Torydämmerung II: Local Election Boogaloo

The Electoral Ruins of a Broken Coalition

The oak is bare, and the sun is setting.

Much like last year's General Election, all the forewarning in the world failed to dampen the impact of the Tories' collapse last week. Anyone paying attention knew it would be bad, yet somehow seeing it realised still felt like a shock. Once again, this was an electoral evisceration. More worrying, in some ways, than last July. It shows the public is still sick of the party, that it now lacks a natural constituency anywhere, and that there is a real chance it could be squeezed into oblivion.

There are not enough superlatives to convey how bad these results were for the Conservative Party. They made no headway against an unpopular government, but were instead routed almost everywhere. Yes, these elections were measured against a post-vaccine high point of 2021, but they were also in areas that should be receptive to the Tory recovery, and where lots of their remaining MPs still are. Scanning the results, however, there are few signs of hope for them, or mercy from the public.

The party came third in terms of seats won. It lost control of every council it held that was up for grabs. Their vote share declined by 10 points. Even with all the expectations management had before, this feels like an unmitigated disaster. In Kent, the Tories went into this poll with 62 councillors and emerged with just 5. In Lincolnshire, they shed 40 of the 54 they took into the election. Both on a national scale and in microcosm, it was a disastrous result.

The predicament the party is now in feels close to insurmountable. These results will add to the sense of institutional decay within the party, whittling away its volunteer and donor base. The gains will instead switch these advantages to the Tories' opponents, empowering them. More than that, Reform holding power and the limelight will further drive the switch away from the Conservatives among voters. Most of all, they have demonstrated how little of a base the Conservative Party has left.