The mayoral elections demonstrated that there is a way to win for a Conservative. This is to make out that you have nothing to do with the Tories.
Of the metro mayorships that were up for grabs, just one has been bagged for the Conservatives. The re-election of Ben Houchen in Tees Valley is being used as a human shield by Rishi Sunak to fend off any attempt to depose him from Downing Street. He’s relying on this sole glimmer of cheer for his party to convince it that a disastrous general election defeat is not inevitable and to blunt the daggers of those in his own party who want him gone.
Yet Downing Street can’t credibly claim this rare win as a vote of confidence in Mr Sunak and his government when the Tees mayor put a million miles between himself and Number 10. He ran, not as a Tory, but as “Ben”. His campaign literature treated the prime minister as a non-person and he even “forgot” to wear a blue rosette at his count. One lesson of his victory is that your best hope of succeeding as a Tory is to pretend not to be one. Another moral is that it helps to have a strong personal brand. Which doesn’t flatter Mr Sunak either, because it draws attention to his lack of one.
Those Tories who want him out of Number 10 have always reckoned that this week would be their best opportunity to try to defenestrate him. Their slogan might be: “Do or Die”. At the time of Boris Johnson’s enforced removal from Downing Street, he made a rueful reference to the instincts of “the herd”. The hope among the plotters is that the panicked beasts of the Tory Serengeti will trample Mr Sunak underfoot.
Against them stand the prime minister’s residual allies and apologists who have been trying to tranquillise the herd with the argument that a coup attempt would be utter madness whether it failed or succeeded. Their slogan might be: “Do and die even more horribly”. It is not that they disagree that Tory prospects look dire. What they fear is that a bid to depose Mr Sunak would make their party look even more absurd than it does already. “We’d be taking the piss out of the public,” says one member of the cabinet. “They’d say, ‘What jokers. We’ve absolutely had enough of them’.” Yet another change of leader would mean four prime ministers, three of them installed at Number 10 without any reference to the voters, since the last election. There are banana republics with more stable governments. These elections had long been ringed in the calendars of both camps as the crunch point that would determine Mr Sunak’s fate. If he can stifle agitation from Tory MPs for his removal over the coming days, he is likely to endure at Number 10 to lead his party into the general election. If discontent with him builds to the point of triggering a confidence vote, his chances of survival become significantly slimmer.
In the immediate wake of Friday’s results, some of the insurrectionists sounded like they were giving up, and loyalist ministers started to declare that the prime minister was safe in his job, at least until the voters get their hands on him. But that was before Saturday brought the Tory-deflating result from London and the Tory-stunning outcome in the West Midlands. A lot will depend on how sulphurous Conservative MPs are feeling when they return to parliament after a bank holiday weekend ingesting results that were almost universally atrocious for the Tories.
The anti-Sunakites are not wrong when they say their party resembles an outfit that is sleepwalking towards the abyss. Taken in the round, these elections confirm the message of the opinion polls that the Conservatives are strapped into the ejector seat and Labour is marching towards government. A sweeping cull of Tory councillors cost them going on for half of the thousand or so seats they were defending, one of their worst results, if not the worst, at local elections in 40 years. Blackpool South was the fifth recent byelection where the whopping swing to Labour exceeded 20 points. It is a measure of Tory desperation that they are claiming a consolation prize for making it into second place by squeaking past Reform by 117 votes.
Conservative hopes that they might make a close-run thing of London were revealed to be a fantasy when the result came in on Saturday afternoon. Sadiq Khan is back in City Hall for a third term with an increased majority. The heaviest blow to the Conservatives from Saturday’s counts was Andy Street, who they expected to cling on as mayor of the West Midlands, being defeated in an area packed with swing parliamentary seats. He’d fought his contest not as a Tory, but as “Andy”. His campaign material was in a non-Conservative livery of green and purple. In his case, the distancing trick was not enough to spare him from his party’s national unpopularity.
The fundamental vulnerability of the prime minister is that he got the job on the promise to his party that he could turn around their fortunes, and has instead led them to even lower nadirs. The Conservatives are now regularly polling at a vote share worse than they endured when John Major was heading towards his doom, worse than Boris Johnson following Partygate and worse even than Liz Truss in the immediate aftermath of the maxi-disaster of the “mini-budget”. Nothing the Tory leader has tried has worked. Marketing himself as “the change” candidate, as he did at the last party conference, was too preposterous to last much longer than a week. Projecting himself as the man to fix the howling mess he inherited has always invited the question: which party created the howling mess in the first place? He asked to be judged on economic growth (which is anaemic), NHS waiting lists (which are enormous), and stopping the boats (which are still coming). Whenever he tries to catch the attention of the electorate, voters block their ears. Since last autumn, national insurance contributions have been slashed by a third, the largest cut to that tax in history, with absolutely no positive impact on the Conservative party’s popularity. So those Tories who want him out of Number 10 aren’t wrong to say that Sunakism, whatever it amounts to, is not working.
One handicap for the plotters is that they are no less implicated in years of failure and strife than anyone else in the Conservative party. Another is persuading colleagues that their scheme would not leave the Tories in an even deeper hole than the one they are already stuck down. The core conspirators are drawn from hard right groupuscules going by the names of the NewCons, the PopCons and the UtterCons. (I may have made up one of those). Their purported rescue plan is a “100-day blitz” to shift the Conservatives even further to the right. Which sounds very like what Mr Sunak is already doing. In the run-up to these locals, he declared that flights would be taking off for Rwanda by July and started detaining unsuccessful asylum seekers, he made bellicose noises about quitting the European court of human rights and he railed against what he derided as the “sicknote culture”. Rightwing “red meat” is not in short supply from Mr Sunak. The trouble for the Tories is that even rightwing voters aren’t finding it appetising while centrist ones are repelled.
One reason his allies nevertheless think it likely he will survive is that the insurrectionists have never had a coherent plan for what would happen the day after a coup. There is no miracle worker ready to swoop in with a magic formula to save the Conservative party. Given the known propensity of the Tories to descend into vicious factionalism, it seems wishful thinking to believe that they could somehow contrive a seamless transfer of power to a new leader. Even if they could, that would invite a tsunami of derision for such a voter-scorning stitch-up. It would be the second time in a row the Conservatives would have put in a leader without any kind of mandate, one not even chosen by its party members, never mind the country as a whole.
So as the smoke clears, we find Rishi Sunak still standing, but doing so amid the smouldering rubble of another devastating judgment on the Conservatives. Even if he survives the manoeuvres of those in his party who want rid of him, the verdict he will not be able to evade for all that much longer is that of the country. Pretending not to be a Tory won’t be an option at the general election.
• Andrew Rawnsley is the Chief Political Commentator of the Observer
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