It’s looking pretty positive for Labour’s David Skaith as he campaigns up and down quiet residential streets in York, a stone’s throw from the city’s ancient walls. “I would rather poke my eyes out with a sharp stick than vote Tory,” says Sandra Barton, a former city council worker, as she emerges from her terrace house to signal support.
Skaith, who runs a clothes shop in the city, is Labour’s candidate in Thursday’s election for the post of the first-ever elected mayor of York and North Yorkshire.
The area stretches across the traditionally Conservative surrounding shires and takes in prime minister Rishi Sunak’s Westminster constituency of Richmond to the north. Just up the road, Skaith knocks on another door and asks a young man, James McCleish, who works in retail, if he can have a word.
“So long as you’re not Tory,” says McCleish politely, before explaining that he lost one of his parents due to Covid and blames the government for failing to provide adequate care during the pandemic.
It is not all plain sailing for Skaith in this university city where opinions about the state of politics are strongly held, and Labour, Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats all have a good presence.
As Skaith’s team presses on, Laura Potts, an ex-university academic working as an environmental volunteer, spots them, stops her bike and harangues the Labour candidate for several minutes.
She is furious at the way Keir Starmer and his team surround themselves with union jacks every time they appear in the media.
“It is appalling,” she says, telling a slightly nonplussed Skaith that such “nationalist” imagery is out of kilter with the process of devolution, of which, she says, the mayoral contest he is campaigning in is a key part.
But despite her anger – “I am a lifelong socialist,” she tells him – Potts is clear that she will still put her cross by Labour.
On Thursday, voters in England will go to the polls to elect more than 2,600 councillors and 10 metro mayors in what will be the last set of local and mayoral contests before the general election. If things go badly for the Tories, Sunak’s leadership will in all probability again be called into question by a minority of Tory MPs at Westminster.
Labour and the Conservatives are defending just under 1,000 seats each, the Lib Dems about 400 and the Greens just over 100. The north-east, York and North Yorkshire and the east Midlands will elect mayors for the first time.
Skaith knows the impact a victory here would have, the positive signals it would send about Labour winning again, not just in the north, but in those mainly rural parts of it that have been pretty much out of his party’s reach for generations. Labour’s analysis of polling suggests the vote will be close, with Skaith just ahead of Tory candidate Keane Duncan, a 29-year-old former Daily Star journalist. (Skaith on 34% and Duncan on 31.4%).
“I think it would be seismic to win here in Rishi Sunak’s backyard,” Skaith says. “If you had asked three or four years ago: ‘Could Labour win in North Yorkshire?’, you would have been really struggling with that.” More than four years on from Boris Johnson’s 2019 general election win and conquest of many “red wall” seats in the north and Midlands, Tory promises to level up those regions have come back to haunt them. Skaith says it is Labour mayors such as Andy Burnham in Greater Manchester and Tracy Brabin in West Yorkshire who have delivered progress, not the Tories.
“People are tired of hearing just language, words, terminology like levelling up,” Skaith says. “We want to take that terminology and put it into real practice. We are a bit behind in North Yorkshire because we haven’t got a mayor yet, or the funding to do what Andy Burnham has done on transport or Tracy Brabin has on housing. That is what we want to do here.”
Last July, Labour overturned a Tory majority of 20,137 in the North Yorkshire seat of Selby and Ainsty – the largest majority reversed at a byelection – so the portents are good for Starmer’s party.
Expectation management is pretty much all the Conservatives have left before polling day on Thursday as they face assaults from Labour across the north and Midlands and the Lib Dems in the southern “blue wall”, as well as from the resurgent Greens. Pundits expect them to lose between 400 and 500 council seats in the early hours of Friday – about half their remaining number – as well as the Blackpool South parliamentary byelection, to Labour.
The last time the same set of council seats was up for election in 2021, Johnson’s government was enjoying a surge in popularity as a result of the Covid vaccine rollout, while Starmer was on the verge of resigning after losing the Hartlepool byelection.
The Tories made strides and were talking then of a “decade in power”. All that has changed. After Johnson’s ignominious fall and the disastrous Liz Truss succession, Sunak has been unable to turn things round. In many national polls, Labour is now a commanding 20 points ahead and, whatever Sunak tries, the numbers do not seem to budge.
Back in 1990 the then Tory chair Kenneth Baker famously spun a set of terrible results for his party by hailing the retention of Wandsworth in south London – rock-solid Tory – as a great positive. This weekend, the party is rallying behind a similar message that if it holds on to a couple of key mayoralties and does not lose too heavily in London, it will have done well.
