First manage your expectations.
When the Tory party chair, Greg Hands, announced last week that he expected the Conservatives to lose 1,000 seats in the local elections, he was being characteristically disingenuous. What he really meant was that the Tories would lose between 500 and 600 seats and he would be able to take to the airwaves and crow about his party having done far better than anyone imagined. The plucky Conservatives yet again seizing triumph from a potential disaster. And it would all be down to him and his idiotic tweets of a 13-year-old Liam Byrne gag. At least we won’t be seeing them again.
Only it didn’t really work out that way. Even though only about a quarter of the councils had been declared by 7am – the rest had delayed their count until later in the day – a clear pattern had emerged. Labour, the Lib Dems and the Greens had all performed at the top end of their projections while the Tory vote share was, in the words of many councillors – make that ex-councillors – decimated.
Losing 1,000 seats was looking realistic. Hopeful, even. The real damage could be even worse. And don’t forget these were the same seats being fought as in 2019 when the Tories also lost 1,000 seats. So this was a wipeout piled on a wipeout. Back in 2019, Theresa May had had to apologise to her party for the election disaster and was removed from office just months later. That same result in 2023 would have been regarded as an electoral triumph. But no one was about to start apologising for anything.
“We always knew it was going to be tough,” Hands said, sounding shell-shocked on his media round. Only he clearly hadn’t ever imagined it would be this tough. Much of his earlier campaigning had had the air of complacency. A man who expected everything to be all right on the night just because it always had been for the last 13 years. A man who had learned not to try too hard. By the middle of the afternoon, he had been reduced to sending around an email to Tory supporters begging for more money. Most would have been deleted unread. Timing is everything. The coronation was turning into a Tory funeral.
There had been no inkling of what lay in store when the election night broadcasts had fired up late on Thursday night. Most pundits were hedging their bets. Another Labour false dawn seemed to be in the back of many people’s minds. But then the results started coming in. Stoke, where Tory MP Jonathan Gullis was for once reduced to silence. He should try it more often. It more becomes him.
Medway. Plymouth. Local MP and government minister Johnny Mercer looked as if he had been mainlining ketamine. “It’s terrible,” he muttered over and over again, his eyes dead, his eyeballs pinpricks. Windsor and Maidenhead. Here the Lib Dems had romped home in Theresa May’s backyard.
Tory MPs had started openly arguing with one another. Kelly Tolhurst was certain it was unrealistic housing targets that had done for the Conservatives. Charles Walker thought the Tories hadn’t built enough. John Redwood insisted the losses were all because of the party not being nasty enough to foreigners and abandoning the Liz Truss economic model. Really. Rehman Chishti – remember him? The leadership contender with just one supporter – thought voters had been put off by the kneejerk, dog whistle politics of Suella Braverman.
Shortly after 8am, Rishi Sunak appeared outside Tory party headquarters. Things weren’t as bad as everyone was making out, he insisted. People loved the core Tory message. Just that they had forgotten to vote for it. And there had been a stunning success in Bassetlaw where the Tories had picked up about four seats on a Labour-dominated council. Really. The one disappointment was that efforts to stop the wrong people voting with the new photo ID rules had not made as big an impact as he had hoped. Maybe next time.
Not long after, Keir Starmer, looking every inch the modern football manager in a crisp black shirt, arrived in Chatham for a photo op. He looked chuffed. As well he might. Medway had been a target council, and an area that had voted heavily in favour of Brexit. Those divisions look to have been healed. Labour was in sight of the sort of swing it would need for an outright majority at a general election. “This is about the cost of living,” he said. “And the Tories have had nothing to say about it.” Which was true. They haven’t. They’ve sat back and done next to nothing as people chose between eating and heating.
By midday, more results had started to trickle in and the pattern was the same. Over on Politics Live, Andrea Leadsom was giving her most spellbinding performance since her never-to-be-forgotten leadership bid in 2016. For the most part, she stared stubbornly ahead, looking for all the world like a woman about to embark on a psychotic killing spree. Then when she spoke, she wouldn’t stop. Talking over everyone. Even herself. Her incoherence was startling.
First she insisted the losses were all down to local issues, such as potholes and planning regulations, and then when she was contradicted by every Tory councillor who had lost their seat, she went on to say voters had been sending the government a message that they were unhappy with the cost of living. Remarkably she went on to infer that losing 1,000 seats was a sign voters wanted more of Sunak’s policies and that the prime minister should take some comfort from the results. Presumably if the Tories had lost 2,000 seats, Rish! would be ruling in perpetuity.
Still the bad news rolled in for the Tories. Blackpool. Hopefully local MP Scott Benton would have had a sponsored bet on his chances of keeping his seat. He’ll need the money. Swindon, where the Conservative former leader of the council moaned about the performance of the government. He could always vote to replace it at the next election.
By now Leadsom had been removed in a straitjacket and had been replaced on the panel by the equally deranged Liam Fox. He too spoke in tongues. It was all very disappointing, he said, but also strangely encouraging. Because what it showed was that Sunak was doing all the right things, though if he just did them all completely differently then that would be better. Low tax, high growth, he mumbled. Bring back Truss! He had also detected a cunning plan from Tory voters. They had all decided to stay away to lure Labour into a false sense of security. And they would all come back in a general election for a Tory landslide.
But even the Magnificent Mr Fox was forced to shut up when the BBC published its projected national share of the vote, which had Labour 13 points ahead. More even than in 1997. Labour’s Jonathan Reynolds tried and failed not to look smug. He could be forgiven. Labour have waited a long time for a day like this.
