The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Johnson suffered a major defeat in the local elections in London

LONDON, May 6 – British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party has lost control of traditional strongholds in London and lost local elections elsewhere, with early Friday results showing voters punishing his government for corruption.

Johnson’s party has been ousted since 1978 in the conservative stronghold of Wandsworth, part of a trend in the British capital, where voters used the election to express anger over the cost-of-living crisis and fined the prime minister. Own COVID-19 locking rules.

The Conservatives lost control of the Barnett metropolis, which has been run by the party since 1964 in all but two elections. Labor believes it has won for the first time in Westminster Council, the district where most government agencies are located. read more

“This is a warning from Conservative voters,” said Daniel Thomas, Conservative chairman of the Barnett Council.

With Johnson winning the Conservative Party’s overwhelming majority in the 2019 general election for more than 30 years, the overall turnout coming late Friday will provide the most important snapshot of public opinion.

The ballot was the first election test for Johnson, the first British leader to break the law while in office. He was fined last month for attending a birthday party in his office in 2020, violating social space rules to prevent the spread of the cove. read more

Preliminary results show that the Conservative Party has lost 92 council seats. The main opposition Labor Party won 23 seats and the Liberal Democrats 42 seats.

The loss of key councilors in London, where the Conservatives have almost been wiped out, will increase pressure on Johnson, who has been fighting for his political survival for months, and faces the possibility of higher police fines for attending other lock-breaking meetings.

Elections on Thursday will determine almost 7,000 council seats, including all in London, Scotland and Wales, and one-third of most seats in the UK.

Johnson won the 2019 general election by elevating conventional British politics by promising to improve living standards in the former industrial areas of central and northern England.

But the loss of Wandsworth, Barnett and possibly Westminster indicates that Johnson, a two-time mayor of London, has lost his appeal in the capital. His support for Brexit, which was supported by a majority of voters to stay in the EU in the 2016 Brexit referendum, lost support for him in London.

Results outside the capital are less likely. The Conservatives lost control of the Southampton, Worcester and West Oxfordshire churches as a whole.

But the party did not do as badly as some polls predicted. A pre-election poll suggested that the Conservative Party could lose about 800 council seats.

John Curtis, a political professor at Strathclyde University, said early trends suggest the Conservatives could lose about 250 seats. He said the results suggest that Labor will not emerge as a major party in the next election.

However, some local Conservative council leaders called for Johnson to resign, after the party’s poor performance, he was fined and blamed for the cost-of-living crisis.

John Mullinson, the Conservative chairman of Carlisle City Council, told the BBC “it is difficult to pull the debate back to local issues.”

“I do not feel that people can trust the Prime Minister to tell the truth,” he said.

Simon Posher, a senior Conservative in Portsmouth, said party leaders in Westminster should “look in the mirror well, long time” to find out why they lost seats.

Reported by Andrew MacAscill; Editing by Kenneth Maxwell and Stephen Coates

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