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Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives on Friday suffered two crushing UK parliamentary by-election defeats but averted a “3-0” drubbing by unexpectedly holding on to Boris Johnson’s old Uxbridge seat.
The grave problems facing the British prime minister were highlighted when the opposition Labour party secured its biggest-ever by-election win in the once-safe Tory seat of Selby and Ainsty in Yorkshire.
Earlier the centrist Liberal Democrats demolished a massive Tory majority to win the seat of Somerton and Frome, opening up a dangerous new front for Sunak in the Tory heartlands of England’s South West.
Sunak’s party is trailing the opposition Labour party by 20 points in opinion polls, and is dogged by high inflation, failing public services and the recent chaos of the Johnson and Liz Truss premierships.
Sir Keir Starmer, Labour leader, said his party’s victory in Yorkshire showed “just how powerful the demand for change is”. Labour has been out of power since Gordon Brown was ejected from Downing Street in 2010.
But Sunak’s fears of a by-election wipeout were allayed in the early hours of Friday when the Tories narrowly held on to the Uxbridge and South Ruislip seat vacated by Johnson with a margin of fewer than 500 votes.
The Tory victory in Uxbridge was attributed to concern over a planned extension of the “ultra low emissions zone”, a charge on polluting vehicles, to outer London boroughs planned by the capital’s Labour mayor Sadiq Khan.
Steve Tuckwell, the winning Tory candidate, said: “Sadiq Khan has lost Labour this election, and we know that it was his damaging and costly ULEZ policy which lost them this election.”
The Conservatives polled 13,965 against the opposition Labour party’s 13,470, a Tory majority of 495, but the local issues at play in Uxbridge did not mask disastrous results for Sunak elsewhere.
Labour, which hopes to return to power at next year’s election, gained Selby and Ainsty from the Tories, who won it in 2019 by a margin of 20,137. It was the biggest majority ever overturned by Labour in such a contest.
Starmer said: “This is a historic result that shows that people are looking at Labour and seeing a changed party that is focused entirely on the priorities of working people with an ambitious, practical plan to deliver.”
Labour candidate Keir Mather won Selby with 16,456 votes, defeating the Tory candidate with 12,295.
The Lib Dem victory on Friday morning in Somerton and Frome gave Sir Ed Davey’s hope of winning back Tory seats in the South West. “This stunning victory shows the Liberal Democrats are firmly back in the west country,” Davey said.
In Somerton and Frome the Lib Dems’ Sarah Dyke won 21,187 votes, easily beating the Conservatives’ 10,179. The previous Tory MP David Warburton had been forced to quit in a drugs scandal.
A trio of defeats in the by-elections would have been the first such humiliation for a British prime minister since 1968 when Labour’s Harold Wilson lost three contests on a single day.
Despite the narrow Uxbridge victory, which came after a recount, some Conservative MPs believe that defeats in Selby and Somerset are a portent of a calamitous general election defeat next year.
Sunak insists he can still turn things around and secure a fifth consecutive election win. In a message to Tory MPs on Wednesday night, the prime minister attempted to raise his party’s morale, pointing to this week’s sharp fall in inflation as a sign that a tide of bad economic news may be turning.
Sunak has vowed to stage an autumn comeback, offering a new “long-term vision” for the country. An autumn financial statement and the King’s Speech legislative package will be crucial moments for the prime minister.
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