The Conservatives have narrowly beaten Labour to retain Boris Johnson’s former seat following a bitter by-election campaign.
In a major blow for Keir Starmer, Steve Tuckwell beat Labour candidate Danny Beales by just 495 votes to become the new MP for Uxbridge and South Ruislip.
The by-election was called following Johnson’s dramatic resignation last month after he was found guilty by the privileges committee of repeatedly lying to parliament over partygate.
The former prime minister retained the seat with a majority of 7,210 at the 2019 election.
Tuckwell received 13,965 votes to Beales’s 13,470 to claim the constituency for the Tories once again.
The Conservatives effectively turned the by-election into a referendum on Labour mayor Sadiq Khan’s decision to expand London’s Ultra Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) across the whole of the city from next month.
The result of a huge boost for Rishi Sunak, who had been braced for the Tories to lose the seat, given the unpopularity of the government and Labour’s commanding lead in the national polls.
A Labour spokesperson said: “This was always going to be a difficult battle in a seat that has never had a Labour MP and we didn’t even win in 1997. We know that the Conservatives crashing the economy has hit working people hard, so it’s unsurprising that the ULEZ expansion was a concern for voters here in a by-election.”
Elsewhere, Labour have won the Selby and Ainsty by-election after toppling one of the safest Tory seats in the country.
And in the third by-election of the night, the Lib Dems pulled off a stunning victory in a previously safe Tory seat of Somerton and Frome.
Despite the Conservatives avoiding a three-nil defeat, the swing in the vote went away from the Tories in every seat.