Asked what chance his party had of winning the next general election, a former Tory cabinet minister, who had occupied a senior government post until not long ago, threw his eyes skywards and replied in an instant: “Zero.”
It was last Wednesday afternoon in the Palace of Westminster. The former minister then paused, grimaced, and added that with every passing day, as the chaos grew, the chances were likely to diminish further – into negative territory.
Another ex-cabinet minister – also from the right of the party – had a different way of answering the same question minutes later.
There were two possibilities for the Tories to drag themselves back from the brink, he believed. One was for Rishi Sunak to be bolder and abandon more green policies while also abolishing inheritance tax. “But he won’t do that,” he added. “He is just too cautious.”
The other was for the party to replace Sunak with another leader: “But that would be madness. It won’t happen.” He too saw no real hope of a miracle recovery for his party before the next election.
The two were speaking exactly a week after Jeremy Hunt’s budget, in which the chancellor had thrown another 2p cut in national insurance at working people, in the desperate hope of improving the national mood and the Tories’ electoral prospects.
But the post-budget polls quickly showed most people had clocked that the overall effect of Hunt’s measures – one of which was to freeze income-tax thresholds again – would actually be to put taxes up, and that the spending cuts necessary to fund them would hit public services. Voters saw through it. Labour’s poll lead – already suggesting a landslide – increased.
Over recent days, the Tories’ already dark mood has worsened perceptibly, adding to a sense at Westminster that they are now locked into an irreversible doom spiral in which discipline is abandoned as fast as hope.
The idea that the budget would be a turning point has already been consigned to history.
Disaster has followed disaster. On Monday morning, a former deputy chairman of the party, Lee Anderson, defected to the populist rightwing Reform party, having refused to apologise for saying that London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, had given the capital city away to his Islamist “mates”.
Then, on Monday evening, the Guardian revealed that the Tories’ biggest donor, Frank Hester, had said that looking at Labour MP Diane Abbott made you “want to hate all black women” and that she “should be shot”.
The news came little over a fortnight after the prime minister had stood outside Downing Street warning of the dark forces of extremism sweeping the country, following the return of George Galloway to parliament as MP for Rochdale.
The government’s response to the Hester revelation was, disastrously, initially to defend their man, until cabinet minister Kemi Badenoch, a future leadership hopeful, went public, saying: “The idea of linking criticism of her to being a black woman is racist.” Two hours later, but too late, Sunak followed, agreeing that the remarks had indeed been racist. But the party is still refusing all subsequent calls to hand Hester’s money back.
In normal times, even when things are going badly, MPs and others in a governing party will at least try to look for positives, particularly with a general election approaching.
But after 14 years of running the country, with five different leaders, the Conservatives are exhausted and terribly divided. Many of the most senior MPs in their ranks will admit privately that they are too riven by factions to muster any real attempt at unity amid the gathering chaos.
George Osborne, the former Tory chancellor, put it succinctly in his podcast with Labour’s Ed Balls last week. Sunak’s authority, he suggested, was already waning and the sharks were beginning to circle. “In politics you get these spirals,” Osborne observed, “which is when you’re weak or when people don’t think you’re going to succeed politically at the election. The patronage starts to dissipate, the authority goes, people say ‘well, he’s not going to be around much longer, I need to hitch my wagon to one of the leadership contenders’. That feeds off itself and that’s where you get this downward spiral where you get more and more undermining of authority, which makes the government even weaker.”
Osborne also noted what he called a paradox at the heart of Sunak’s recent approach to extremism – that in the same week that the Tories were announcing a new policy of refusing to give cash to extremist groups they were “taking money from someone who appears, by their own definition, to be an extremist”.
Sunak’s core problem has been that none of his plans to relaunch the party have seemed credible to his own party or out in the country. Last autumn he tried to position himself as the “change” candidate against Keir Starmer and Labour. He dumped some green initiatives and then the northern leg of the HS2 high speed rail line. But after 14 years of Conservative government, trying to disconnect himself from what had gone before stretched credulity.
Gavin Barwell, formerly Theresa May’s chief of staff, says Sunak had his chance to stamp his authority on the party at the start of his premiership, and flunked it. “I don’t think there is anything they can now do to avoid losing,” he said. “Rishi Sunak would be in a much better position if he had taken over directly from Johnson. The most calamitous damage was done by Liz Truss.
