British Prime Minister and Conservative Party leader Rishi Sunak reacts as he meets with veterans at a community breakfast, in Northallerton, North Yorkshire, Britain, on May 25, 2024.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

After declaring a general election for July 4, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is reportedly spending his first Saturday with his closest advisers as he takes an “unusual step” of a day away from public events over the first weekend of the campaign.

The 44-year-old Indian-origin leader is taking some private time out with his aides and family amid a mass exodus of senior members of Parliament from his embattled Conservative Party.

Cabinet ministers Michael Gove and Andrea Leadsom became the latest Tory frontliners to announce their decision to not stand for re-election in this summer’s polls, taking the number of party members quitting the race to as many as 78.

Mr. Gove’s announcement in a letter released on social media on Friday evening had been anticipated amid strong challenges to incumbent Tories in constituencies around the country.

Leadsom released her own letter shortly after, writing to Mr. Sunak: “After careful reflection, I have decided not to stand as a candidate in the forthcoming election.”

In his letter, Housing Minister Gove wrote that he knew “the toll office can take, as do those closest to me…No one in politics is a conscript. We are volunteers who willingly choose our fate. And the chance to serve is wonderful. But there comes a moment when you know that it is time to leave. That a new generation should lead.”

Former Prime Minster Theresa May is also among the senior MPs stepping away, with former defence minister Ben Wallace already having announced his decision to leave frontline politics.

According to sources quoted by the Guardian newspaper, Mr. Sunak is taking the “unusual step” of a day away from public events over the first weekend of the election campaign and instead will spend it in discussion on election strategy with his closest advisers.

While one source was quoted as saying that the idea that Sunak was hoping to reset his campaign was “ridiculous”, another campaign operative claimed that “prime ministers don’t normally spend the first weekend of the campaign at home talking to their advisers”.

The reports prompted Opposition Labour MP Stella Creasy to post on social media: “Sunak is already in need of a duvet day. Britain is already in need of a different government.” However, the claims were soon rubbished, saying he was spending the day campaigning in his north England constituency of Yorkshire. Conservative minister Bim Afolami intervened to brand criticisms of the Sunak campaign made by the Opposition.

“I think a lot of those things are fluff…I think that the important thing is that we frame this election correctly,” he said.

It came as Sunak visited the Titanic Quarter in Belfast on Friday, where the world’s largest attraction themed around the ship is located, prompting one reporter to ask if he is “captaining a sinking ship going into this election”.

Opposition Labour leader Keir Starmer is also in full campaign swing planning to use the day at public events designed to focus on his argument that the Conservatives have damaged the economy and raised living costs.

It came as Labour’s lead fell by three points in the first YouGov opinion poll since Rishi Sunak called the snap summer general election on Wednesday.

The survey, conducted on Thursday and Friday, shows the Conservatives up by one point to 22 per cent, while Labour is down two to 44 per cent.

Britain’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. File
| Photo Credit: Reuters

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on May 5 promised to work “as hard as ever” after a disastrous set of election results saw his Conservative Party being unseated across several local authorities and even losing a mayoralty stronghold in the West Midlands region of England.

The British Indian leader admitted his disappointment after Andy Street, the party’s popular Mayor of West Midlands, narrowly lost to Labour rival Richard Parker by a mere 1,508 votes after a recount had to be ordered for the knife-edge result. This leaves Mr. Sunak with a solo sliver of hope in Ben Houchen, who had held on to the party’s mayoralty in Tees Valley on Friday amid a virtual sweep for the Opposition parties, with Labour in the lead.

“It’s been disappointing of course to lose dedicated Conservative councillors and Andy Street in the West Midlands, with his track record of providing great public services and attracting significant investment to the area, but that has redoubled my resolve to continue to make progress on our plan,” Mr. Sunak said in a statement.

“So we will continue working as hard as ever to take the fight to Labour and deliver a brighter future for our country,” he said.

While Tory rebels have begun circling, the echo this time does not seem to be around replacing Mr. Sunak as party leader but piling pressure on him to get tougher on the party’s core issues like setting a cap on legal migration and dramatically cutting taxes. Former Home Secretary Suella Braverman is leading this charge and issued a stinging rebuke in ‘The Daily Telegraph’ to demand that it was time for Sunak to move on from “managerialism” and show strong leadership.

“Let me cut to the chase so no one wastes time over-analysing this: we must not change our leader. Changing leader now won’t work: the time to do so came and went. The hole to dig us out is the PM’s, and it’s time for him to start shovelling,” writes the sacked Indian-origin ex-minister, who is at the forefront of the backbench rebellion.

“Either we start fighting to win now, or we’ll have no one else to blame when this week’s political earthquake is made to look like a mere tremor come the general election night,” she said.

Others have chimed in to say it was time for Sunak to “wake up and smell the coffee” because the local election results show that the Labour Party is on course to stomp to victory in a general election, expected later this year.

