In local elections in London, Prime Minister Johnson suffers significant losses

Key Takeaways:

• As a result of a string of scandals, Prime Minister Boris Johnson's Conservative Party lost control of historical strongholds in London and suffered losses elsewhere.
• According to preliminary data, the Conservative Party has lost 92 council seats. The Liberal Democrats won 42 seats, while the Labour Party came in second with 23.
• In the run-up to the elections, one survey predicted that the Conservatives would lose roughly 800 council seats.

Early results from local elections on Friday showed that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson's Conservative Party lost control of historical strongholds in London and suffered losses elsewhere as voters punished his government over a slew of scandals.

Johnson's party was loosed in Wandsworth, a low-tax Conservative stronghold since 1978. It was a portion of a trend in the British capital where voters were using the elections to vent their frustrations about an increasing cost of living and fines imposed on the PM for breaking his own COVID-19 rules.

The Conservatives lost control of the London borough of Barnet, which they had held since 1964 in all but two elections. Labour also believes it has won the Westminster council for the first time, a district that houses the majority of govt institutions.

"This is a warning shot from Conservative voters," Barnet Conservative leader Daniel Thomas stated.

The aggregate result will be released later on Friday. It will provide the most important snapshot of public sentiment since Johnson secured the Conservative Party's biggest majority in around 30 years in the 2019 general election.

Johnson is running for re-election after breaking the law while in office for the first time in British history. He was fined last month for having attended a birthday party in his office in 2020, in violation of COVID social distancing restrictions in place at the time.

The Conservative Party has lost 92 council seats, according to early figures. The Liberal Democrats won 42 seats, while the main opposition Labour Party won 23.

The loss of key London councils, where the Conservatives were virtually wiped out, would pile the pressure on Johnson, who's been struggling for his political life for months and faces additional police fines for his participation in earlier lockdown-breaking gatherings.

In Thursday's elections, about 7,000 council seats will be determined, including all of those in London, Scotland, Wales, and a third of those across the rest of England.

Johnson upset conventional British politics by winning the general election in 2019 and promising to improve living standards in former industrial areas of central as well as northern England.

However, the loss of Wandsworth, Barnet, and possibly Westminster symbolizes how Johnson, who served as mayor of London for two terms, has lost his appeal in the city. His support for Brexit has cost him support in London, where most voters in the 2016 Brexit referendum voted to remain in the European Union.

Outside of the capital, the conclusion is likely to be less obvious. In Southampton, Worcester, and West Oxfordshire, the Conservatives lost overall control of the councils.

However, the party has not performed as poorly as some polls projected. One survey predicted that the Conservatives would lose roughly 800 council seats in the run-up to the elections.

Early indications suggested the Conservatives would lose approximately 250 seats, according to John Curtice, a politics professor at the University of Strathclyde. He predicted that Labour would not be the major party at the next election based on the results.

However, after the party's poor result, which they blamed Johnson's fine and the cost-of-living problem, some local Conservative council leaders called for Johnson to quit.

Carlisle city council, Conservative leader John Mallinson, told the BBC that it had been "tough to draw the discourse back to local matters."

"I just don't think people believe the prime minister can be trusted to tell the truth anymore," he remarked.

The most senior Conservative in Portsmouth, Simon Bosher, said the party's Westminster leadership needed to "take a good, long, hard look in the mirror" to understand why they had lost seats.