At the next general election, the Conservatives will be making a very big ask. They will be seeking a fifth consecutive term in power, a privilege that has never been granted to any party since the Great Reform Act of 1832. Assume the election is held in the spring of 2024. Imagine that the Tories receive the answer that they are looking for. We could then be contemplating 19 uninterrupted years of Conservative prime ministers.
For those who shudder at this future, the consoling news is that the Tories are working extremely hard to ensure that this does not happen. It is not entirely their fault that they are presiding over the most severe squeeze on living standards since the 1950s. They are to blame for deciding that this is the appropriate time to be cutting welfare support and hiking taxes. Voters can be willing to make sacrifices when persuaded that it is in service of a noble cause, but the only guiding principle of this government is to keep a disgraced law-breaker in office. There is no sense of a strategy to address the many economic and social challenges confronting Britain. Nor any expectation, even among Tory MPs, that the government will suddenly reveal an invigorating mission in this week’s Queen’s speech.
Levelling up has not graduated from slogan to substance. Promises of a huge house-building programme have collapsed on contact with resistance to planning reform. The energy security plan blinked at the big questions. The failure of Brexit to deliver the opportunities claimed for it is now so evident that Jacob Rees-Mogg has been told to go looking for them. Don’t hold your breath. There is no discernible ambition to tackle the chronically poor economic growth that has been a feature of this era of Tory rule.
It is not just in their intellectual exhaustion that the Tories are exhibiting the morbid symptoms of a fin-de-siècle regime. Following the tawdry example set from the very top, they are enveloped in the sleaze that often characterises parties that have been squatting on power for too long. Two Tory MPs have recently been forced to resign their seats, one after being convicted of sexually assaulting a teenage boy and the other after being caught watching porn in the Commons. A third has been suspended from the parliamentary party pending investigation into allegations of cocaine use and sexual harassment. If you missed those scandals, don’t worry. Another will be along in a minute. That is the one thing that can be guaranteed by a government led by Boris Johnson. Voters are extremely fed up and have expressed their dissatisfaction in the time-honoured fashion. They used the local elections to give the Tories a hard kick in the ballots, but the thwack was not sufficiently eye-watering to instantly boot Mr Johnson out of Number 10.
How parties react to election outcomes can be as illuminating as the results themselves. Labour made gains that put the electoral catastrophe of the Corbyn years behind them, but the party did not display the kind of momentum necessary to convince that Sir Keir Starmer is confidently striding in the direction of Downing Street. It is some encouragement for Labour that the shadow cabinet understands and acknowledges that their party still has far to go. Euphoric Liberal Democrats reaped the most gains on the night, but Sir Ed Davey’s jubilation is tempered by the knowledge that it is a demanding task to translate local election successes into more seats at Westminster. The Greens, the SNP and Sinn Féin all have reason to be cheerful.
The Tories are responding to heavy losses with a mixture of fear and complacency. Fear among those MPs anxious that the formula that delivered victory in 2019 is disintegrating. Complacency among those who reckon these elections don’t mean much. Rather than reflect on why so many colleagues in local government have just lost their seats, Johnson loyalists prefer to mock Labour’s performance while expressing glee that Sir Keir is under investigation by Durham police for an alleged lockdown breach. The shoulder-shruggers say that the Tories are suffering nothing more than a case of the midterm blues. To their opponents, that should sound pleasingly insouciant about how much trouble the Conservatives are in.
Really big trouble in the case of London. Labour’s gain of Barnet, with its large Jewish community, testifies to Sir Keir’s de-Corbynification of his party. The Tory losses of Wandsworth and Westminster speak more to the levels of discontent with the Conservatives. These councils were such sturdy citadels for the party that they kept the blue flame burning even during the depths of Tory austerity and the heights of New Labour’s popularity.
Were I a Conservative MP with a seat in the capital, I’d be alarmed that the prime minister’s understrappers responded to the London results by suggesting they somehow didn’t matter because the city represents “the metropolitan elite”. The man who was the capital’s two-term mayor now employs people who treat Londoners with contempt. “It is idiotic, writing off London,” says one former Tory cabinet minister. “That’s no way to win an election in this country.” Thoughtful Tories ought to worry about what it says about them that most of the large metropolises, with their younger, vibrant, diverse, wealth-creating populations, have turned so hostile to the governing party. Tories across southern England have reasons to be fearful about their prospects. We have all heard a lot about “red wall” voters and how they delivered a majority to the Conservatives, but they didn’t do it on their own. There was another critical component: the centrist, broadly liberal voters in the “blue wall”. Many went with the Tories in 2019 not because they especially liked them, but because they shivered at the thought of prime minister Corbyn. There’s no risk of that any more, while Mr Johnson is still Mr Johnson and the consequences of that are much clearer to these voters.
The Lib Dems have just made bags of gains at the expense of the Tories. The “yellow peril” is back to menace the Conservatives in their southern and shire heartlands. Tory MPs who had grown accustomed to not fretting about the Lib Dems are now nervously fingering the size of their majorities. All Conservative MPs who like power will worry that a Lib Dem resurgence makes the path to a Tory victory at the next election much more difficult.
The Labour-Conservative battles in Brexit-voting areas of the Midlands and the north of England had more mixed results, but there things are likely to get worse for the Tories. As prices soar and public spending doesn’t keep pace, the cost of living crisis will be felt acutely in these areas. So when Conservative MPs look at the voter coalition that gave them power in 2019, many see cause to sweat that it is starting to unravel. “People used to think that only Boris could keep it together,” says one senior Tory. “The danger now is we lose both ends of the coalition because of him.”
Local Tory leaders are explicit that their candidates were punished because of the grubby halo of law-breaking and sleaze around the Johnson regime. Ravi Govindia, ousted by the voters as leader of Wandsworth council, reported that “consistently on the doorstep, the issue of Boris Johnson was raised”. John Mallinson, the Conservative leader in Carlisle, blamed the loss of “some very good colleagues” on “the integrity issue”. “I just don’t feel people any longer have the confidence that the prime minister can be relied upon to tell the truth.” Simon Bosher, the Tory leader in Portsmouth, told Mr Johnson to “take a good, long hard look in the mirror”. They are wasting their breath. Self-reflection and taking responsibility are alien to this prime minister. He also knows that recriminatory local Tories cannot evict him. Only MPs can do that.
You can make a good case that these elections produced a worst-of-all worlds result for the Conservative party. The losses are bad enough to leave many of the Tories’ footsoldiers feeling sore and furious. They are painful enough to increase the already elevated levels of fractiousness among MPs. They are threatening enough to sharpen the feeling that their deeply unpopular leader is a drag anchor on their fortunes. These elections darken the weather for the Tory party. But they were not so catastrophic as to trigger such a deluge of panic among Tory MPs that they will immediately resolve to remove him. And that was probably the best result of all for the opposition parties, though not for the country.
• Andrew Rawnsley is Chief Political Commentator of the Observer
