It’s only the beginning of a long weekend of election results, but so far so bad for Rishi Sunak’s Tory party. Even the veteran Tory commentator Tim Montgomerie has had enough, telling the BBC that the ‘results are so bad’ that Sunak ‘should go’. Meanwhile polling guru John Curtice predicts this weekend’s results will be ‘one of the worst, if not the worst, Conservative performances in local government elections for the last 40 years’. Ouch. And now, to add insult to injury, the Tories came a distant second to Labour in Blackpool South’s constituency by-election — only 117 votes ahead of Reform UK. Talk about being hit where it hurts…
In a career-ending newspaper sting, the area’s former Tory MP Scott Benton was caught offering to lobby ministers for the gambling industry. Promptly suspended from his party, the circumstances of the Tory rule-breaker’s dismissal didn’t leave the Conservatives in a particularly strong position going into the by-election.
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