For some battle-weary Tory campaigners, the election-betting scandal is just the latest affront in a blunder-strewn campaign punctuated by polls predicting a Conservative wipeout on July 4.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is facing severe criticism from his own side over his handling of the saga, amid growing clamour to suspend the three party figures under investigation by the Gambling Commission.
“Every Tory I know is angry, in disbelief,” said Tim Montgomerie, co-founder of the ConservativeHome grassroots website.
Sunak should “come to the microphone” with full-throated condemnation and show “some humanity”, he said. “Where’s the raw emotion, passion, anger we all feel?”
Two of the three being investigated — Craig Williams, Sunak’s closest parliamentary aide, and Laura Saunders, a party staffer and the wife of the Tory campaign director — are still Conservative candidates in the election.
The prime minister spent Thursday preparing for a BBC Question Time appearance, where he will face audience questions. But his decision to hunker down ceded the airwaves to Sir Keir Starmer, Labour leader. “If it was one of my candidates they would be gone and their feet would not have touched the floor,” Starmer said.
One former cabinet minister heaped scorn on Sunak: “It is absolutely dreadful. Frankly it looks like a failure of leadership”.
Campaign officials and Tory MPs are braced for the possibility of more party figures being named as under investigation for election-related bets in coming days.
One Tory insider said “the party is in freefall” following the saga, the latest in a series of problems to befall the Conservative campaign.
The latest came on Thursday when Chris Skidmore, a former Tory energy minister and author of the government’s net zero review, endorsed Labour. Writing in the Guardian, he criticised Sunak for siding with climate deniers on net zero.
The decision not to ditch Williams and Saunders as candidates has sparked anger from Tory colleagues who said the party’s support should be withdrawn, even though it would be too late to replace them on the July 4 ballot papers.
A series of incumbent Tory MPs and officials told the Financial Times that Williams and Saunders should be suspended, and any other official ensnared in the row should face disciplinary action, if they placed a bet on the election using inside information.
Tony Lee, Saunders’s husband and the party’s head of campaigning, took a leave of absence on Wednesday, the party confirmed. A person familiar with the matter said Lee was also under investigation by the gambling regulator.
Sunak said last week that he was “very disappointed” in Williams but declined to comment further, citing the ongoing investigation into his ally.
But the former Cabinet minister accused the prime minister of trying to “hide behind the process”, adding: “It’s a very simple question: were they aware of the information beforehand? If so, they should be suspended. The electorate are entitled to know.”
Party officials defended Sunak, however, saying he would address the issue during the Question Time event on Thursday evening. They said it was for voters to decide whether to elect Williams and Saunders.
The officials added the Gambling Commission had only asked the Conservative party to confirm details about the individuals now under investigation, but had not shared more information about any allegations against them, making it hard to launch internal disciplinary action before the regulator’s probe had concluded.
Other party figures turned their ire on their colleagues under investigation by the Gambling Commission. Placing a bet was “incredibly stupid and venal”, former Tory leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith told the News Agents podcast.
He said such behaviour was “unacceptable and whatever happens to them wouldn’t be hard enough in my book”.
One exasperated Tory staffer said the party couldn’t “catch a break”, adding that it was a “fucking annoying story” that had generated far too much adverse news coverage.
Incumbent Tory MPs fighting for re-election, meanwhile, expressed their anger on WhatsApp groups, while some of their colleagues who stepped down at the election expressed relief over their decision.
Paula Surridge, a politics professor at the University of Bristol, said the debacle entrenched a negative impression of Sunak’s party among some voters. “It reinforces the image of the Conservatives as being out for their mates and thinking the rules don’t apply to them,” she said.
For voters it risks reigniting memories of the premiership of Boris Johnson, when Tory officials — including Sunak — breached Covid-19 restrictions and received a criminal penalty, she added.
However, she cast doubt on whether it would encourage voters to switch away from the Tories to another party. “What it might do at the margins is make some Conservative voters stay at home,” Surridge said.
The furore erupted a day after three different MRP models indicated the Tories are headed for a crushing defeat at the general election, with the least-favourable suggesting the party would be left with just 53 MPs, while the most favourable forecast 155 Tory MPs on July 5.
The Conservatives have started shifting resources out of parts of the country where they hold seats with majorities of about 10,000 votes, considering them lost causes. Instead, it is shipping activists and funds to areas that previously garnered larger majorities.
Party officials defended the move, insisting it was logical for all political campaigns to deploy their resources as efficiently as possible.
While all polls predict a significant majority for Labour, some Tory candidates are taking succour from the wide variation in predictions between different multilevel regression and post-stratification (MRP) polls, believing the party may be headed for opposition — but not wipeout.
One minister said: “The MRPs are not accurate. This isn’t a presidential election — it’s a ‘how many seats do you have’ election. Can we amass a reasonable number of seats to form a decent opposition? The answer is definitely yes.”