Britain’s Prime Minister Rishi Sunak could find himself in a familiar predicament after his Conservative Party suffered a two-constituency general election defeat on Thursday: isolated, battered and the subject of whispered conspiracies from anxious Tories bent on pushing him out for a new leader.
The landslide loss of two seats in once reliably conservative areas capped another dismal week for Mr Sunak. Economic data confirmed on Thursday that Britain had slipped into recession late last year, undermining one of the prime minister’s five key pledges – to recharge the country’s growth.
But the drive against Mr. Sunak, analysts said, is no more likely to go anywhere than during his previous leadership crises. As desperate as the Conservatives’ political straits are, they would find it difficult, at this late stage, to replace their withering prime minister with someone else.
With the party divided between the center and the right, and a general election looming within months, the conditions for an intra-party coup – of the kind that ousted the last two Tory leaders, Liz Truss and Boris Johnson – are increasing. . difficult day by day, according to analysts.
Mr Sunak could still be cleared like Mr Johnson and Ms Truss. But his most likely fate, these analysts said, is to be swept away by the opposition Labor Party, which won both seats Thursday in resounding fashion and has led the Conservatives by double digits in national polls for more than a year.
“I wouldn’t completely rule out the idea that he could be gone by the end of the month, but it seems pretty unlikely,” Timothy Bale, a politics professor at Queen Mary, University of London, said of Mr. Sunak. . “I think most Tory MPs still believe it would make them look ridiculous.”
Support for the Conservatives never recovered from Mrs Truss’s disastrous 44-day tenure as prime minister, which ended with her resignation after being forced to reverse tax cuts that unnerved financial markets and sent interest rates soaring. But the party’s long confusion began during Mr Johnson’s scandal-ridden tenure.
There were echoes of the Johnson era in the election in Wellingborough, a Northamptonshire constituency where Tory MP Peter Bone was recalled by voters following a bullying and sexual abuse scandal.
In the 2019 general election, the Conservatives won the seat by more than 18,000 votes. This time, voters chose the Labor candidate, Gen Kitchen, by a margin of 6,436 votes – the largest loss of votes suffered by the Conservatives in a post-war by-election for a seat they were defending.
In the other election, in Kingswood, near Bristol, Labor won a Tory seat vacated by Chris Skidmore, the energy secretary. He had resigned to protest the government’s plan to issue more licenses to extract oil and gas from the North Sea. The Conservatives had won the seat by more than 11,000 votes in 2019. This time, Labor candidate Damien Egan took it by 2,501 votes.
While each race had its own idiosyncrasies, both reflected deep voter fatigue with the Conservatives, who have been in government for 14 years. Mr Sunak did not bother to campaign in any constituencies, confirming the party’s slim hopes of retaining the seats.
Such elections, however, are often seen as a harbinger of a party’s general election performance, and these defeats confirmed the bleak outlook for the Tories. With opinion polls suggesting hundreds of Tory MPs could lose their seats, the mood within the party is now bordering on panic, officials say.
That is why every new electoral setback prompts speculation that the Conservatives will turn against their leader. Even before Thursday’s vote, Mr. Sunak had added to those concerns with a series of policy blunders.
In an interview with TV presenter Piers Morgan, Mr Sunak appeared to accept a £1,000 (about $1,260) bet that Britain would put asylum seekers on a plane to Rwanda before the next general election. Critics attacked him for gambling on the lives of people crossing the Channel in small boats.
Mr Sunak then came under fire for making a joke in the House of Commons about Labour’s position on transgender people. As Mr Sunak spoke, the mother of Brianna Ghey, a transgender teenager who had been murdered, was visiting Parliament. Mr Sunak has repeatedly refused to apologise.
While Mr Sunak inherited an embattled party, an economy battered by the coronavirus pandemic, a health system in crisis and the war in Ukraine, analysts said these episodes revealed a worrying deficit in his political instincts.
“He is not a particularly convincing politician, which is not surprising given his rise to the top has been so rapid,” said Professor Bale, who has written several books on the Conservative Party.
To be sure, Mr Sunak has never presented himself as a jovial politician, but rather as a responsible steward of the British economy after Ms Truss. But having calmed the markets, he has struggled to develop policies to recharge Britain’s growth or reduce the red ink on its public finances.
“They are neither stupid nor financially illiterate,” Jonathan Portes, an economics professor at Kings College London, said of Mr Sunak and his Chancellor of the Exchequer, Jeremy Hunt. “But they’ve basically given up trying to do anything other than short-term traps for the opposition.”
Mr. Sunak dug a deeper hole for himself with his five goals. As well as restoring growth, he promised to halve inflation, reduce the public debt, stop the flow of ships in the canal and reduce waiting times in NHS hospitals. It has failed to achieve any of these apart from reducing inflation, for which the Bank of England arguably deserves much of the credit.
“He keeps promising to do things that he can’t do in the time he has,” said Robert Ford, a professor of politics at the University of Manchester. “It just pisses off his base because it’s not deliverable and they know it.”
But the process of ousting Mr. Sunak would be a challenge, even for a party renowned for its toughness in ousting unpopular leaders. Unless he agrees to leave, which he shows no sign of doing, more than 50 conservative lawmakers will have to turn against Mr. Sunak to force a vote of no confidence. Lawmakers can submit letters pushing for competition privately. how many have done so is not known.
But very few have publicly called on the prime minister to step down. When Simon Clarke, a former minister, did so recently, he was quickly disowned by his Tory colleagues, one of whom advised him to find a dark room, lie down and settle down. Lawmakers know a leadership change would expose the party’s internal rifts unless a consensus emerges on Mr Sunak’s successor.
This seems very unlikely. Much of the agitation against Mr. Sunak came from the right. Critics such as David Frost, a one-time adviser to Mr Johnson, have warned that the party is headed for defeat and that if it does not act, “soon we will be nothing but smoking ruins”, as Mr Frost put it.
The most prominent contender for the right-wing leadership is Kemi Badenoch, the trade secretary, who has stood by her loyalty to Mr Sunak even after news reports that he is part of a Tory MPs WhatsApp group called “Evil Plotters”. Hard-line former interior minister Suella Braverman, whom Mr Sunak fired from her job, is also said to have leadership aspirations.
However, the party’s centrists will likely be reluctant to install a polarizing figure in Downing Street ahead of the election. A more likely compromise choice would be Penny Mordaunt, the leader of the House of Commons, whose profile soared when she took a prominent role at the coronation of King Charles III last year.
“Given the poll, it could be the last roll of the dice,” Professor Bale said. But, he added, “even she would think she’s better off staying with Sunak and hoping the economy has finally bottomed out and will pick up.”
