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Boris Johnson, the beleaguered British Prime Minister, was defeated in two parliamentary by-elections on Friday, including one in a southwest English seat previously held by his ruling Republicans for over a century, prompting the party’s chairman to resign. The Conservatives’ December 2019 general election majority of more than 24,000 votes were overruled by the centrist Liberal Democrats in the Tiverton and Honiton constituency.
At the very same time, the main Labour opposition reclaimed the Westminster seat of Wakefield in northern England, signaling the party’s resurgence two and a half years after its worst electoral performance in decades.
The Conservatives’ disastrous results are set to pile new pressure on the embattled Johnson, as the particularly destructive “Partygate” scandal involving lockdown-violating gatherings in Downing Street keeps going to plague him and his party.
They were expected to lose both by-elections, and Johnson vowed on Thursday, while in Rwanda for a Commonwealth summit, that he would not resign if that happened.
The disastrous results, the latest in a series of electoral defeats for the Conservatives in the last year, prompted the party’s chairman, Oliver Dowden, to resign immediately.
“Recent events have distressed and disappointed our supporters, and I share their disappointment,” the key Johnson ally wrote in a letter of resignation to the Conservative leader.
“We cannot conduct business as usual. Someone must take responsibility, and I have concluded that it would be inappropriate for me to continue in office under these circumstances.”
“An awakening”
The elections were held on Thursday after both former Tory MPs from the two constituencies resigned in disgrace in recent months.
Neil Parish of Tiverton and Honiton resigned after admitting to watching pornography on his mobile in the House of Commons, while Wakefield’s Imran Ahmad Khan was jailed for sexually abusing a teen.
The by-elections also come after months of controversies and setbacks that have severely harmed Johnson’s and his party’s popularity, and just weeks after he narrowly avoided being deposed as Tory leader and prime minister by his own lawmakers.
According to officials at a count centre in nearby town Crediton, the Liberal Democrats won Tiverton and Honiton, which had voted Conservative in each and every general election since the 1880s, by more than 6,000 votes.
Meanwhile, the opposition party won nearly 5,000 votes in Wakefield, one of dozens of traditional Labour seats Johnson won in 2019 on a promise to “get Brexit done” and address glaring regional income disparities.
Labour leader Keir Starmer, who wants to replace Johnson as prime minister in the next general election in 2024, said his party’s success in one of its former heartland seats demonstrated that it could reclaim power for the first time in far more than a decade.
