You just have to sit back and admire this from Rishi Sunak, really. It has been revealed on Saturday that the Prime Minister DID NOT vote for the Conservative candidate Susan Hall, who lost to Sadiq Khan in the London Mayoral Elections.
The shock admission comes after Downing Street initially failed to disclose details about where, and when, Mr. Sunak would cast his vote. That mystery has been put to bed, however, thanks to a scoop from the Political Editor of The Independent.
The explanation given by Team Sunak is that the PM did vote in the election, but chose to lend his support to Keane Duncan in the York and North Yorkshire Mayoral Elections. He submitted his ballot via post, and therefore, couldn’t back Hall.
The optics of this decision are far from ideal. Susan Hall ran a controversial campaign, and was slammed for ‘non-stop negativity’ by Sadiq Khan. In the end, she fell some 275,000 votes short of the Labour incumbent.
In fact, there was a small swing of 3.2% from Tory voters to Labour voters from the last election. Khan won with a lead of 11 percentage points, meaning that a possible vote switch from Rishi Sunak would have achieved very little.
However, his decision to send his support up north also proved fruitless. Duncan, the Tory candidate in the region, was beaten by Labour’s David Skaith, who will become the first person to take up this role – in Sunak’s backyard, no less.
It has been a chaotic few days at Conservative HQ.
Almost 500 Councillors of theirs have been voted out of office during the Local Elections, with voters flocking to alternative parties in the process. It certainly doesn’t bode well for the Tories… with a General Election now looming large.
