Britain's Prime Minister Rishi Sunak speaks in the House of Commons, in London, on May 1.-/Getty Images
British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is bracing for a string of local elections on Thursday, which polls show are expected to go badly for his Conservative Party and raise more questions about the future of his leadership.
Mr. Sunak has been struggling for months to reverse the slumping fortunes of the Conservatives, who trail the Labour Party by as much as 20 points in most opinion polls and face a general election later this year.
The Prime Minister had high hopes that the government’s budget in March, which included some tax breaks, would help to turn the tide, but voters seem largely unimpressed. His flagship plan to send some asylum seekers to Rwanda has also yet to get off the ground and the British economy has stalled.
To add further insult, Tory MP Dan Poulter, who is a medical doctor, defected to Labour this week and criticized his former party for failing to properly fund health care.
Thursday’s local elections could be a harbinger of even worse things to come for Mr. Sunak.
Around 2,660 seats across 107 councils in England are up for grabs, along with spots for 37 regional police and crime commissioners in England and Wales. Voters will also choose 11 mayors, including in London and the Birmingham region, and there’s a by-election in Blackpool.
The Conservatives and Labour Party will each be defending nearly 1,000 seats, while the Liberal Democrats currently hold around 400. Nearly all of the seats were last contested in 2021 when the Conservatives were flying high under Boris Johnson, who led the party to a landslide victory in the 2019 election.
But the party has been on a downward spiral ever since.
Tory MPs pushed out Mr. Johnson as leader and prime minister in 2023 after he was caught up in a flurry of scandals. Liz Truss took over, but she was ousted after just 45 days in office when her mini-budget caused chaos in financial markets and a spike in mortgage rates. She was quickly replaced by Mr. Sunak, whose approval rating in some polls has fallen even lower than hers.
Most analysts expect the Conservatives to lose at least half of their council seats on Thursday, with Labour picking up most. Polls show the party is also on track to lose the Blackpool by-election, which has been called because the current MP, Conservative Scott Benton, resigned after violating lobbying rules.
“If the opinion polls nationally are anything to go by, it’s going to be pretty bad for the Conservatives,” said Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London. “It looks as though Labour might win by about a two-to-one margin.”
Mr. Sunak’s best hope is the re-election of two popular Tory mayors – Andy Street in the Birmingham region and Ben Houchen in the Tees Valley area in northern England.
Mr. Houchen took 73 per cent of the vote in 2021, and he has been seen as a driving force in helping the Conservatives break Labour’s stranglehold on much of the north. But he is facing a far more difficult election this time and polls show he has a narrow lead over Labour candidate Chris McEwan, a local councillor.
Mr. Street, a former businessman who has been mayor since 2017, is in an even tougher race, and polls show he’s trailing Labour’s Richard Parker, a former partner at accounting firm PwC.
A win by both mayors would help Mr. Sunak deflect some attention from losses elsewhere. But if the overall results are worse than expected, talk of dumping Mr. Sunak as leader is certain to intensify. Under party rules, a vote on Mr. Sunak’s leadership can be triggered by 15 per cent of caucus members, or 52 Tory MPs.
There have been rumblings of discontent about Mr. Sunak from a handful of MPs, but Dr. Bale doubts enough caucus members will move against the Prime Minister. Few of the main candidates to replace him would want to be leader now anyway, he said. “And I do think that quite a lot of Conservative MPs believe they’ll become even more of a laughingstock in the country if they tried to make another quick change of leadership.”
Tony Travers, a professor of government at the London School of Economics, agreed that most Conservative MPs would view another leadership race as absurd, but that could change if the results on Thursday were disastrous.
“If the losses were really, really, really bad, more Conservatives might think, ‘Well, you know, what have we got to lose?’ ” Dr. Travers said. “And what this tells us is the Conservative Party, which is brilliant at winning elections, at the moment is riven with factions.”
Dr. Travers noted that Mr. Sunak does have a trump card to play if a rebellion surfaces. He has not ruled out calling a snap election this summer, and that threat is likely to keep most Tory MPs in line, given the party’s current polling numbers.
Paul Waldie