Official results showed that Liberal Democrat candidate Helen Morgan won the North Shropshire constituency seat with 47 percent of the vote, nearly 6,000 votes ahead of her challenger, who was nominated by the Prime Minister’s party to succeed Conservative MP Owen Patterson.
After her victory was announced, Morgan said voters “clearly” assured Boris Johnson that “the party is over”, stressing that “your government, which rules on lies and vanity, must be held accountable.”
Patterson had held this seat since 1997 and was forced to resign due to a political scandal, and in the last elections that took place in 2019, he had obtained 62.7 percent of the votes and a comfortable majority of 23,000 votes.
Turnout in Thursday’s election in this rural constituency in England, which has been dominated for decades by the Conservative Party, was 46.3 percent (or 38,093 voters according to the final census), compared to 62.9 percent in the December 2019 poll.
The Liberal Democrats seem to have had the support of the opposition Labor Party’s supporters.
“I am going to vote for the Liberal Democrats because I am offended by Johnson’s performance,” Martin Hill, 68, who usually votes for Labor, told AFP earlier in the week. “It will be a tactical vote. I want to slap Johnson.”
British media on Friday described the defeat of the prime minister’s party as an “insult” to Johnson and a “nightmare before Christmas”.
The Telegraph said the “shocking result” represented an “insult” to Johnson, whose party had maintained a voter base in the district for nearly 200 years.
The Guardian wrote that “a catastrophic collapse of support for the Conservatives (…) will frighten many Conservative MPs and could raise questions about Johnson’s future.” “This finding adds to the pressure on the prime minister, who has already faced painful weeks in Westminster,” the seat of Parliament, she added.
For its part, the newspaper “Daily Mail” said that Johnson is experiencing a “nightmare before Christmas”, saying that “his defeat reveals a high level of public anger against the prime minister.”
“North Shropshire voters are tired and I think they want to send a message to us (…) that we have heard,” Conservative Party chairman Oliver Dowden told Sky News Friday.
These cases come at the worst time for Johnson, as the United Kingdom, he says, faces a “tidal wave” of an outbreak of the Omicron mutant in a country that has recorded nearly 147,000 deaths.
His credibility has become questionable, especially after it was recently revealed that a ceremony was held at the headquarters of the government at the end of 2020, while great restrictions were imposed on the British to limit their social contacts to the maximum.
In the House of Commons on Tuesday, he struggled to persuade MPs to impose new restrictions to combat Covid.
The final blow was represented by an unprecedented rebellion by his party’s MPs, 99 of whom voted in the House of Commons against the imposition of health certification for major occasions, considering that this limits freedoms, and this measure was passed only thanks to the support of the Labor opposition.
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