Last week’s local election results may finally have sunk Rishi Sunak’s Conservative party. It lost all but one of the 11 mayoralty contests, and while Ben Houchen held on in Tees Valley, it was with a diminished majority. Labour were out of sight in winning the Blackpool South byelection with a 26% swing, and more broadly in local elections across England the Tories lost nearly half the council seats they were defending.
These losses are staggering, but so too is the reaction of would-be Tory rebels, the Reform-lite group. They have suggested they will not challenge Sunak now; as Suella Braverman put it, it is Sunak who should “own this and fix it”. It is the height of political self-unawareness – because it is their political gameplan that Sunak’s rudderless No 10 has been attempting to follow. It is as a result of their flawed political judgments that support for the party has plummeted the length and breadth of the country, and across generations of voters – so much so that shockingly, the party only now leads in the over-70s voter age group. The 2024 local election results are their responsibility to “own”, not just the prime minister’s.
Time after time, Sunak has pivoted more sharply towards this group’s uniquely unpopular political agenda, whether in his bizarre conference speech attacking the 30 year failed status quo, raging against the apparently omnipresent “woke” agenda, stoking divisive but headline-grabbing culture wars – or even now threatening to leave the European convention on human rights.
And the more Sunak has danced to the Reform-lite political tune, the worse the party has done in the polls. Far from suggesting that the party should continue with more of the same, Thursday’s election results show that voters are rejecting the very Reform-inspired agenda it has pursued. This direction has so clearly taken the party backwards, to the extent it could barely scrape second place in Blackpool South, the latest byelection disaster for the Conservatives. To suggest, as they now do, that Sunak should try harder with a strategy that has already proved to have failed is self-serving madness.
It’s also bad maths. In places like Blackpool South or London, even combining Conservative and Reform UK voters into a “coalition” of support would be insufficient for winning a general election. In London, after deliberate overnight speculation on Friday that the race would be tight, the Tory mayoral candidate performed even worse than last time. Meanwhile, in Braverman’s own patch of Fareham, the party lost councillors to the Lib Dems. The madness is that when it comes to the national picture, the party finds itself battling for a small pool of voters with the third-placed party, Reform, while abandoning and alienating many more in the centre ground of British politics to Labour, which is first place by a wide margin.
Theirs is a strategy that has tripped up at every hurdle. Today’s Reform-lite Conservatives are losing badly, and more of the same cannot be the solution.
The problem is that they have no positive vision for our country, just a long list of things and people they dislike and oppose as they tilt at any “woke” windmill they can conjure up. These issues are irrelevant and a turn-off for most voters.
Crucially, the promise of levelling up that voters across the country bought into – whether north or south, leave or remain – has been arrogantly ditched by them and Sunak. While continually pointing the finger at “elites”, they nevertheless seem to have little to say on how we fundamentally level up Britain so that everyone can have fair access to opportunities, irrespective of background.
Yet whether you call it levelling up, breaking down barriers, or equality of opportunity, the local election results show that it is the candidate and party that voters believe can practically deliver for them and their families that consistently wins elections in today’s Britain.
In Tees Valley, Houchen managed to hold back the political tide through demonstrably driving greater access to opportunity for local people and giving his own region the chance to be part of Britain’s economic success of the future. In Harlow, where a concerted effort on levelling up has been made by the council, county council and the respected local MP Robert Halfon, the Conservatives held on. Andy Street may have lost the West Midlands mayoralty but he is a politician respected across the party divides as having a track record of delivery. His demand for a moderate, tolerant and inclusive Conservative party is correct and the antithesis to culture-war-driven Reform-lite Conservatives. Unlike them, he should have a role in any future Conservative revival.
By contrast, Reform-lite Conservatives, like Labour’s Corbynites, are far more consumed by making ideological political arguments, theorising about deep-state plots and demonstrating they are disconnected from our day-to-day lives, than setting out proposals on the necessary, ambitious and comprehensive plan Britain needs for driving social mobility.
Stepping back from a Conservative leadership coup they clearly assume would fail suggests they believe they cannot even win the argument within their own party, let alone the wider country. Yet they still plan to wage the equivalent of a coup in public anyway. They may say it’s about forcing Sunak to own the results, but that’s just an excuse. What they really want is for Sunak to continue to carry the can for their own failing political strategy. They are simply getting their excuses in early, unable to see what everyone else in the country can: that they are the people turning off millions of voters from voting Conservative. And the longer this goes on, the more damage they will do to the party, and the harder it will be to regain public trust.
Bluntly, they are the problem the Conservative party now needs to face down if it is ever to electorally prosper again. As long as Reform-lite continues to loudly monopolise the debate, banging on with their futile finger-pointing and vote-losing culture wars, they prevent the wider party from confronting the hard truths about where it goes next.
Justine Greening was education secretary and minister for women and equalities, 2016-18, and Conservative MP for Putney, 2005-19
