Liz Truss, a name with which you will be painfully familiar if you have had to remortgage your home since she was prime minister, has claimed that “Britain is full of secret Conservatives”. If so, these clandestine Tories were keeping themselves exceptionally well hidden when it came to voting in the recent brace of byelections. The Conservatives were clobbered in Kingswood and walloped in Wellingborough, the latter producing the second largest swing from the Tories to Labour since 1945. This double whammy of byelection humiliations adds to the lengthening list of electoral eviscerations that have been inflicted on the Tories since Rishi Sunak moved into Number 10. The promise to his party that he had it in him to turn around their fortunes remains undelivered.
The flaccid manner in which the Tories tackled these contests makes you wonder whether even the prime minister still believes in the notion of a Rishi Revival. During byelections where the governing party is profoundly unpopular, it is nevertheless usual for the incumbents to put up at least some pretence that they are competitive. One indicator of the fatalism in Tory ranks is that cabinet ministers did not go out to brave the doorsteps in either seat. Another sign is how very few Conservative MPs volunteered to help out in contests which were signifiers of two of the reasons their party has become so noxious to so many voters. The Wellingborough contest was triggered after the parliamentary standards watchdog rejected denials by the then Tory MP, Peter Bone, by finding that he had verbally bullied, physically struck and exposed his genitals to a staff member. The local Tory association then made the extraordinarily bizarre decision to choose the partner of the disgraced ex-MP to be its candidate. Mr Sunak refused to endorse her, but couldn’t stop her, demonstrating the Tory leader’s lack of grip over his party.
