Labour on course for power: 5 takeaways from UK elections

The governing Conservatives suffered heavy defeats in a set of local elections on Thursday, adding to the sense that Prime Minister Rishi Sunak will struggle to turn things around before a general election that he must hold within nine months.

Keir Starmer’s opposition Labour Party made some eye-catching gains, taking control of councils in Thurrock, Hartlepool and Rushmoor, winning the mayoralty of York and North Yorkshire — which includes Sunak’s constituency — and emerging victorious in the Blackpool South parliamentary constituency on a huge swing from the Tories.

The Conservatives had lost 473 council seats by Saturday afternoon, almost half of the ones they were defending, while there were gains for Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and independent candidates. Here are five key takeaways from what we’ve seen:

1. Heavy Tories losses suggest polls are right

This set of election’s results were bad for the Tories by any measure, suggesting opinion polls showing Labour far ahead are broadly accurate and translating into real votes.

“It’s one of the Conservatives’ worst performances in 40 years of following local elections,” John Curtice, the polling guru and politics professor, told Bloomberg Radio.

One Tory official privately conceded that if the results are repeated at the general election, they imply a defeat not far from the scale of Tony Blair’s landslide Labour victory in 1997, which gave him a majority of 179 seats.

However one glimmer for Sunak came in the BBC’s projected national vote share putting Labour on 34% in a general election, and the Tories on 25%. While that’s still a 9-point deficit, it’s significantly lower than the 26-point lag in the latest YouGov poll. While Sky produced a similar projection, pollsters warned against extrapolating national results from local elections.

2 Even so, Sunak is safe as Tory leader for now

Right-wing Conservative rebels had seen these elections as their last chance of mounting a coup to replace Sunak before the general election. They have now given up on that, people involved in the discussions told Bloomberg.

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