The Tory MP for Carlisle, John Stevenson, who chairs the Northern Research Group of Conservative MPs in red wall seats, said: “If Andy Street holds on in the West Midlands and Ben Houchen in Tees Valley, and we put up a good show in London, we will have a narrative there – signs that not everything is going against us everywhere.”
He sees “no appetite for a leadership challenge” against Sunak in the parliamentary party.
Even if Street and Lord Houchen do hang on (and Susan Hall for the Tories gives Sadiq Khan a run for his money in the London mayoral contest), it will be after campaigns in which both Street and Houchen have very deliberately distanced themselves from the national party, and stressed their own local records on issues such as housing.
To win Tees Valley from Houchen, Labour candidate Chris McEwan would need a much bigger swing than the one needed for a Labour majority at a general election.
A vote of no confidence in Sunak would be triggered if 52 Tory MPs request one. Views are mixed within the parliamentary party, but there is a consensus that Sunak would only really face a “real wobble” if both Street and Houchen lost to Labour.
“I think [the plan to challenge Sunak] is still relatively unformed,” said a former Tory minister. “People know they’re going down – they all do. It’s just a question of what is best, looking forward.
“It’s about having the best campaign that you can and making sure you win enough seats to be a credible opposition - that’s the basic foundation. If they lose that, then they’re in real trouble.”
Sunak’s recent flurry of activity, most notably a pledge to increase defence spending, has been driven by a need for him to be seen to be leading and making a difference. Talk of a summer election – and the idea he could call an early poll at any moment – is also regarded by senior Tories as a party management device designed to quell unrest.
The main concern for Sunak’s allies is that the party is now so unruly it is impossible to predict.
“They don’t seem to want to group around Rishi Sunak,” said a former minister. “The handicap Sunak has is he wasn’t elected by the party members – he took over in the circumstances post-Johnson and post-Truss. No party leader has been quite in that situation. So people are saying: ‘Well, what’s the point of being loyal?’”
Labour has its causes to worry, particularly in areas with big Muslim populations, where many are angry with Starmer over his stance on Gaza. Dozens of Labour councillors have resigned over recent months.
There are signs of Labour nerves in the West Midlands this weekend for this very reason, and in other towns and cities north and south, including Burnley and Oxford. The Tory peer and local elections expert Rob Hayward says he expects what he calls “disruptors” such as Muslim voters to have an effect that will minimise the impression of a Tory disaster after Thursday. “Overall, I expect the Tories to have a bad night, but it will not be a blowout for Labour. The [new] disruptors will probably have a greater impact on Labour than the Tories.”
In the feverish atmosphere at Westminster, those rumours persist that Sunak may call an early general election to nullify the effect and head off such a threat.
A senior Downing Street source said such talk was “bollocks” and “100% untrue” and that it was just being put about by Labour to make the Conservatives look scared of going to the country.
In London, Labour too is managing expectations, determined to get its vote out and avoid the impression that Khan will win a third term with ease.
A source close to the London mayor said: “It is has been a very tough campaign and it will be a lot closer than many people have been saying.”
Up north in Richmond, meanwhile, where Skaith and Duncan are fighting it out, Sunak still has plenty of backers in his own backyard and there is no detectable enthusiasm for Starmer or Labour.
But it is striking even there how the Conservatives as a collective force and as the governing party have lost the people’s trust.
Ian McCallum, a dog trainer who normally votes Tory, says Sunak is “very smooth and says all the right things” as the local MP, but he is disillusioned with his government and is not at all sure he will turn out to vote in the mayoral election.
The message was similar from many other normally Tory voting residents. Dismay and disillusion were the most common sentiments.
Geoff Rider, the joint owner of the Gelato Tutti ice-cream shop at the top of the town, was furious with the Conservatives for the way they have let him and the country down.
He had always voted Tory before, but is particularly seething about Brexit, which he says has pushed the costs of many imported ingredients that go into producing his ice-creams and cakes through the roof.
He says he won’t be voting on Thursday. “I have lost total confidence in the Conservatives to get anything right,” he says.
“They even voted in Liz Truss. That tells you everything.”
• This article was amended on 29 April 2024 because an earlier version said ‘A recent YouGov poll put Skaith on 34% and Duncan on 31.4%”. To clarify: the figures given were based on Labour’s analysis/extrapolation from recent MRP (multi-level regression and post-stratification) polling.
