What Boris Johnson’s troubles mean for Labour’s election chances

The Labour Party is reaching a critical moment as Boris Johnson battles to save his political career this week amid growing allegations of Downing Street parties.

With a general election likely in less than two years, shadow health secretary Wes Streeting said yesterday that while it was in the “national interest” for the prime minister to go, it would be a “great” result for the opposition if Johnson kept his role.

“If I’m thinking about this purely through the prism of party politics, my message to Tory MPs is keep him on,” Streeting told Trevor Phillips on Sky News. “Knock yourselves out. Literally, you will be knocked out of the next election.”

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

That prediction is backed by the findings of a YouGov poll. Of almost 1,700 voters quizzed, six in ten said Johnson should resign. Four in ten respondents who voted Tory in 2019 thought he should now quit.

The poll was conducted after Johnson apologised at Prime Minister’s Questions last week for attending a “bring your own booze” party in the garden of No. 10 during lockdown in May 2020, claiming he thought it was a “work event”. But subsquent reports that two parties were held in Downing Street on the night before Prince Philip’s funeral in April 2021 triggered fresh criticism.

The PM has urged voters and his party to wait for the conclusions of an inquiry into the claims, led by Sue Gray, that are due at the end of this week. But he has “failed to quell mounting public anger”, wrote YouGov’s Connor Ibbetson.

The newly published results of an Opinium poll for The Observer also make “grim reading” for Johnson, said the newspaper’s Robert Ford. The PM’s personal approval ratings “fall below the worst figures ever recorded by Theresa May”, and the Tory party “sinks to its worst vote share since the general election, ten points behind Labour”.

Conservatives may now be “damned if they do and damned if they don’t”, Ford continued. Sticking with Johnson “risks further contaminating the party brand if the scandals continue and voter fury intensifies”, but none of the front runners to replace him “looks likely to replicate his unique appeal with voters”.

By contrast, Labour’s Keir Starmer is finally “seen as a possible winner”, said Financial Times’ Steve Richards, who warned that the opposition leader “must not squander” this opportunity.

Johnson’s main rivals for the Tory leadership, Chancellor Rishi Sunak and Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, have been “holding regular meetings with MPs” but “deny they are on manoeuvres”, wrote Hugo Gye at the i news site.

Paul Mason at The New Statesman predicted last month that Starmer could beat Sunak, but not necessarily “a Conservative Party machine united around Truss”. “We would be dealing here with a Thatcher tribute act, but tribute bands are popular,” said Mason.

Polling pundits at Opinium claim that Sunak stands the best chance, however. He is the only Tory leader contender “who more voters think would make a good PM than a bad PM”, the polling firm tweeted this weekend. Four in ten poll respondents said they “don’t know enough to form an opinion” on Truss.

Whoever is in charge at No. 10 at the next election, said Labour’s Streeting, “we don’t think that just because the Tories are in a mess, people flock to Labour by default. We want to win people’s trust.”

All the same, thanks to Johnson’s “extraordinary series of self-inflicted blows”, there is growing evidence that “the public is inspecting Starmer’s wares with serious interest”, said The Times.

An ally of the Labour chief told the paper: “He gets that he’ll win by being as un-Boris as possible. He doesn’t need to be the biggest personality, just a credible prime minister.”