It’s a devastating day for Rishi Sunak

So far, it’s been terrible for Rishi Sunak.

Perhaps, as local election counting continues throughout Friday, the Prime Minister will be able to take some comfort from the opening of the polls. But if his party’s fate (and his own) were to be decided by the overnight results, he should consider calling in the movers and shakers now.

Not that there haven’t been crumbs of comfort for the Tories, even if those crumbs cannot be attributed to Sunak or his party. Labor supporters are said to be concerned about the loss of seats and votes to the Greens in Newcastle, where Muslim voters have reportedly abandoned their traditional party due – reportedly – ​​to Keir Starmer’s stance on the conflict. Gaza.

In the Byker area of ​​the city, the Greens saw their support rise by 42 per cent, while Labor saw theirs fall by more than 22. A similar trend across the country would be worrying for Starmer, who is expected to focus on the successes of his party. to hammer home his preferred message that Labor is set to form government. Distractions on Middle East politics would not be welcome.

Today’s results will reveal whether Newcastle is a bellwether to watch closely or an outlier that the Labor leader’s entourage can confidently dismiss.

Unfortunately for the Conservatives, the most significant result of the evening came not in the local elections but in the Blackpool South by-election, where Labor scored an impressive victory with the third biggest electoral swing in the seat since 1945.

Contest could hardly have presented a worse scenario for Sunak: Tory MP Scott Benton was suspended from the Commons after being implicated in a lobbying scandal. It was exactly such a lobbying scandal, which the party will want to forget, that triggered its alarming poll deficit, back when Boris Johnson was still prime minister, when the government sought to derail a commission report privileges on former minister Owen Paterson. on its own relationships with lobbying clients.

Just as John Major frantically tried to escape the bad behavior of his own MPs in the 1990s (and notably failed in his attempts), Sunak finds himself unable to escape the gravitational pull exerted by the actions and the instincts of his own team. Labour’s Chris Webb overturned Benton’s previous majority of 3,690 votes to secure his own majority of 7,607 votes. Blackpool South was previously held by Labor for 22 years – from 1997 to 2019.

And to make this result even more uncomfortable for the Prime Minister, Richard Tice’s British Reform Party nearly beat the Conservatives into third place, coming just 1 percent behind the Conservative candidate and securing 17 percent of the vote – the best party score. result since it was known as the Brexit Party. The risk of Reform disrupting the Conservatives’ general election results is now evident – a prospect Labor is positively salivating over.

Elsewhere, so far, we have seen that Labor is making great strides. Today we will learn the fate of the metropolis’ mayors, including high-profile Conservatives Andy Street in the West Midlands and Ben Houchen in the Tees Valley.

Sunak needs some good news today after last night’s terrible results. The Greens’ humiliation of Labor in Newcastle will have pleased him, but he cannot take credit for it, and the general election will not be decided by the smaller parties or Gaza.

And if the Prime Minister hoped to assess the advisability of setting a voting date for the legislative elections before the parliamentary summer recess, he would have been disappointed. Based on the (admittedly few) results to digest so far, no one will blame him if he concludes that voters should only be invited back to polling stations very late in the year.

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