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There can be no doubts. A narrow victory in the Tees Valley cannot obscure the reality, now cemented by Andy Street’s defeat in the West Midlands: these local elections have been a disaster for the Conservatives.
One measure of how inept the plot to unseat Rishi Sunak as Conservative leader is is the fact that would-be plotters have allowed the Prime Minister to mark his own homework by turning the results of such mayoral contests into “key evidence.” ” of the viability of his leadership.
What the mayoral races really show is that when the Conservatives can make the election a referendum on Ben Houchen or Street’s mayoral record, they can do better than when voters are asked to choose directly between Labor and conservatives. But as Street has learned, even an enviable mayoral record is no shield against the presence of the word “Conservative” next to his name on the ballot.
As for what these polls tell us about the general election, there’s a simple answer: It won’t be about what voters think of mayors. It will be about what people think about the Conservative Party’s platform and record, and their willingness to accept a vote for Sir Keir Starmer and the Labor Party as an alternative. All the evidence we have suggests that they will choose to do the latter in large numbers.
What is even more worrying for the Conservatives is that these election results (which are even worse than last year’s defeats) come just as the prime minister’s allies are touting a good week for their man.
Sunak chose the terrain on which to wage this campaign. He chose to make the Conservatives’ closing argument the news that the government had given a rejected African asylum seeker £3,000 to move voluntarily to Rwanda and start a new life there. He chose to focus on further cuts to disability benefits (many of which go to people already working) and his party’s nebulous ambitions to reduce public spending to fund the abolition of national insurance. The crushing defeat in London – where the Conservative Party’s campaign consisted of a noun (Sadiq Khan), an insult (exaggerations about crime in the city) and Ulez – occurred in Downing Street as much as by the Conservative candidate, Susan Hall.
How could it be otherwise? In the winter of 2019, Boris Johnson demonstrated how the Conservatives could win large majorities in the post-Brexit era. Promises of greater public spending were accompanied by tough messages on crime and immigration control. Plans to “get Brexit done” were accompanied by a commitment to achieve the UK’s net zero emissions target and to spend heavily on infrastructure projects.
In autumn last year, Sunak chose to slow the UK’s move towards net zero; In the most recent budget, Jeremy Hunt opted to cut taxes and plan to reduce spending; the country’s prisons are almost full and Sunak’s strategy on immigration is to tell liberals that the UK’s border regime is cruel and to conservatives that it is incontinent.
Unsurprisingly, he has led his party to a worse election result than in 2023. If Sunak follows his instincts, he will lead them to an even worse defeat in the general election which must take place no later than January 2025.
And even if the Prime Minister ends his disastrous experiment now and returns to the ground he abandoned in the autumn of 2023, this election showed that while Nigel Farage’s Reform UK is not doing as well as the polls suggest, is still doing well enough to do serious damage to conservative prospects.
There is a small but not insignificant risk that the next general election will be not just a 1997-style defeat for the Conservatives, but a disaster on the scale of what befell the Canadian Conservatives in 1993, when they were reduced to being the ruling party to a parliamentary group of only two deputies. Sunak’s chosen battleground this time turned out to be a battleground for Conservative councillors. The rest of the group should be careful.
This article has been updated to reflect the developing story.