Sadiq Khan, the Labor Party mayor of London, stormed to victory on Saturday, securing a record third straight term at City Hall, on another hugely disappointing day for Britain’s governing Conservatives, in the in the run-up to the impending general election.
Khan won just over a million votes, or almost 44% of the vote, more than 11 percentage points ahead of his main challenger, the Conservative Party’s Susan Hall. He did particularly well in central London but struggled in several suburbs.
There was frenzied speculation on Friday that the result would be closer than previously thought, but Khan’s lead showed a swing from Conservative to Labor compared to the previous 2021 mayoral election.
Khan, who replaced Boris Johnson as mayor of London in 2016, has become increasingly divisive in recent years.
Alastair Grant / AP
While his supporters say he has several achievements to his name, such as expanding housing, free school meals for young children, controlling transport costs and generally supporting London’s minority groups, his critics say he has overseen a wave of crime, been anti-car politics and has unnecessarily allowed pro-Palestinian marches to become a regular feature on weekends.
“Sadiq Khan was absolutely the right candidate,” said Labor leader Keir Starmer. “He has two delivery terms behind him and I am confident he has another delivery term ahead of him.”
The incumbent Labor mayors in Liverpool, Greater Manchester and West Yorkshire were also re-elected on Saturday, while the party appears to have ousted the Conservative mayor in the West Midlands. A recount will take place there.
The latest successes come a day after Labor took control of councils across England, which it has not had for decades. The party was also successful in a special election for a seat in parliament, which, if translated into a general election, would lead to one of the biggest ever defeats for the Conservatives.
Although the Conservatives suffered a drubbing in the local elections, it appears Prime Minister Rishi Sunak will not face further rebellion among his ranks.
Sunak was able to breathe a sigh of relief when the Conservative mayor of Tees Valley in the northeast of England was re-elected, albeit with a low number of votes. Sunak had hoped Andy Street would hold out in the West Midlands, but it appears he has lost.
One negative for Labor was that the mood in heavily Muslim areas of England was depressed by opposition to the party leadership’s strongly pro-Israel position on the war in Gaza.
Starmer admitted the party has had problems with Muslim voters, but the results have been generally positive for the man favorite to become prime minister at the next general election.
Sunak has the power to decide the date of the next election, and has indicated it will be in the second half of 2024. Starmer urged him not to wait.
“We are tired of your division, your chaos and your failure,” he said on Saturday. “If you leave your country 14 years later in a worse state than when you found it, you don’t deserve to be in government any longer.”
Thursday’s elections in many parts of England were important in their own right, with voters deciding who manages many aspects of their daily lives, such as waste collection, road maintenance and local crime prevention. But now that national elections are approaching, they are being viewed through a national prism.
John Curtice, professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde, said the results showed Sunak had not helped the Conservative brand after the damage suffered by the actions of his predecessors, Boris Johnson and then Liz Truss.
“That, in a sense, is the most important conclusion,” he told the BBC.
Sunak became Prime Minister in October 2022, after Truss’s short-lived term in office. She left office after 49 days following a budget of unfunded tax cuts that roiled financial markets and raised borrowing costs for homeowners.
Her chaotic – and traumatic – leadership exacerbated the Conservatives’ problems after the circus surrounding her predecessor Johnson, who was forced to quit after being declared to have lied to Parliament about coronavirus lockdown breaches in his Downing Street office .
By late afternoon on Saturday, when most of the 2,661 seats up for grabs in the local elections had been counted, the Conservatives had lost about half of the 1,000 seats they were defending, while Labor had won about 200 despite some apparent Gaza-related losses.
Other parties, such as the centrist Liberal Democrats and the Greens, also made gains. Reform UK, which is trying to usurp the Conservatives from the right, also had some successes, most notably in the special parliamentary election in Blackpool South, where it was less than 200 votes away from second place.
