Voters gave Boris Johnson a yellow card – but Keir Starmer is behaving like he won the Champions League
VOTERS gave Boris Johnson only a yellow card at the local elections – yet Sir Keir Starmer was trying to celebrate like he had won the Champions League.
Boasts that Thursday would be the day Labour began their fightback in the Red Wall and would bury crooked BoJo fell as flat as a chapati.
Yes, Labour piled up a lot of votes. But most of them were in their metropolitan, liberal stronghold of London, where they already dominate.
In their first test at the ballot box since Partygate, amid soaring bills and prices, the Tories took a kicking in the capital.
Two flagship councils, Westminster and Wandsworth — low-tax bastions of Conservatism since the days of Margaret Thatcher — both fell to Labour.
But Labour already represent both of those areas in the Commons.
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Things were pretty grim for the Tories in Scotland and it was hardly great news from their traditional blue heartlands of the South East and South West.
But despite the Labour leader Sir Keir hailing the result as a “turning point”, it was Ed Davey’s Liberal Democrats that did most of the heavy lifting.
Thousands of middle-class Remainers turned away from Boris and gave the forgotten third party their vote, seven years after the Lib Dems were kicked out of the Coalition Government.
Plenty of grumpy Tory bigwigs were quick to the airwaves calling for a new Prime Minister, just minutes after getting the boot from their town-hall jobs.
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The Tories didn’t do well. But it could have been a lot worse, as the relatively muted response — so far — from the PM’s internal critics in Westminster would imply.
And as Boris was quick to point out, it wasn’t all bad news for the Government. The Tories came pretty close to a major upset for Labour in the totemic stronghold of Sunderland.
In Brexit-loving Hartlepool, where the Tories won a historic by-election just a year ago, fears there would be widespread “Bo-gret” over switching from Labour did not come true.
Further inroads for the Conservatives in Bolton and Oldham will have Labour strategists nervous that their rout in the North is not yet over. Which isn’t to say there were no warning signs for Downing Street.
The key to Boris’s stonking General Election success was holding together a coalition of richer Southern seats while driving a coach and horses through the industrial heartlands of the North forgotten by Labour.
Unless Boris is careful, his electorally brilliant “realignment” will fall over. That 80-seat Commons majority is reliant on keeping those two groups united under his big tent.
Tory MPs report that in the leafy Home Counties, the most deprived wards are now their most solid, while more affluent and better educated Southerners are fleeing the party in droves.
Home Counties MPs blame the endless talk of “levelling up” — promising massive spending in the North — while HS2 tears through their countryside and the higher-paid are hammered with tax rises.
One former Cabinet minister said this week: “It’s safe to vote Lib Dem when Labour is not led by a nutter. You can risk a protest without worrying about letting the lunatics take over the asylum.”
Will Thursday’s protest vote become a permanent two-fingered salute? Boris put it down to midterm blues and leadership rivals such as Jeremy Hunt called off the dogs as the widely predicted mullering failed to materialise.
These local elections were a focal point for enemies of the PM deciding whether to strike. Now they will wait for the publication of Sue Gray’s report into Partygate instead.
It showed how desperate Sir Keir is for signs of progress that the Labour leader, surrounded by a mob of rent-a-selfie aides, declared his latest Red Wall bloody nose proof that Labour are on the path to power.
In the brief couple of hours on Friday between dawn and him getting dragged into a police investigation about his own lockdown-breaking, it was as if Labour had just won a General Election.
“This is a big turning point for us,” he told the cameras. “From the depths of 2019 in that General Election, back on track . . . we’ve changed Labour and now we’re seeing the results of that.”
To be fair to Sir Keir, it is a mark of how thoroughly he has cleansed Labour of the stain of antisemitism that voters in the North London borough of Barnet — with its sizeable Jewish population — gave him their backing.
'FAILED TO ADVANCE'
But Thursday was not the thumping victory Labour needed — and fell far short of pointing to an earthquake coming at the next election.
Labour piled up votes in places they didn’t need them but barely made inroads in the vital swing territories that would put Sir Keir in No10.
A rough totting-up of the national vote share points to a hung parliament, a far cry from the thousands of council seats Tony Blair totted up before his 1997 landslide and the Tories in the dying days of New Labour.
As pollster Sir John Curtice warned: “The loss of support for the Conservatives simply did not translate into Labour advance. A one-point advance in Labour’s vote share in London was accompanied by a three-point fall in the North of England.
“Indeed, across England as a whole, Labour failed to advance in wards where it faced competition from both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats.
“The party has not recorded the kind of consistent advance that demonstrates it has reached new levels of popularity.”
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On the airwaves yesterday, Labour were clinging to the idea this marked their best results since 2012 and 2018.
Downing Street will cling to the fact the Tories won a majority at both of the following Westminster ballots.
