Pressure on Johnson after by-election defeat

LONDON — Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party has suffered a stunning defeat in a parliamentary byelection that was viewed as a referendum on his government amid weeks of scandal and soaring COVID-19 infections.

Liberal Democrat Helen Morgan overturned a Conservative majority of almost 23,000 votes from the last election to win Thursday’s contest in North Shropshire, a rural area of northwest England that has been represented by a Conservative almost continuously since 1832. The election was called after the former Conservative member of Parliament resigned following allegations of improper lobbying.

The result will heap pressure on Johnson just two years after he was re-elected with a seemingly unassailable 80-seat majority in the House of Commons. His authority has been dented in recent weeks by allegations that he and his staff attended Christmas parties last year while the country was in lockdown, efforts to shield his ally in the lobbying scandal and suggestions that he improperly accepted donations to fund the lavish refurbishment of his official residence.

Against this backdrop, supporters and opponents are questioning Johnson’s handling of the pandemic after coronavirus infections soared to records this week as the highly transmissible omicron variant swept through the U.K.

“Tonight the people of North Shropshire have spoken on behalf of the British people,” Morgan said in her victory speech. “They said loudly and clearly, ‘Boris Johnson, the party is over. Your government, run on lies and bluster, will be held acparty’s countable. It will be scrutinized, it will be challenged, and it can and will be defeated.’ ”

Thursday’s result is the second by-election defeat for the Conservatives this year. The Liberal Democrats, England’s thirdbiggest party, in June won a by-election in Chesham and Amersham, a constituency northwest of London that had also been a traditional Conservative stronghold.

John Curtice, a pollster and professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde, said the Conservative defeat in North Shropshire was “pretty spectacular by historical standards,” noting that the support plunged 34% from the previous election in 2019.

The only time the party suffered a bigger drop during a by-election was in 1993, when it was riven by internal division, he said. The Conservatives lost power to the Labor Party during the next general election in 1997.

“There is no doubting the size of this rebuff to the Conservatives and further evidence that the party has indeed now hit something of an electoral hole in the wake of those various scandals,” Curtice told GB News.