What do the local election results mean for Boris Johnson?

Boris Johnson’s leadership could be under threat after his Conservative Party last night lost three London councils in the local elections.

It was a “mixed set of results” across the country for the two major parties, said The Times. But a triple blow of Conservative losses in the flagship councils of Westminster, Wandsworth and Barnet will be particularly painful for the Tories.

As voters went to the polls, the Daily Mail speculated that a “dire set of results could be terminal” for Johnson, as MPs mulled “whether to launch a coup” a month after the PM was fined by the Metropolitan Police for breaking lockdown rules.

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The loss of long-held Conservative councils in the capital looks to be a “historic moment that speaks to the reshaping of the party’s electoral coalition”, The Times reported.

A Conservative defeat in Wandsworth, which Margaret Thatcher once described as her “favourite council”, is particularly “embarrassing” for Johnson. Conservative MPs will no doubt “ask why a well regarded and debt-free council was lost to Labour” and could conclude it has “something to do with the unpopularity of the prime minister”.

And defeat in Westminster City Council is perhaps “even more damaging”, the paper added, because it is “unexpected”, transforming a “bad night in London into a capitulation”.

Some senior Tories had warned that the party could lose “some 800 seats”, reported Politico’s London Playbook, although the Labour Party, in full management expectation mode, “claimed this analysis was nonsense”. The New Statesman had predicted more modest losses for the Conservatives, predicting they would lose more than 200 seats across the country, while Labour might gain about 150.

As the country woke up this morning, Conservative losses were already nudging into the “triple digits” said Politico. At the time of writing, with more than half of councils still to declare, the Tories have lost 148 seats, with more expected.

Conservatives may have already been bracing for losses in London and the South, said The Guardian’s political editor Heather Stewart, but they had “hoped to show they are holding their ground” in areas “where they took seats from Labour in the 2019 general election”.

There is “scant evidence” of that so far, she added, with Labour analysts declaring that the vote share in key battlegrounds suggests they could be on course to take back the Westminster seats of Hartlepool, West Bromwich and Workington.

While it may have been a bad night for the Conservatives in London, it was hardly a “Conservative bloodbath” in the rest of the country, said Janet Daley in The Telegraph.

It seems that Keir Starmer’s “new look Labour just doesn’t cut it”, she added, suggesting that while northern voters thought “Corbyn was a dangerous idiot”, they also consider Starmer to be “the very personification of the out-of-touch Islington elitism which knows nothing of the real lives lived by working class people”.

The feeling in Westminster appears to be, for now at least, that poor results in the local elections “won’t be a trigger for a no-confidence vote in Johnson”, said James Forsyth in The Spectator.

The magazine’s political editor wrote that “one well-connected minister predicts that the Tories are ‘entering a phase of it’s not great but let’s see where things are in six months’.”

And another is “far more worried” about the privileges committee investigation into whether Johnson misled parliament than Sue Gray’s report, which is expected to be published at the end of May.

What may come in the aftermath of the elections is a cabinet reshuffle, and discussions have reportedly now started “in earnest” in order to “bounce back” from the elections, and ahead of the Queen’s Speech, which will aim to reset the party’s levelling up programme, said Paul Waugh on the i news site.

Tory sources have reported that allies of the prime minister have been “privately discussing” the possibility of replacing Chancellor Rishi Sunak with Liz Truss, the foreign secretary, in a possible “job swap”.

“Boris wants the first female Chancellor to be a Conservative and Liz makes no secret she’d love the job,” one MP told Waugh. “It also gives Rishi a way of saving face if he goes to Foreign. But to be honest, he may just walk anyway. He looks like a broken man when you see him up close.”