A couple of weeks ago we were told it was Rishi Sunak’s best week ever. Now, it is hard to even remember why. The Rwanda Bill was passed, and the Prime Minister had some important photocalls playing statesman with European allies. Now it seems that rather than a sign a corner might be turned, it confirmed the signal becoming more and more dominant – nothing the party can do will shift the dial.
The local elections point to this. The line about the projected national share pointing to a hung parliament is statistically illiterate self-delusion. The PNS is a flawed metric which ignores differential turnout, and regional variations and overweighs the success that minor parties have at a local level. Anyone putting stock in it as a predictor of the general election is either trying to fool you or fool themselves. It is hard to overstate how bad these locals were for the Conservative Party.
At a mayoral level, they were close to wipe out. Andy Street couldn’t hold, despite his personal brand, and Labour haemorrhaging votes to a Gaza-focus insurgent independent. Ben Houchen saw his majority slashed, with a swing which, if repeated in the GE would wipe out all Tory MPs in the region. The party lost every other mayoral contest, even those like North Yorkshire where they should have had a fighting chance.
In the council elections, there was a similar tale of woe. The party lost control of ten local authorities out of the 16 it held going into the election. Out of the 989 seats the Tories held before this contest, they lost 474, an attrition rate of almost half. This was a kicking, which shows both the electoral peril they are in and will have damaged and demotivated the activist base. It’s a double hit.
These contests show quite clearly how the party's popularity has sunk. More than that, they show how the country is turning on the party and wants to punish it. In the bigger contests, like Tees and the Midlands, the party name was like being lashed to a millstone for otherwise popular figures. At the same time, patterns of tactical voting stand out, showing the “anything but the Tories” sentiment coming through at the ballot box.
The Lib Dem vote showed a striking efficiency. Compared with 2021, when these boundaries were last fought, they got the same vote share but a quarter more seats and control of two more councils. Other parties benefitted elsewhere. In Stroud, for example, both Labour and Greens enjoyed a surge, cutting the Tories by 2/3rds through a combination of targeted campaigning and voting. In Castle Point, localist parties took every seat, with no mainstream parties on the council at all. If this sort of approach is mirrored at the general election it opens up the way for the worst-case scenarios for the Tories.
More desperately for the Conservative Party, there is no real lesson that they can take from this election, beyond the idea that almost everyone wants them out. Councillors were fighting for their lives across the country, across geographical regions and demographics. Yes, Reform had a reasonably strong showing in some of the northern regions where they stood. But Tory voters poured over to Labour, Lib Dem, Green or Independent too. There’s no simple pivot that could change the results.
Indeed, the only place where the Tories seemed really to outperform seems as much a symptom of their problems rather than a respite from it. Despite winning comfortably in London, Sadiq Khan’s support was below the Labour average and poor compared with some of the polling. This was largely driven by the Tory vote holding up in outer London. This repeated the trend from the Uxbridge by-election, which saw the Tories do poorly compared to previous years, but not badly enough to lose it.
In some ways this makes sense. The denizens of Outer London are, really, the big winners of the Tory Party tenure. These areas are replete with people who were moderate earners but have grown rich off rising property prices. Often older, pro-Brexit, anti-immigration, and car-enthusiasts, they are on the right side of most of the fights the Tories are picking. The problem is that there simply isn’t enough of them nationally to make an electoral difference. The message may resonate in Havering and Harrow, but it isn’t getting much further.
It seems too that the party is learning this. The deflation of the plot to oust Sunak might be dressed in some of the cope from the elections, but, in reality, it is an admission that all is lost. No one wants to step into the breach, no one believes that there is anything that can be done to rectify the situation. It was obvious months ago and it has now solidified for the slower learners in the party. All they can do now is hunker down and see what survives the impact.
The problem is that there are now six months or more of the situation getting worse. As well as the local elections, the party has faced the chaos of double defections. Dan Poulter’s was perhaps understandable – he’s always been on the left of the party and rankled at NHS cuts as early as 2016. Natalie Elphicke’s however is almost unfathomable. Worryingly for Number Ten, both have chosen to make moves in an almost unnecessarily damaging style.
Neither Elphicke of Poulter will be contesting the general election for Labour. They are not extending their political careers, just creating maximum havoc. Each has given Labour a perfect cudgel to wield – one on healthcare, the most salient issue overall, and the other on immigration, the issue wavering Conservatives care about most. They could have gone quietly, standing down like so many others, instead, they have become noisy turncoats for almost no reason. It seems the instinct that the Tories shouldn’t lose, they should hurt, has spread from the public to the parliamentary party.
As the summer stretches towards an autumn, or even a winter election, it feels like the only choice Number Ten now has is when to sign its own death warrant. The things it held out for a year ago – dropping inflation, hints of growth, Rwanda, NI cuts – have largely materialised and failed to move the dial. It's unclear what else could come now except problems.
There is little parliamentary time left and hardly any chance to introduce any new, bold measures. Even if an initiative doesn’t require legislation, getting it up and running and making an impact in twelve months feels fanciful. Meanwhile, with the weather improving, boat crossings will pick up. Mortgage rates and higher prices will continue to bite, a constant reminder of how things have unravelled. The wet spring in particular will further hammer food prices and farmers. When you look at the things that could come out of the blue, there are far more that are bad for a government than good for it.
Instead, it feels likely that party order will break down further. Council losses will be a real kick to local associations. Many of the hardest groundworkers will be fed up and disillusioned. In parliament, one lesson will have shone forth from the mayoral contests– your personal brand might just, in a pinch, save you. MPs will be looking to distance themselves from the wider party, but the more that do this the more an overall sense of incoherence abounds, as some pull right to Reform and others try to intensify their moderate credentials.
For those paying attention, there was nothing really new in the locals. The results however stretch the credibility of the Tory attempts to cope even further, whether it is those who deny defeat is coming, or those who suggest a quick pivot to mirror their views will fix it. The party is tired and widely despised, with voters moving where they can inflict most pain on it. There are no quick moves that can change it, the voting coalition is collapsing in on itself and any move in one direction is just as likely to cause an adverse reaction as a beneficial one.
The party is now out of tricks and out of ideas. The only thing it now has control of is time, a horrid choice between hastening its own electoral crisis or intensifying it by holding on in case something dramatic changes things. It’s been doing the latter for more than a year now, and things have only got worse. The only question now is how long Number Ten chooses to string out its own demise.
The patriotic thing to do (old fashioned I know) would be to go to the country on July 4th. I’m sure the polls will instantly tighten a little bit, but going on to December is likely to replicate the 1993 Canadian election result.
Do the decent thing and we can all get this miserable business over with and have a decent summer holiday.
Conservative in name only. Untrustworthy and beholden to the chattering classes and their gurus such as Schwab & co.