View attachment 42866
The
2019 United Kingdom general election in London was held on 2 May 2019 and all 73 seats in London were contested under the first-past-the-post electoral system.
The election was the first contested by the centrist
Metropolitan Party, which only stood in seats in Greater London. The Metropolitan Party won 62 of London's 73 seats in a landslide victory. Despite enjoying a positive result nationally, the
Liberal Party suffered its worst ever result in the capital, losing 27 of the 33 seats it held after the
2015 election. The
Unionist Party, who went into the election in government at the national level, suffered a similar collapse in fortunes, holding onto just five of their London seats. The left-wing
Social Democratic Party (
SDP), led by
Claudia Webbe, lost all of their seats in the capital, just four years after their strongest ever showing in London. Webbe lost her own seat of
Islington South and Finsbury, seeing her majority flip from over 5,000 in her favour to a deficit of over 10,000 in favour of the Metropolitan candidate
Zack Polanski.
The election result in London saw several frontbench MPs from the three main parties lose their place in the House of Commons: the Unionists saw Home Office Minister
Chris Malthouse, Foreign Office Minister
Mark Field and Assistant Whip
Victoria Borwick lose their seats as well as former
Mayor of London Andrew Boff, whilst the biggest casualty on election night for the Liberals was
Chuka Umunna, the
Shadow Home Secretary, whose own seemingly unassaible majority of well over 15,000 in
Vauxhall vanished in one fell swoop. The SDP lost Foreign Spokesperson and former journalist
Owen Jones, Equalities Spokesperson
Dawn Butler and Communities Spokesperson
Rokhsana Fiaz. Long-serving MP
Diane Abbott, who had served in several frontbench positions for the SDP in her Westminster career which stretched back to the
1988 election, narrowly lost her own seat of
Tottenham despite her personal popularity locally. Post-election analysis suggested that the Metropolitan Party took voters from all three traditional major parties, with younger and BAME voters most likely to switch their vote to them.
The election result is considered an electoral earthquake and put into question exactly what London's position was in the United Kingdom. One of the Metropolitan Party's key offerings as part of their election manifesto was to push for further devolution in the capital, including the establishment of a devolved legislature, something vehemently opposed by the Unionists and unfavoured by the Liberals. Metropolitan leader
Siobhan Benita, who did not stand in the election ahead of her bid for the London mayoralty in
2020, said that giving the Mayor's office powers over tax and law and establishing a "London Assembly" were a "red line" for her party in post-election coalition negotiations. Metropolitan deputy leader
Sadiq Khan, who had previously served as leader of
Wandsworth Council as a Liberal between 2007 and 2011 and who was elected to the seat of
Battersea, would become the party's leader in the Commons after the election.