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Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives have been hammered in local elections across England and Wales and lost the Blackpool South parliamentary by-election to Labour, but threats of a mutiny against the prime minister have receded.
Sunak’s party comfortably held on to the totemic Conservative mayoralty of Tees Valley, easing fears in Downing Street that a catastrophic set of results would trigger an uprising against his leadership by Tory MPs.
Early returns in the last big test before a general election expected this year suggested that the UK’s governing party could lose half the council seats it was defending.
The results were at the upper end of Tory MPs’ worst fears and Sunak described the loss of Conservative councillors as “disappointing”.
By contrast, Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer said on Friday that the 26 per cent swing to his party in Blackpool was “seismic”.
Sunak is struggling to maintain a grip on a Conservative party that often appears exhausted after being in office since 2010, and is still suffering the after-effects of Liz Truss’s disastrous and shortlived leadership.
But in a victory on Friday that calmed nerves, the Tories held on to the Tees Valley mayoralty with a reduced but comfortable majority of 18,789. Lord Ben Houchen, the incumbent, remains a popular local figure and tried to distance himself from the party’s woes at Westminster.
Conservatives are hopeful that Andy Street, Tory mayor of West Midlands, will also hold on, with Labour insiders saying that Starmer’s position on the Gaza war may have cost the party Muslim votes.
Early signs were that rightwing Conservative critics of Sunak would pull back from trying to topple him. “A strong ‘stay calm’ message is going around the WhatsApp groups,” said one former cabinet minister.
Dame Andrea Jenkyns, a Boris Johnson supporter who submitted a no-confidence letter in Sunak last November, told the BBC: “It’s looking unlikely that the MPs are going to put the letters in. So we’ve got to pull together.”
One Tory rebel insider said some of Sunak’s critics in the parliamentary party were now reluctantly rallying behind him, adding: “Tees Valley has given people an off-ramp.”
Projections that the Conservatives could lose half the council seats they held were based on results in 53 of the 107 councils being contested; some voters in England and Wales were also electing mayors as well as police and crime commissioners.
Sir John Curtice, the veteran elections expert, said the results were “not far short” of catastrophic for the Conservatives and “one of the worst, if not the worst” result for the party in local elections for 40 years.
Starmer’s overnight focus was on Labour’s parliamentary by-election victory, where the new MP, Chris Webb, beat the Conservatives’ David Jones with a 26 per cent swing. Reform UK came a narrow third, just 117 votes behind the Conservatives.
“This seismic win in Blackpool South is the most important result today,” Starmer said. “This is the one contest where voters had the chance to send a message to Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives directly, and that message is an overwhelming vote for change.”
Labour’s victory in Blackpool South was its third-biggest swing against the Conservatives in a postwar by-election and is ominous for Tory MPs defending similar working-class seats in the “red wall” of northern England.
Labour overturned a Tory majority of 3,690 votes to take the parliamentary seat with a 7,607 majority. The seat was formerly held by Scott Benton, who was forced to quit in a lobbying scandal.
Reform UK, formerly the Brexit party, secured 17 per cent of the vote in Blackpool South, one of the races it focused on, after standing candidates for only 12 per cent of contested council seats.
The fact that Reform UK, founded by Nigel Farage, did not come second will be one crumb of comfort for Tory strategists, although its performance was another reminder of how it is splitting the vote on the right.
A Conservative spokesperson said: “What has been clear is that a vote for Reform is a vote for Sir Keir Starmer.”
It was not all good news for Labour. The party lost control of Oldham council in Greater Manchester, after ceding several seats to independents who stood on a pro-Palestine platform. It also lost seats in Newcastle.
Pat McFadden, Labour’s elections co-ordinator, admitted that the Gaza war was costing the party votes. “There’s no denying this is a factor in some parts of the country,” he said.
The Conservatives also narrowly held on to power in Harlow in Essex, a Conservative-Labour battleground seat in which Starmer had campaigned this week. Sunak seized on the result as proof that the Tories could halt Labour’s advance.
As counting continued on Friday afternoon, Labour had made net gains of 86 council seats against 148 Tory losses.
Labour also won the newly enlarged North East mayoralty. Its candidate Kim McGuinness overcame former Labour mayor Jamie Driscoll, who was standing as an independent.
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