“If you could go back in time to the moment he took over, he could have much more clearly differentiated himself from Truss. He could have said he wouldn’t allow her to stand as a candidate. The basic problem he has got is that he is going to go into the election and his main message to people is going to be that he has stabilised the thing after a complete train crash.
“The problem is his own colleagues caused the train crash, and those people are still standing as Conservative candidates and they are still writing their agenda. So he is hamstrung. The argument he should be making, he can’t make.”
This weekend, however, even Sunak’s claim to have delivered a measure of stability, relative to Truss, is in some danger.
Amid the pessimism has come talk of plots to oust him. The Daily Mail led its front page on Saturday with talk of a plot to replace Sunak with the leader of the House of Commons, Penny Mordaunt, in a “coronation” in the next few weeks.
The vast majority of Tory MPs believe having yet another leadership change would be madness, and that it would inevitably hasten a general election, with resulting carnage in terms of seat losses. “Even if it happened, which it won’t, she would be an even shorter-serving prime minister than Liz Truss,” said another former cabinet member. “The calls for a general election would be irresistible, we would lose by a mile, and she would be out. It is completely insane as an idea.”
Mordaunt herself is said to believe the stories are part of a plot by people wanting to damage her and harm any attempt she might make after an election defeat to lead the party, were Sunak to step down.
“It is complete lunacy on every single level,” said another former minister. “But there are colleagues with quite big majorities of 14, 15, 16,000 who are now beginning to wonder if they will hang on at the next election who are really panicking. That is how bad it is.”
Last week, as his troubles mounted, Sunak finally ruled out a general election on 2 May, which some Tories had believed was the best chance to avoid a heavy defeat, on the basis that things would only get worse if he left it for longer. The most likely month is now November.
Some optimists in the party still see a possibility that the economy will improve over the summer in a way that will allow Sunak to tell a story of hard-won success during an election campaign. “It could be that he can say inflation is at 2%, interest rates are coming down – in the end, it will be ‘the economy, stupid’,” said one senior party figure. “The truth is, it is a fast-moving world and things may change.”
The effects of two budgets may also feed through, he said.
“The Treasury rule of thumb is that tax cuts don’t register for six months. After two or three months of having more in their pay packets, people begin to think: ‘Oh hang on, I can afford to go on holiday.’ It takes that long.”
This week, Sunak’s Rwanda deportation bill returns to the Commons, beginning what could be a prolonged period of “ping-pong” between the lower chamber and the Lords. But the upper house is unlikely to hold it up for long and the Tories are confident it will be on the statute book soon, possibly allowing flights to take off to Rwanda before an election, barring probable legal challenges. “It could be a gamechanger,” said one senior Tory.
But few Conservatives seriously expect public opinion to shift much before an election campaign proper if thing start to improve, and even then most believe any narrowing in the polls would not be enough to prevent a Labour victory.
Paul Goodman, the newly ennobled former Tory MP and ex-editor of ConservativeHome, said: “His [Sunak’s] best hope is that people give him a second glance once the election campaign proper starts. It is unlikely there will be a significant change of sentiment before then, if it happens at all.”
Increasingly, accompanying the Tory malaise, a sense prevails at Westminster that this parliament, and this government, have both run their course and run out of steam.
There is little more in terms of government legislation in the coming months that will keep MPs busy or up late. More and more MPs are announcing they are quitting parliament altogether, either exhausted or disgruntled, adding to an end-of-term atmosphere and a feeling that they are merely playing out time.
This week the Commons Public Accounts committee will publish a report on the future of social care which will underline yet again how successive governments have failed to tackle the issue. Last week, the Financial Times published research showing that working days for MPs have been shorter on average in this parliament than in any other in the last quarter of a century.
The former Labour deputy leader Harriet Harman – who will retire at the election having been first elected in 1982 – tells Rachel Cooke in today’s Observer New Review how parliament seems these days: “On a good day it’s like a zombie film. On a bad day it’s worse. We’ve got ministers but they’re sort of holograms.” The Tory MP William Wragg, who is also leaving, adds: “I’d just like it to be over now, I think.”
As to the growing perception that this has become a “zombie parliament”, Barwell says that could makes things even worse for Sunak and the Tories. “The danger is, if it looks like it is just a shambles all the way through to the election, the result can get even worse. You just build up the voters’ determination to finish the zombie off, essentially.”
