United Kingdom: Stuart (University of Nottingham), “byelections, a catastrophe for the Conservative Party and another wound that will eventually end Johnson’s political career”

“A veritable catastrophe for the Conservative Party and another wound that will eventually end Johnson’s political career, even if the Prime Minister will do all he can to play down his failure”. This is how Mark Stuart, political analyst at the University of Nottingham, judges the two crushing defeats of the Tories at the byelections in Tiverton and Honiton, a constituency in southern England that had always been Conservative, and in Wakefield, in the deep Labour north, that Johnson did not win over until 2019. “The Prime Minister has lost voters at both ends of the social spectrum, wealthy pensioners and poor unemployed people, who voted tactically by choosing the Liberal Democrats, even if they used to be Labour and vice versa, as long as they could get rid of the Tories”, Stuart points out. “If they did the same at the general elections, it would be a sure defeat for Boris Johnson. Especially in Tiverton, this is the greatest victory of a party at a byelection in the post-war era. Then, in Wakefield, the voters who had always been Labour and who had chosen Johnson only in 2019 have reverted to the Labour Party, so it would succeed. At the general elections, such a result would mean that the Labour has become the majority party. Today, a lot of Tories will be scared at the idea of losing their posts and will ask that the rules may be changed to kick out Johnson, who should stay one more year”.
Valentina Bombelli