Opposition leader Sir Keir Starmer has hailed his party’s “phenomenal result”, which included Labour’s Sadiq Khan being re-elected for a record third term as London Mayor on Friday.

But Mr. Starmer also appealed to the voters who had punished the party over its weak stance on the Israel-Gaza conflict, after analysis showed that Labour suffered losses to independents and the anti-war Worker’s Party of Britain in areas with large Islamic populations as a result.

“I have heard you. I have listened. And I am determined to meet your concerns and to gain your respect and trust again in the future,” said Mr. Starmer.

But on the whole, the Labour camp will be celebrating this weekend as it virtually swept the mayoral elections across England, winning in Liverpool, South Yorkshire, West Yorkshire, and Greater Manchester.

With most of the results now in for the elections held for local councils on Thursday, Labour looks set to have grabbed over 1,100 seats. The Liberal Democrats beat the Tories into second place by winning over 500 seats as the Conservatives lost around 400 of previously held seats of local councillors, who manage day to day issues such as waste collection, roads and local infrastructure as well as crime fighting.

A member of the Labour Party sits outside a polling station near Russell Square, central London London, during the local elections, on May 2, 2024.
| Photo Credit: AFP

Britain’s governing Conservative Party is suffering heavy losses as local election results pour in Friday, piling pressure on Prime Minister Rishi Sunak ahead of a U.K. general election in which the main opposition Labour Party appears increasingly likely to return to power after 14 years.

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Labour won control of councils in England it hasn’t held for decades and was successful in a special by-election for Parliament. Its only negative has been in some areas with large Muslim populations, such as Oldham in northwest England, where the party’s candidates appear to have suffered as a result of leader Keir Starmer ‘s strongly pro-Israel stance in the conflict in Gaza.

Perhaps of most importance in the context of the looming general election, Labour won Blackpool South, a long-time Labour seat in the northwest of England that went Conservative in the last general election in 2019, when then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson won a big victory. In the contest, triggered by the resignation of a Conservative lawmaker following a lobbying scandal, Labour’s Chris Webb secured 10,825 votes, 7,607 more than his second-placed Conservative opponent.

“This seismic win in Blackpool South is the most important result today,” Starmer said. “This is the one contest where voters had the chance to send a message to Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives directly, and that message is an overwhelming vote for change.”

Thursday’s elections were important in themselves, with voters deciding who will run many aspects of their daily lives, such as garbage collection, road maintenance and local crime prevention, in the coming years. But with a general election looming, they will be viewed through a national prism.

Starmer next Labour PM?

The results so far provide more evidence that Labour is likely to form the next government — and by quite a margin — and that Mr. Starmer will become Prime Minister.

As of early Friday, with barely a quarter of the 2,661 seats up for grabs counted, the Conservatives were down 115 while Labour was up 60. Labour has won in areas, which voted heavily for Britain’s departure from the European Union and where it was crushed by Johnson, such as Hartlepool in the northeast of England, and Thurrock in southeast England. It also seized control of Rushmoor, a leafy and military-heavy council in the south of England where it has never been in power.

John Curtice, professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde, said the results so far indicate that the Conservatives are losing around half of the seats they are trying to defend.

“We are probably looking at certainly one of the worst, if not the worst, Conservative performances in local government elections for the last 40 years,” he told BBC radio.

The results will roll in through Saturday. Mr. Sunak hopes he can point to successes, notably in several key mayoral races, to douse talk that the Conservative Party will change its leader again before the United Kingdom’s main election, which could take place as soon as next month.

Key to his survival could be the results of mayoral elections in Tees Valley in the northeast of England and in the West Midlands. The former is due Friday midday and the latter on Saturday. Should Conservative mayors Andy Street and Ben Houchen hold on, he may win some respite from restive lawmakers in his party. Should both lose, he may face trouble. Labour’s Sadiq Khan is expected to remain mayor of London when results are announced on Saturday..

Mr. Sunak could preempt any challenge by threatening to call a general election that has to take place before January 2025. He has the power to decide on the date and has indicated that it will be in the second half of 2024.

Mr. Sunak became Prime Minister in October 2022 after the short-lived tenure of his predecessor, Liz Truss, who left office after 49 days following a budget of unfunded tax cuts that roiled financial markets and sent borrowing costs for homeowners surging.

Her chaotic — and traumatic — leadership compounded the Conservatives’ difficulties following the circus surrounding her predecessor Johnson, who was forced to quit after being adjudged to have lied to Parliament over lockdown breaches at his offices in Downing Street.

Nothing Mr. Sunak has tried to do appears to have shifted the political dial, with Labour consistently 20 percentage points ahead in opinion polls, which would lead, if translated into a general election, to a landslide victory on a par with that achieved by Tony Blair in 1997.