How to react to unfolding calamity? Tory MPs took different approaches. “Disastrous. Worse than I expected and pointing to a total wipeout.” That’s how one Conservative MP – and not one of the disaffected usual suspects – summed up the local election results to me as the gloom deepened on Saturday. Others preferred to focus on how football teams were doing.
Then there were some game attempts at spin – “Labour are tracking Cameron in 2009, ended up not getting a majority,” said one – but they were few and far between. After Andy Street’s defeat in the West Midlands, the last filigree traces of a silver lining vanished.
For months, there has been speculation that a rout in the local elections would lead to an attempt to oust Rishi Sunak. Yet so far, at least, there is no sign of it. “There’s a defeatism to the party,” offered one minister by way of explanation.
In truth, the barriers to a putsch were always formidable. The prime minister has the ultimate job security: that none of his would-be successors want his job now. Various leadership campaigns are already running, behind the scenes, but all with an eye to a contest after the general election. Nobody is keen to be the face attached to what is shaping up to be a historic defeat.
Then there’s the fact that six months out from the most likely date of the election, the Conservatives are simply too close to it, and too far behind in the polls, for anything but the most carefully choreographed and uncontested of leadership changes.
A full, competitive contest, such as that between Sunak and Liz Truss in the summer of 2022, would risk devolving into a very public orgy of recrimination and bloodletting, all for the sake of installing a wounded leader without sufficient time to turn the ship around and who, as the Tories’ fourth prime minister since 2019, would face enormous pressure to go to the country.
Such a process, at a time when the electorate expects the government to be focused on the nation’s problems, would probably be a self-indulgence too far for the shrinking pool of voters currently still minded to vote Conservative at the next election. No wonder ConservativeHome found almost two-thirds of party members didn’t think Sunak should resign, regardless of the local election results.
Yet the impact of those results extends far beyond the immediate fate of the prime minister. The loss of hundreds of councillors will be a serious blow to the Tory campaign machine: in an age of shrinking memberships, it is they (and the friends and family they dragoon into helping) who are the core of canvassers that are essential to maximising the vote in any seat.
Across a broad swath of England, the ranks of that infantry have now been seriously thinned. Many of those who lost their seats will be less inclined to give up their evenings and weekends to help re-elect the government.
Then there’s Reform UK. We have been spared, at least, the panic that might have resulted had it actually beaten the Conservatives into second place in Blackpool South. But it got very close, and where it stood candidates the Tories palpably suffered for it, a grim preview of the role it could play at the general election.
For CCHQ, a big question now is whether Reform performs better in byelections, or worse. Normally, such contests favour smaller parties, allowing them to concentrate scarce resources and campaign shamelessly on local concerns without regard for the compromises of government.
But Reform UK doesn’t have a strong activist base (it isn’t even a membership organisation). Nor does it really do carefully chosen local messaging, favouring instead foghorn blasts about immigration and “socialism”. Such a party might actually do better when Labour and the Conservatives are stretched thinly across hundreds of seats.
All of that ought to prompt at the very least a change of Conservative strategy. For months, the polls have been all but screaming that the party needs to adopt a deeply defensive approach to the election, writing off old battlegrounds and digging new trenches in seats once considered safe.
Officially, however, CCHQ remains committed to an 80/20 approach: defending the 80 most vulnerable seats while pressing the attack in a score of targets. This might have been a reasonable posture in 2021, but it is madness now, a recipe for throwing away seats the party might otherwise hold by squandering resources on unwinnable contests.
Yet that would mean telling an awful lot of Conservative MPs that their seats are beyond saving – and those MPs might suddenly start feeling differently about the electoral risks of trying to dethrone the prime minister.
As it is, he looks set to carry on, unloved but unchallenged, while the various wings of his party gird themselves for an almighty battle to explain a defeat that almost all think is coming, but none can think of a way to avoid.
Henry Hill is deputy editor of ConservativeHome
