British voters deal coalition rebuke in local elections The Conservatives, however, did appear close to winning a major consolation prize - the reelection of London's eccentric mayor, Boris Johnson. The mop-topped Conservative was on track to resoundingly beat his Labor challenger, Ken Livingstone, who had formerly held the top job in Europe's largest city. A likely win could further position the gaffe-prone, blunt-talking Johnson as a potential challenger to Cameron's leadership of the Conservative Party in the years ahead. But elsewhere around the country, with more than 80 percent of the ballots counted, the results were amounting to a major setback for the coalition. A beaming Ed Miliband, head of the Labor Party, traveled to Birmingham on Friday to revel in the opposition's big night, describing the local elections as a foreshadowing of the national race in 2015 when he will try to take the premiership away from Cameron. Seats on local town and city councils across Britain are considered key to garnering grass-roots votes in national elections. "The battle to change Britain begins here," Miliband said. Voters were also showing surprisingly strong support for the right-wing Independence Party, which has campaigned on a platform that includes having Britain withdraw from the European Union. The party's strong showing could amount to a wake-up call for Cameron, seen as a moderate reformer who has attempted to shift the Conservatives closer to the political center. The coalition's junior partners - the Liberal Democrats - continued a major unwinding of support since their decision to join the Conservatives in government two years ago, with the number of elected local councilors from the party falling to a record low. Analysts said the bloodbath could have been far worse, pointing to even larger opposition landslides in local elections in the past. Still, Labor made unquestionably strong gains, and analysts said the biggest force working against the coalition remained the economy. Britain fell back into recession the first quarter of this year, bringing heaps of criticism from the opposition for the government's dogged attempt to continue cutting spending - and the deficit - in the midst of an economic downturn. Cameron, however, insisted on Friday that the government would not be deterred from its fiscal crusade. "These are difficult times and there aren't easy answers," Cameron said. What we have to do is take the difficult decisions to deal with the debt, deficit and broken economy that we've inherited and we will go on making those decisions and we've got to do the right thing for our country. Yet the government has also been stung by a series of recent scandals, including the Conservative's ties to media tycoon Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch - whose tabloid, TV and newspaper empire in Britain has been rocked by revelations of phone hacking and other illegal newsgathering methods - was described this week as "unfit" to run a global media company by a panel of parliamentarians. Last week, the government faced calls for the resignation of Cameron's culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, after a judge-led inquiry published 163 e-mails between Hunt's office and a top lobbyist at Murdoch's News Corp. The e-mails appeared to show that the government was attempting to smooth the way for News Corp."s bid for full control of BSkyB, a satellite network. Cameron is reportedly considering a major cabinet shake-up to get his government back on track, particularly as his administration faces allegations of incompetence. His ministers, for instance, have been unable to head off a border guard strike next week that has left Heathrow International Airport bracing for massive backlogs of arriving passengers. That followed several other missteps, including the perceived mishandling of a possible fuel-haulers strike. "It's a significant but not fatal backlash," Tony Travers, a political expert at the London School of Economics, said of Thursday's vote. There is a perception of incompetence and once there's a perception of incompetence, it's hard to get it back for a while.