Wandsworth is a borough in London that has a few Instagrammable streets, but also a notorious prison where Boris Becker has just started his sentence. Also on the local High Street is a fine old English council building, partly red brick and beautifully blooming flowers outside the windows, where the Tories have ruled for the past 44 years. For the Conservatives, Wandsworth in otherwise Labor-dominated south-west London is, as Margaret Thatcher once put it, “the jewel in the crown”. The jewel broke away during the night from Thursday to Friday. The Tories lost Wandsworth to Labor in the 2022 local election.
London Labor Mayor Sadiq Khan was in Wandsworth for the election party and there are now plenty of photos of him cheering and happily hugging people. The victory in Wandsworth is symbolic, especially since Labor also won in other long-standing Conservative councils in London, in Westminster for example, or in Barnet.
Ravi Govindia, who has headed Wandsworth’s Conservative Council for the past 11 years, said in a television interview early Friday morning that over the past few days he had often heard why people here no longer wanted to vote for the Tories: Because of the Partygate thing, because of the government’s handling of the rising cost of living; even the story of Neil Parish, the Tory MP, who watched porn in Parliament “came up more often,” Govindia said. The ruling party has stumbled from scandal to scandal in recent months and now, on the day after the election, the question is how much longer it can keep going.
London’s Labor Mayor Sadiq Khan celebrates at Wandsworth Town Hall.
(Photo: Hannah McKay/Reuters)
Outside London, too, the Conservatives lost many seats in the councils, at the time of going to press the counter in England was down 304 for Boris Johnson’s party, in Great Britain even down 386. Johnson himself was in a preschool in Ruislip on Friday , his own constituency. In the television interviews there, he said roughly what he has often said lately: He will continue to “work on the issues that matter” and that there is a lot to catch up on, especially with regard to energy supply, which “the previous governments missed”. . It’s not entirely clear who Johnson was referring to: his party has ruled the country for 12 years.
Outside London, the Labor Party made little improvement
The local election results, while not as devastating for the Conservatives as some media outlets had predicted, were bad enough to show at least one trend: some voters were voting, if not for Labour, then against the Tories. The fact that Keir Starmer’s Labor Party now has the largest national vote over the Conservatives since 2012, but on the other hand roughly the same result as in 2018, when Starmer’s largely unpopular predecessor Jeremy Corbyn was party leader, this in turn dampened Labor’s joy, at least beyond by Wandsworth. Outside London, Labor improved little, with the Liberal Democrats and the Greens benefiting from this. The Liberal Democrats won more seats in England than any other party.
There were also elections in Scotland and Wales, where the Conservatives also lost many seats. And in Northern Ireland, where the counts only started on Friday morning and were still ongoing at the time of going to press. A new regional parliament was elected in Northern Ireland. According to the BBC, the Republican Sinn Féin received the highest share of the vote with 29 percent, making it the strongest party for the first time, a historic result. Sinn Féin was once the political arm of the militant IRA, and the party has recently positioned itself clearly on its main goal: a united Ireland. The unresolved problem with the Northern Ireland Protocol definitely stood her in good stead.
At least one lesson from this leaked out to Johnson’s party on election day: the government’s program for the new parliamentary season, which opens next Tuesday, will lack a draft that the Tories actually wanted to introduce. The draft law that would have allowed ministers in Westminster to simply ignore the Northern Ireland Protocol.