Have the Tories noticed they lost?
Local elections response - delusion or resignation?
Last week’s local elections unleashed a whirlwind in the Labour Party. The polls crystallised Sir Keir Starmer’s unpopularity and created a real crisis for his leadership – unresolved at the time of writing. That was entirely expectable. The party had slumped in the polls, and the local electoral geography, along with the elections in the devolved nations, was poised to expose it. Lo, Labour took a battering, and the leadership speculation began.
On the other side of the political spectrum, the reaction has been very different. There are no calls for change in the Conservative Party. No letters to the 1922 Committee. Indeed, the mood is something like optimism. The party itself boasts of strong results, while the leader talks of the green shoots of recovery. There’s an element to which they have to say that, of course, but there hasn’t been much internal opposition to the core message that these results were decent for the party. The question is whether, deep down, that is a sign of confidence or a message that the party has just given up. After all, these results were actually terrible.
The party lost 563 council seats. It was defeated in 41% of the wards it was defending. You would have a greater chance of survival in first class of the Titanic than as a Conservative councillor last week. The party’s projected national vote share was just 17%. Better than this time last year, but still massively down on even the 2024 general election result. In an excellent and damning thread, Dylan Difford sets out just how numerically destructive this was: the second-worst results in living memory for an opposition party.
Sure, the results were better than last year. But that was mostly a product of what was up for re-election. The 2025 map was terrible for the Tories. The 2026 skewed towards harming Labour. This should not be allowed to obscure the reality. The party is not recovering; it is not pushing towards government. It is, just about, not going very far backwards.
Even the few bright spots are misleading. The Tory gains in London were not the result of a surge of votes in the capital. Rather, the party went backwards, but just not as much as everyone else. In Wandsworth, the Conservative vote share dropped from a half to nearly a third. They won out because the left fragmented, while the right did not. They held because these areas remain impervious to Reform, likely too affluent, too liberal, and too multicultural to tolerate Farage, while the left vote splits.
Comparisons with Conservative history really draw this out. Iain Duncan Smith was ousted in the aftermath of the “underwhelming” performance in the 2003 locals. In those, the party polled 31% and gained 556 seats, almost as many as it lost this time. In 2006, when the party was truly showing green shoots of a return to power in Westminster, they came top in London and won 14 councils. Right now, they are suggesting that holding four was a success – really, last week’s results were proof of how sidelined the party has become.
These results show the Conservative Party are painted into an electoral corner. No longer nationally competitive, they are holding on only where Reform is demographically and culturally too weak to challenge them. The London Boroughs point to this. Winning Kensington and Chelsea, Westminster, Wandsworth, Bexley, holding up in parts of places like Croydon and Enfield, this marks who is sticking with the party rather than Reform. In short, it is the Farage-averse right-wingers. Well off enough not to be tempted by populist grievance politics, metropolitan enough to be queasy about some of the immigration rhetoric and policy, and in places where the Lib Dems have no real foothold to compete from. That is who is remaining Tory.
Outside of London, there is a similar dynamic. Reform failed to break through in places like West Oxfordshire, or Hart, or Three Rivers. Councils with decent chunks of affluent commuters, where the Conservatives have remained the main anti-left option. By contrast, in the seats of the semi-urban north, Reform surged forward, adding to their gains from last year in the less affluent Tory rural areas. This is not a party fighting back; it is a party besieged in its strongest of redoubts.
These results were an improvement on last year but that is about all that can be said for them. They point to a Conservative Party that is no longer a national force but a regional one, relegated to a rump of affluent, educated (and older) right-wing voters that is insufficient to sustain much more than local success. Even then, if the left hadn’t been so fractured, it would have performed even more poorly.
Obviously, election results will also be subject to a certain amount of spin and expectation management. The danger for the Conservatives is that they seem to believe their own optimistic framing. Everything about last week should have been taken as a huge warning. On its current trajectory, the party will be reduced to even fewer MPs at the next general election, pushed into third-party territory, with a few strong areas but nothing more. Starting from any sort of analysis other than that is likely to lead to bad decisions and poor strategy. By not acknowledging the worst-case outcome, you make it more likely.
These results are not necessarily destiny. Politics shifts, and the return of the Conservative Party to power remains an underpriced option. Being unrealistic about results, however, leans towards learning the wrong lessons. The Conservative Party must understand that, for it to survive, these results have to change, and that the status quo, in which it has gone backwards since the general election, is not giving it the momentum it needs. If the party wants to survive, it must fight for it.
That begins with honesty about its state. The trajectory from 2022-24 was evidence of both the power and the costs of denial. The Conservative Party spun itself into thinking it had a chance, rather than shoring up its damage limitation. Now it risks making the same mistake, but in a much worse position. These are not the results of a party on the brink of power. They are not where the Tories were in 2007. They are not even where they were in 2024. They should be taken as a real warning. Not green shoots, but the bulldozers moving in to clear the wreckage.
The ease with which this outcome has been spread into positive points raises two possibilities. Either the party and those around it remain delusional, unable, once again, to recognise the tsunami coming their way. Or worse, they have given up, resigned to fighting no further, instead succumbing to being snuffed out. Both lead to the same trajectory: failing to properly reckon with reality, build a strategy and implement it in ways that might change things. Denial will only bring further failure.
