UK PM Sunak Puts on Brave Face After One Narrow Win, Two Heavy Losses for Conservatives in Local Polls – News18

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak turned up at the Conservative Party office in Uxbridge to offer words of victory in the by-election held on Thursday. Sunak’s brave face, however, was a change from the worried Conservative faces all around him. But there is more reason to be concerned than be confident like Sunak appeared to project.

Conservative candidate Steve Tuckwell did win the by-election in the Uxbridge and South Ruislip constituency, which was brought about by the resignation of former PM Boris Johnson. Tuckwell scraped through with a margin of only 495 votes. That is a narrow margin given the small constituency electorates in Britain.

After winning, Tuckwell did not speak a word in support of Sunak or his policies, which might arguably have led him to victory. He spoke of the single local issue on which the bypoll was fought – the extension of the vehicle emission zone limited to outer London, which is to take effect from August 29. That unpopular scheme has been introduced by London’s Labour mayor Sadiq Khan.

Both Labour and the winning Conservative candidate agreed that the emissions issue had made the difference in the outcome. “I was not expecting to win,” Tuckwell said.

Through five weeks of door-to-door campaigning, he said he had heard nothing but complaints about the emissions scheme. Nothing by way of support for Sunak’s policies. But he still did not think the emissions grouse against Labour would see him through somehow. It proved to be the tipping point, just about.

Tuckwell did not quite echo Sunak when he came along on Friday morning. “Steve’s victory demonstrates that when confronted with the actual reality of the Labour Party, when there’s an actual choice on a matter of substance at stake, people vote Conservative,” Sunak said.

That claim was not backed by the circumstances of the party’s razor-thin victory. And it was emphatically not backed by the heavy Conservative losses in the other two constituencies, where bypolls were held the same day.

In Shelby, 25-year-old Labour candidate Keir Mather overturned a massive Conservative majority of more than 20,000 to win by over 4,000 votes, making him the youngest MP in British parliament. This was a knockout for the Conservatives in one of their safest strongholds.

Clearly, Conservative areas are still not bound to rejecting Labour even if this was to an extent a vote against the Conservatives and not necessarily in favour of Labour.

In the third constituency, Somerton, Labour were pushed into fifth place. Here the Liberal Democrat candidate Sarah Dyke won, overturning a Conservative majority of close to 20,009 by a margin of 11,000 votes. People seem to have voted tactically in these two areas to back the strongest candidate, who could knock the Conservatives out.

Which makes Sunak’s brave words sound hollow. His gung-ho tone was at odds with the results and the far more sober and sobering assessment of his own colleagues. The PM appears on track on getting some policy decisions about the economy right, but that appears not to have delivered popularity for him or his party. If he is not more worried than he sounds, it should be even more a matter of concern.