At a bus depot in Derbyshire Rishi Sunak valiantly rehearsed some of the arguments the Conservatives are preparing to deploy against Keir Starmer and Labour at the local elections in May.
Starmer was “arrogantly taking the British people for granted”, he claimed, and pointed to Birmingham council as an example of how Labour had “effectively bankrupted the largest local authority in Europe”.
But the problem for Sunak is that these criticisms are more resonant when levelled at the Tories. They are 20 points behind in the polls amid accusations of being out of touch and having crashed the economy, sending inflation and interest rates soaring under Liz Truss.
Launching his party’s local election campaign, the prime minister is six weeks away from a moment of maximum danger for his premiership. Qualms about Sunak’s leadership are rumbling on, with talk of installing Penny Mordaunt or Tom Tugendhat in his place, but those calls may become more public and louder from some Conservative MPs if the party loses mayoralties in Tees Valley and the West Midlands on 2 May.
Few political experts anticipate anything other than a resounding victory for Labour in the 107 council contests on that date, but the possibility of Starmer’s party getting a clean sweep when it comes to mayoral polls in London and 10 other areas is what is really causing jitters in Conservative party headquarters.
Tony Travers, the professor of government at LSE and an expert on local politics, said the West Midlands and Tees Valley races were difficult to call. Andy Street, the incumbent Tory mayor of the West Midlands, had a narrow 2021 victory margin over Labour which is less than the subsequent swing in national polling, but he had been “politically shrewd” in plotting a distinct course from the national party and could thus hang on, Travers said.
In contrast, while Ben Houchen took nearly 73% of the vote in Tees Valley last time he could suffer from a collapse in Tory support in the “red wall”, Travers said, noting a poll that predicted a Labour victory.
While Labour has warned that the move to a first past the post electoral system for mayoral races, against the old system in which voters could make a second choice, could result in the Conservative candidate, Susan Hall, denying Sadiq Khan a third term as London mayor on 2 May, Travers said this seemed unlikely.
“There has been a 15 percentage point swing from Conservative to Labour since 2021. It is in the interests of both parties to pretend the Conservatives can win, but the polls show Sadiq Khan a long way ahead,” he said. “There is an incumbency factor against him, but then Susan Hall isn’t a great candidate.”
Overall, there will be 10 mayoral votes, six of them new, so predictions will be difficult. However, Travers said, it was “not beyond the bounds of possibility” that the Conservatives could lose every one.
Senior Tories say they will measure success or failure mostly by a handful of mayoral contests, rather than how many councillors they lose. One cabinet minister said: “We are at risk of losing both the Teesside mayoralty and West Midlands. If we can hold one or both of those, we will have done well.”
The cabinet minister added, however: “The polls currently have us 20 points behind. If that were to be repeated at the locals, we would do well to hold on to a single council.”
Labour dismisses such suggestions as setting unrealistically low expectations in order to outperform them come election night. One shadow minister said: “They’ll easily hold both of those mayoralties. But that won’t eclipse the hammering they will get in local authorities.”
If a truly disastrous showing for the Tories comes to pass, Sunak will face a very difficult few weeks before the summer recess, with inevitable questions over whether he is heading for a near wipeout at a general election.
However, the problem for rebels seeking to oust him remains the difficulty of finding a candidate who wants to face near-certain defeat in the autumn. One Conservative official said the anti-Sunak plotters were not distinguishing themselves in terms of strategy: “The problem with the idea that this is all somehow a game of 4D chess is that no one in Westminster is clever enough to play 4D chess.”
Meanwhile, Sunak’s team in private conversations is managing to remain bullish about the prime minister’s chances of turning things around, having convinced themselves that the polls will narrow and they are still in with a chance – of a hung parliament at least.
Astonishingly, Sunak still believes he has a chance of staying on after the election, according to those close to him.
“The prime minister has been talking about the chance of a hung parliament,” said one ally. “If that happens, he believes there could be a second in the space of a year, as happened in 1974. He would then argue to the party that they should keep him on to see them through the second election.”
One cabinet minister said: “There’s no reason why he would need to step down if the result is close, let’s say if there’s a hung parliament, because it would be likely there could be another election within the next year or two. If you look at 1974 there’s a precedent for it. So yes I think Rishi would try to stay as leader in those circumstances.”
With no public challengers emerging, despite a seriously bad few weeks after the defection of Lee Anderson to Reform UK and calls for Sunak to hand back £10m from donor Frank Hester, the prime minister enjoyed a display of loyalty from his backbenchers at the 1922 Committee meeting of MPs on Wednesday afternoon. More MPs than usual attended and the traditional banging of desks when the prime minister arrived was so loud and prolonged it sounded on the verge of hysteria.
MPs who left the room before the meeting was over marched through the mass of journalists outside dispersing quickfire words of high praise. “The best we’ve seen him for a while,” one backbencher pronounced as they strode off. Asked for marks out of 10, they paused for a second before replying: “Eleven!”
‘Time to grow up’
It was notable that the MP tasked with briefing the press afterwards was a prior critic of Sunak from the right of the party, Jonathan Gullis, the MP for Stoke. It was, he said, “time to grow up and pull together”.
However, some Tory MPs were privately sceptical as to how genuine the overall show of support was, and even the meeting betrayed some tensions, with the former party chair Jake Berry complaining bitterly to Sunak that No 10 had briefed against him.
Sunak’s advisers had hoped to dissipate the tension in parliament by sending MPs home for their Easter break early. The prime minister’s opening gambit at the 1922 was to joke: “I know you’re not applauding me, you’re applauding the chief whip for letting you leave early.”
However, that plan was derailed on Thursday when an informal deal with Labour to avoid votes on the investigatory powers bill on Monday fell apart. Tory and Labour MPs are on a three-line whip to vote on the bill – which some in government insist was the plan all along.
Either way, the result is that Conservative MPs will return to the Commons on Monday in an even worse mood.
