Rishi Sunak has sold himself to other Tories as a kind of company doctor with a recovery plan to rescue a hideously tarnished and hugely unpopular brand from political bankruptcy. Downing Street has projected him to the voters in a similar fashion as a Mr Fix-It. This has provided Conservatives with a consoling story about their chances of winning the next general election. Whenever confronted with dire opinion poll ratings, they have responded that their prospects will improve as the prime minister draws a line under the torrid past and shows that he leads a stable government.
At a recent event organised by Onward, a Conservative thinktank, the Tory leader sought credit for moving his party on from what he called the “box-set drama” that came before his arrival at Number 10. Much ruder phrases are available to describe the mad premiership of Liz Truss and the bad one of Boris Johnson. He has hoped to earn points for himself and soften the disdain towards his party by not being as reckless with the nation’s finances as Ms Truss and not as degrading of public life as Mr Johnson. A lot of senior Tories have echoed this “steady Sunak” narrative if only for want of any other tale to tell themselves.
We now have evidence from “real votes in real ballot boxes” to tell us what the country thinks. And the answer is that voters are not swallowing Mr Sunak’s sales pitch. They are not buying it in places with marginal seats that will be critical to the outcome of the next general election and they are rejecting it even in parts of England that have historically been deep blue. The local elections were his first electoral test since he moved into Downing Street six months ago and they confirm that a change of face at Number 10 has not assuaged the anger that people feel towards the Conservatives. Campaigners for all the parties report that the defining characteristic of these contests – what most fired up voters on suburban doorsteps, in city high streets and down country lanes – was rage towards the Tories. It was blue murder out there as the Conservatives were defeated in all kinds of areas. Three-quarters of those who voted rejected the Tories. The loss of more than 1,000 of their councillors was worse than their worst-case scenario.
I have heard cabinet ministers respond to these results by saying that a pummelling was only to be expected when their party has been ruling for 13 years, a surprising excuse to deploy when it is unlikely to be to their advantage to remind people how very long the Conservatives have been in power. The line from Mr Sunak’s friends is that these elections were inevitably terrible for the Tories because the voters were bound to punish them for all the mayhem unleashed on the country last year. That allocates the blame to Ms Truss and Mr Johnson, but in the process concedes that Mr Sunak has failed to separate himself from the havoc wreaked by their regimes. Voters are not going along with his attempt to present himself as somehow detached from the deep damage that his party has done.
That’s not his only problem. He’s yet to make any tangible progress on the five-point plan that he produced at the beginning of the year. On the crisis in the health service, he is going backwards. NHS waiting lists are not falling; they are remorselessly climbing to ever-higher records. The single sharpest influence on the public mood at the moment is double-digit inflation. That is inflicting the most severe crunch on living standards since records began in the 1950s because most people’s earnings are not keeping pace with the soaring cost of their outgoings. No one was talking about the affluent society during these elections. What they were talking about was the effluent society. The pollution of our waterways became a highly salient issue. Combined with all the other things that aren’t working as they ought to do, the sewage scandal has added to the overarching sense that the Tories have dropped Britain in, well, the shit.
There’s one sliver of positive news for the prime minister. He is not about to lose his job, as some were speculating he might a few weeks ago. Any plotting to remove him by the residual and ridiculous rump of Johnsonites will not go anywhere. Mr Johnson is an even more discredited figure now than he was at the time of his eviction from Number 10. Mr Sunak’s personal approval score is superior to the ratings for his party.
So he will be spared an eviction notice from Conservative MPs. What he won’t be able to escape is a cacophony of feverish and contradictory advice from them about what he should do now. Move further to the right, cry the rightists. Don’t be mad, retort more moderate Tories.
The root cause of all this flailing is Conservative panic that the electoral coalition that won them power at Westminster in 2019 has disintegrated.
The Tories won a near-landslide parliamentary majority at the last general election because they exploited frustration with Brexit deadlock and fear of Jeremy Corbyn to weld together two voting blocs. They retained their support in the “blue wall”, the traditionally Conservative-leaning constituencies found mainly in the more affluent parts of southern England. To that they added the “red wall” seats that they snatched from Labour in the Midlands and north of England. These local elections suggest that the Conservatives have been deserted by voters in both wings of the 2019-winning coalition. Tory decline and Labour resurgence in “red wall” constituencies was illustrated by Labour’s victory in Stoke-on-Trent, an emblematic Brexit-voting city that currently sends three Conservative MPs to Westminster. Labour was also cheered by victories in places such as Blackpool, Erewash and Middlesbrough. This implies that it is fair for Labour to contend that it is winning back so-called “hero voters”, former Labour supporters who wanted Brexit and then backed the Tories in 2019. Gains in the likes of Dover, Gravesham, Medway and Swindon also supply Sir Keir Starmer with legitimate bragging rights that his party has advanced in locations containing key target parliamentary seats.
The Lib Dems did well at last year’s locals by attracting moderate Tory voters who were repelled by Mr Johnson’s carnival of chaos and depravity. They have punched more holes in the “blue wall” this year and demonstrated that Sir Ed Davey’s party can also eat into Tory territory against Mr Sunak. The Lib Dems made striking gains, including Surrey Heath, where Michael Gove is the MP; Stratford-on-Avon, which is represented in parliament by the disgraced former chancellor Nadhim Zahawi; and Windsor and Maidenhead, the home territory of Theresa May.
That will give the shivers to a lot of Conservative MPs. They will be scared to see the Lib Dems ravaging the Tories in what they are accustomed to thinking of as their heartlands. A strong showing by the Lib Dems is not just cheering for Sir Ed’s party. It is also encouraging for Labour. The more efficient the Lib Dems are at scalping Tory MPs at the next general election, the likelier it is that Labour will be the largest party in the Commons.
Sir Keir has been sounding very triumphant about what he hails as “fantastic” results for Labour, but there’s some dispute about whether these victories validate his claim that he is on course for Number 10. Truth to tell, and whichever way you choose to interpret and extrapolate the numbers, no one can provide a cast-iron prediction. Local elections are not a sure indicator of what will happen at a general election that could be as much as 20 months away. A lot can happen between now and when the country chooses its next government. What we can say is that Labour and the Lib Dems have good reason to be buoyed by these results. Both parties will be infused with a morale-boosting sense of momentum. We can also say that the Tories have a lot of cause to be fearful. This will give them a confidence-sapping dread that their leader’s recovery plan is not working. That will make it harder for the prime minister to keep his party disciplined, cohesive and loyal while making it more likely that the Conservatives will descend into a doom-loop of despair, disunity and rancour.
Mr Sunak and his friends had calculated that he could induce the country to give a fresh start to the Tories. Think again. The voters are in no mood to forgive and forget the Conservative record. The “Rishi revival” story has not survived contact with the electorate.
• Andrew Rawnsley is Chief Political Commentator of the Observer
