Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives unexpectedly held onto Boris Johnson’s old parliamentary seat in a special election, a major boost for the UK prime minister as he tries to show the opposition Labour Party’s emphatic lead in national polls is not transforming into votes on the ground.
Uxbridge is the first of three special elections to report results early Friday, with Selby and Ainsty in northern England, and Somerton and Frome in the southwest, yet to declare. The Conservatives had been downplaying their chances, arguing that even winning in one contest would represent a victory given governments are traditionally given a kicking in mid-term votes.
Steve Tuckwell retained the seat in Uxbridge and South Ruislip, a commuter district in northwest London.
Sunak is seeking to prove he can turn around his party’s slump in the polls, which began under Johnson — who was premier from 2019 to 2023 — and has barely recovered from Liz Truss’s disastrous seven-week premiership last fall.
Read more: Don’t Say Tory: How Sunak’s Party Aims to Survive Key Votes
Johnson first won Uxbridge in 2015 and held the seat in 2019 with 53% of the vote, when he also led the Tories to a landslide national victory. But he was forced out as prime minister last year and quit as an MP in June, after a panel found he lied to Parliament about rule-breaking parties in Downing Street during the pandemic.
That political backdrop, and the fact that Johnson’s 2019 margin was the slimmest of the three contests, made Uxbridge on paper Labour’s clearest chance of a momentum-cementing win. That Starmer’s party could not secure a smaller swing than its national poll lead suggests will raise questions.
But Labour will point to local factors in Uxbridge that prevented its candidate making headway. Faced with an expected drubbing, the Tories worked to turn the vote into an unofficial referendum on controversial plans to charge vehicles in the district in an effort to reduce pollution. That program is being pushed by Labour’s mayor of London Sadiq Khan, causing a political headache for Beales as he was forced to back away from the plan.
--With assistance from Rebecca Choong Wilkins.
