The reactions of the British opposition forces in the face of the ruinous results of the Conservative Party of Prime Minister Boris Johnson in the two by-elections held yesterday in as many colleges in England, that of Wakefield and that of Tiverton and Honiton: the latest in a series are exultant. of medium-term electoral reversals that have already produced the
resignation of Oliver Dowden
, minister without wallet and head of the Tory organizational machine since 2021 as party president.
The two colleges up for grabs were both lost by the Tory candidates, according to forecasts, to the benefit of Labor and the Liberal Democrats.
But with a swing, a
transfer of votes
, even heavier than expectations.
According to Labor leader Keir Starmer, "the vote confirms that the country has lost faith" in the prime minister and that BoJo's party
"is imploding
".
While for Ed Davey, number one of the Lib Dems, it is a wake-up call addressed to the Tory deputies themselves who, in the light of the Partygate and other missteps accused to the government, should in his view "finally do the right thing and torpedo" the leadership of Boris Johnson.
In
Wakefield
, a college in the former 'red wall' of northern England torn from Labor for the first time since 1932 on the occasion of BoJo's national electoral triumph in December 2019, the Labor candidate Simon Lightwood has returned to prevail not so much thanks to the recovery of votes of his party (limited to 8% in spite of the sexual harassment scandal on a fifteen-year-old dating back to 2008 that had even taken outgoing Tory MP, Imran Khan, brother of the international prosecutor of the UN Criminal Court, to jail), how much thanks to
the 17-point collapse of the Tories
.
While in
Tiverton and Honiton
, a wealthy, pro-Brexit constituency of southern England created in the 1990s, but inserted into a territory controlled by conservatives for over a century, the centrist Liberal Democrats have advanced more than 20 percentage points with their candidate Richard Foord;
against the
minus 30%
scored by the conservative Helen Hurford compared to the figure obtained in 2019 by his predecessor Neil Parish, then overwhelmed by a Boccaccio story of porn videos peeked at the House of Commons.