Johnson in crisis after Tories crushed in UK parliamentary votes

CREDITON, United Kingdom: British Prime Minister Boris Johnson vowed on Friday to listen and learn but refused to quit, after his Conservatives suffered crushing defeats in two parliamentary elections and a staunch ally stepped down.

In a pointed resignation letter to Johnson, party chairman and cabinet member Oliver Dowden said "somebody" had to shoulder the blame for "recent events". That was widely seen as a reference to "Partygate" and other scandals dogging the prime minister, who only narrowly survived a no-confidence vote this month among Tory MPs.

But Johnson framed the election setbacks as mid-term blues for the Conservatives, as Britain contends with inflation reaching double-digit levels not seen since the 1970s, rising poverty and strikes.

"I’m not going to pretend these are brilliant results. We’ve got to listen. We’ve got to learn," Johnson told reporters in Rwanda, where he is attending a Commonwealth summit. "But I genuinely, genuinely don’t think the way forward in British politics is to focus on issues of personalities, whether they are mine or others," he added.

"The way forward is to make arguments to people about change and improvement that we are delivering. And that is what I was elected to do." After his visit to Rwanda, Johnson travels to Germany and then Spain for G7 and Nato summits. He is not due back in Britain until late next week and is facing some calls to cut the trip short to deal with the by-election fallout.

If replicated in the next general election, due by 2024, the two results would consign the Conservatives to a historic national defeat. In the Tiverton and Honiton constituency, southwest England, the party saw its 2019 general election majority of more than 24,000 votes wiped out by the centrist Liberal Democrats, in one of the biggest upsets of UK electoral history.

The main Labour opposition regained the parliamentary seat of Wakefield, in northern England, in a further sign of its resurgence after Johnson triumphed in 2019 on a vow to "get Brexit done".