in 2016, and it was considered astonishing, but not sensational, that the conservatives lost there. North Shropshire, on the other hand, is a conservative Brexit country, with 60 percent voting for “Leave” in 2016.
Ed Davey is currently in quarantine because of a positive corona test, and from his quarantine he said on Friday that the North Shropshire election had also shown that people “have had enough of Boris Johnson” and that they have left Brexit behind . The British newspapers quoted several citizens as saying that they were actually clearly conservative, but that they could no longer vote for Johnson’s party, because too much had happened for that. Many of them did not even vote: The turnout was only 46 percent, more than 20 percentage points less than in 2019.
The reason why this by-election was necessary in the first place may have played an additional role: Owen Paterson, who had held the constituency since 1997, had to resign because he had not declared high-paying part-time jobs that contradicted his role as MP. This had caused severe criticism of Johnson in the House of Commons, after all the prime minister had tried to change the rules under which such cases are investigated at short notice in order to prevent a suspension of Paterson. Only after resisting the opposition and also in his own ranks did Johnson give in.
Helen Morgan, the now elected Liberal Democrat, is a clear opponent of Brexit, and it can be said that she cannot stand Boris Johnson. During the 2019 election campaign, she compared Johnson to Adolf Hitler, which rightly earned her a lot of criticism. That night she stepped in front of the cameras, surrounded by several candidates from the other parties, and spoke directly to Johnson: “The people here said loudly and clearly: Boris Johnson, your party is over.”
The number of corona cases is higher than ever
Morgan’s allusion is not entirely out of thin air. The ongoing reports of various parties in Downing Street in disregard of the applicable Corona rules are increasingly causing anger among voters, as surveys show. Johnson himself recently tried to devalue the topic as “party political nullity”, as a sideline that was not important. It was only on Thursday that it became known that there should have been meetings not only in winter 2020, but also in May of last year, when the country was in lockdown: Johnson himself was even present at a meeting known as a “pizza party” reported the Guardian.
Oliver Dowden, party leader of the Conservatives, said on Friday that the message was understood. In addition, Dowden referred, as Johnson does at every opportunity, to the booster program – Johnson had set the goal on Sunday last week that all adults in England should get the third vaccination against Covid by the end of the year. Meanwhile, the number of infections continues to rise: more than 88,000 new cases were registered on Thursday, more than ever before in the entire pandemic.