Rishi Sunak will have been relieved when Ben Houchen was declared the winner in the Tees Valley mayoral election, but he can’t disguise the fact that these were very bad election results.
Council elections are difficult to interpret – there are a host of local factors at play. The best thing to look at is what is known as national equivalent vote share. The BBC’s estimate at the time of writing is that Labour got 34% and the Conservatives 25%.
This tells us two important things about British politics. First – if we didn’t already know it – that the Tories are likely heading for a defeat, and potentially a very heavy one, at the general election later this year: 25% is as bad as they were getting at the nadir of John Major’s government (David Cameron did recover from a similarly low standing but that was in midterm, not a few months before polling day). Despite all Rishi Sunak’s efforts, the party has actually gone backwards slightly over the past 12 months.
Second, there isn’t huge enthusiasm for Keir Starmer’s Labour: 34% is a long way below what Tony Blair was achieving in the mid-1990s and below the 38% Ed Miliband achieved in 2012 – although Labour did do better in the places it needs to gain.
If council elections are hard to interpret, the writing on the wall could not be clearer from the Blackpool South byelection. The swing to Labour of 26% is the third highest since the second world war and more than twice what Labour needs to win the general election. The only crumb of comfort for Rishi Sunak was that the Conservative candidate just managed to come second ahead of Reform.
So what does all this mean for the future of the Conservative party? Short term, it looks as if Sunak is safe from a vote of confidence in his leadership. Most Tory MPs have (correctly) concluded that another leadership election would further damage the party’s standing and that there is no alternative leader who would transform their prospects. It helps that the putative contenders aren’t encouraging them because they don’t want to take over now and be blamed for the inevitable defeat.
Medium term, the unpalatable truth is there is probably nothing Sunak or anyone else can do to avert defeat now – Boris Johnson and particularly Liz Truss did too much damage to the party’s reputation, which Sunak has proved unable to undo. But that doesn’t mean Tories should just give up. A rediscovery of collective discipline so that voters perceive the government to be focused on the things they care about – the cost of living, the NHS, border control – and the media spend some time scrutinising Labour rather than an ongoing Conservative psychodrama, might yet save a fair few Tory MPs.
Long term, the Conservative party will have a debate about its future direction after the election. These results reveal another unpalatable truth: neither a lurch to the right nor a return to Cameroonism are likely to work. Aping Reform is not a recipe to win back traditional Conservative heartlands such as Rushmoor in Hampshire (now Labour) or Tunbridge Wells in Kent (now Liberal Democrat).
But these results do not mean the realignment of British politics is at an end either. It didn’t start in 2019 or even 2016 – it has been building for years, and Houchen’s result in Tees Valley proves the Conservatives can still win in traditionally Labour areas if they have the right policies and are trusted to deliver them.
If the party wants to win again, it will have to show some penitence for the chaos of the Johnson and Truss period and have a programme that unifies both its traditional support and the new voters Houchen has proved it can still attract.
Gavin Barwell was prime minister Theresa May’s chief of staff and Croydon Central MP
