Is Boris Johnson losing the south?

The great Tory success in 2019 was winning a host of new seats while keeping hold of their traditional southern heartlands, including many seats that had voted Remain. But the local election results will increase concern among Tory MPs that these seats are becoming vulnerable. The Tories have in the last couple of hours lost control of Maidenhead, Huntingdonshire, and Wokingham.

Talk to Tories in these types of places and they cite a variety of reasons for their difficulties. Some say that these voters don’t like levelling up – they suspect it is code for taxing them more so that more can be spent in the Tories’ new northern seats. Then, there is a more general complaint that No. 10 pays more attention to the newest parts of the Tory coalition.

There is also a Johnson factor here. Voters in these seats are less likely to be Brexiteers than in the red wall, so don’t feel the same affinity to Johnson. They are less inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt on things such as partygate.

But, perhaps, the biggest Tory problem is that Jeremy Corbyn is no longer Labour leader. In 2019, the Tories could keep supporters who didn’t like Johnson’s style in the fold by warning them that a vote for anyone else risked Jeremy Corbyn in No. 10 and John McDonnell in the Treasury. This was enough, in most cases, to stop them from going Lib Dem. Look at how the Tories held both Cheltenham and Winchester at the last election. But with Corbyn gone, the Tories don’t have that card to play anymore. Keir Starmer may be many things, but he is not scary and he is succeeding in making the Labour party not scary either. The threat of Starmer is not enough to stop these voters going Lib Dem.

The question now is what these MPs do about their difficulties. Some say privately that they need a new leader, but today hasn’t seen a concerted campaign to get the 54 letters in to remove Boris Johnson.

There is also the fact that the candidate many of them favour – Jeremy Hunt, who sits in a southern seat where the Lib Dems are a decent second – doesn’t have obvious appeal to the new parts of the Tory coalition. So, the Tory stasis will probably continue. But these results will exacerbate the divide between those in southern seats worried about the Lib Dems and those in the north and Midlands for whom Labour is the principal opponent.