LONDON (AP) Voters punished the opposition Labour Party in Scotland as the results rolled in Friday for local and regional elections races that underscored divisions in the public mood across the United Kingdom.
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The result in the London Mayoral election is expected Friday evening.
Cameron is also grappling with deep splits in his party ahead of the June 23 referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union.
Meanwhile, UKIP leader Nigel Farage also insisted the growth in his party’s vote “is coming more from Labour than it is from anybody else”.
News of the holiday came as new London mayor Sadiq Khan launched a thinly veiled attack on Corbyn’s leadership and Labour MPs criticised last week’s election results.
In highly symbolic results, Labour lost the totemic Rhondda seat in the Welsh Assembly to Leanne Wood, leader of the Welsh nationalist party Plaid Cymru, and saw the Scottish National Party (SNP) pull off a clean sweep of seats in the one-time Labour stronghold of Glasgow.
The favourite throughout the campaign, Khan is sitting comfortably with around 9% more than Conservative candidate Zac Goldsmith.
Khan was elected to replace Conservative Mayor Boris Johnson after a campaign marked by U.S.-style negative campaigning.
It was a contrast with party leader Jeremy Corbyn’s claim during the local election campaign that the party did not expect to lose any council seats.
“This is not a route back to power in 2020 for the Labour party”, she said, directly criticising Corbyn for not exploiting the weakness of the Conservative government.
The scale of Labour’s problems were most evident in Scotland, where the Scottish National Party (SNP) was, as expected, on course for a second consecutive majority.
In Northern Ireland, where final results will be announced today, Democratic Unionist leader Arlene Foster has expressed confidence she will be returned as Northern Ireland’s first minister.
The Labour party member, who was suspended after suggesting Zionism was supported by Adolf Hitler, reportedly made the comments in an interview with TV station Al Ghad Al Arabi.
Labour was pushed to third place in Scotland – where it was once dominant.
Urging the leader to broaden the political “diversity” of his inner circle, Mr Coyle said: “We are moving further away from Government, I think, because we seem to be fixated on some issues that are peripheral and we seem to have a team which isn’t projecting either unity within the party or a vision and policies that the voters want”.
Meanwhile, Labour also suspended party activist David Watson last week after The Jewish Chronicle highlighted posts he wrote on social media.
The BBC calculated that had the pattern of voting in the local elections been repeated nationally, Labour would have been on 31 percent, just ahead of the Conservatives on 30 percent.
Labour lost three of its seats on Bury council, two of them wards in Prestwich, which is one of six towns the council represents.
Asked whether a victory for Mr Khan would threaten the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, Mr McDonnell said: “He’s worked together with Jeremy and myself to deliver this fantastic victory”.
“We’re holding our own more or less”, former cabinet minister Peter Hain, a Labour lawmaker in the upper chamber, the House of Lords, told BBC Television.
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The party has been deeply unpopular in Scotland since the 1980s premiership of Margaret Thatcher but its fortunes have turned around under current leader Ruth Davidson.
