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One of Rishi Sunak’s most influential critics has admitted that, had the party listened to the then prime minister, it could have avoided the calamitous defeat it suffered at the general election.
Ben Houchen, the mayor of Teesside and the only leading Tory left in power, insists that his party “absolutely can win in five years” but warns that the Conservatives should not try to become a version of Reform UK in an attempt to achieve this.
Lord Houchen, who has yet to come out publicly in support of any of the leadership contenders, spoke exclusively to The Independent ahead of the party’s conference this week in Birmingham, and after an election at which the Tories returned a historically low 121 MPs.
Having backed Boris Johnson to return as prime minister when Liz Truss resigned, and then disowned Mr Sunak before the local and regional elections in May – not even wearing a blue rosette when his result was announced – Lord Houchen now believes that the former prime minister’s analysis was right, but that “people had stopped listening”.
He warned that while Labour is struggling with questions about freebies, the influence of wealthy donors like Waheed Alli, and anger over the new government’s policies – particularly that of cancelling winter fuel payments for 10 million pensioners – the Tories “still have a long, hard road to recovery”.
He said his party had only itself to blame for a situation in which, he claimed, the main objective of voters was not to elect a Labour government, but to kick the Tories out.
“I’ve been saying this for the last year. There is no love for the Labour Party. They didn’t increase their share of the vote. It is a very broad, very shallow vote that they actually have.
“The biggest problem we have as a country – and it’s going to be a problem over the next five years of misery, and we, the Conservative Party, are to blame for this – is that we lost the election. Labour didn’t win it.
“It is diametrically opposite, actually, to Tony Blair, for example. In 1997, people actively went out and voted for Tony Blair.”
Part of the reason for this, said Lord Houchen, is that both his party and the country refused to listen to the warnings of Mr Sunak, who he now believes “would be considered a very good prime minister in normal times”.
“He’s very competent, he’s got all the right skill sets, but [given] the circumstances he walked into, he was always doomed to failure, and that wasn’t his fault.
“In hindsight, it’s pretty obvious that, irrespective of who was in charge of the Conservative Party going into the general election, they would never win that election, because of our behaviour.”
Lord Houchen now believes he underestimated the extent to which Ms Truss’s mini-Budget and its impact on interest rates, mortgages and the cost of living “broke the trust with the British people”.
He says the party should have listened to Mr Sunak’s warnings during the leadership election, and then listened to his warnings about Labour.
“I think we will see it over the weeks and months ahead: everything he said in the leadership election, when he stood against Liz Truss, came true. He was warning party members of exactly what would happen, and the problems that we would face, and the membership ignored him.
“And then, eventually, he became prime minister anyway, and then we saw, everything he said in the run-up to the general election, all of the points he made about the Labour Party – all of the things he warned people about – are now starting to come true.
“The problem was that, irrespective of what Rishi was saying and how correct or accurate it was, people had stopped listening. People just turned off, and they wanted to vote for somebody else other than a Conservative government.”
But he warns against a simplistic debate over whether the party should mimic Reform or move closer to the Liberal Democrats. He points to the fact that some voters were trying to decide between Reform and the Lib Dems as an anti-Tory vote.
“There are lots of Conservative voters that ended up voting elsewhere – Lib Dem or Reform, or some went to Labour – but actually, the vastness of the vote ended up staying at home.”
On Reform, he suggested that Nigel Farage was actually mimicking Boris Johnson.
“Farage was able to bring together red-wall voters that were fed up of the political establishment. Boris Johnson was anti-establishment, or certainly framed himself as an anti-establishment candidate.”
He said he agrees with Kemi Badenoch that “Reform voters are our voters. That doesn’t necessarily mean that we parrot what Reform are. We’ve got to get back to what we, as Conservatives, do.”
He also agrees with candidates Tom Tugendhat and Robert Jenrick, who are suggesting that the UK could leave or diminish the influence of the European Convention on Human Rights.
“I think a conversation about [the Convention] is much more mainstream than people think: not around the technical nature of the Convention itself, but what the contenders are trying to do is encapsulate the broader discussion around it.”
Lord Houchen has not declared support for any of the four candidates standing to replace Mr Sunak as leader, but he is clear about what the party has to do.
“Just because Labour are terrible doesn’t mean that the Conservatives do not still have a huge amount of work to do. We’ve got to elect the right leader, we’ve got to put the right policies in place. We’ve got to rebuild that trust with the public. That is going to take a long time, not just days or weeks or months. It’s going to take years, into the run-up to the next election, to get anywhere close to rebuilding.”
