If Boris Johnson plans to execute one of his trademark feats of improbable political survival, he’d better do it soon. The U.K. prime minister suffered another setback Thursday in two parliamentary by-elections, casting his future back into doubt.
Mr. Johnson’s Conservative Party was defending the two seats after Tory incumbents were forced to resign amid scandals. Wakefield in Yorkshire, in the north, is one of the so-called Red Wall seats Mr. Johnson won in 2019. Mr. Johnson achieved a historic win in that year’s general election in part by wooing blue-collar, culturally conservative voters who had reliably elected Labour Party candidates for decades but who felt increasingly alienated by Labour’s leftward drift.
