“What I’m hearing on the doorstep is that people are giving Rishi Sunak a chance,” the Conservative party’s chair, Greg Hands, insisted in the face of a disastrous night for his party.
Among Conservative MPs, this positive spin on the loss of hundreds and possibly as much as 1,000 Tory seats was not going down well on Friday. Some have even bluntly admitted the terribleness of the results. Johnny Mercer, the MP for Plymouth Moor View, where Labour gained the council, gave the most direct admonishment to his party that it would need to “learn from this” and “make a material difference to the quality of people’s lives”.
What Sunak will need to worry about in the short to medium term is whether his backbenchers are prepared to give him time to turn things around in the face of an increasingly likely general election win for Labour.
If the view takes hold that a Labour victory against Sunak is inevitable, some Conservative MPs will in effect throw in the towel, take on second jobs, and mentally check out of politics for the next year. One Tory MP with a relatively safe southern seat said his main reaction was mulling his own private-sector job options given his lack of appetite for a stint in opposition.
But others will want to put up a last-ditch fight, either by attempting to oust Sunak or pushing his politics towards their own ideological leanings that they think will be more successful with the electorate.
In the prime minister’s favour, the only credible candidate as a replacement is Boris Johnson, ousted just 12 months ago by his MPs over an avalanche of scandals from Partygate to failure to deal with sexual harassment within his government.
Certainly, there is a circle of diehard Johnson fans, congregating around the newly formed Conservative Democratic Organisation (CDO), presided over by the donor Peter Cruddas and backed by the former home secretary Priti Patel.
David Campbell Bannerman, a former Tory MEP and chair of the CDO, told BBC Radio 4 that it was not a case of “bring back Boris” but that the party should not “rule that out as an option longer-term” as so many members and the public still liked him.
He later hardened his line, calling for a confirmatory vote of members for Sunak, adding: “It was MP self-preservation that got rid of Boris; they thought they’d be better off without him. And now it’s going to be MP self-preservation getting him back again … We’re well adrift. And I’m afraid that it has been because Boris has been brought down with all the turbulence that resulted from it and Rishi is in the frame for that.”
A Conservative source – not from the Sunak wing of the party – said: “Sunak can’t blame these results on last year’s chaos. He started that chaos by knifing the most successful Tory election winner in 50 years. Sunak’s claim that stability has been restored is shot to bits. These results are on track to be catastrophic for the party and worse than before the change of leader.”
However, the idea of a return for Johnson, who is awaiting the verdict of a cross-party inquiry into whether he misled the House of Commons, is still a niche view among MPs. One of Johnson’s strongest supporters in two leadership elections, Michael Fabricant, the MP for Lichfield, dismissed the idea of changing leader again.
“Obviously it’s very disappointing results but in many areas it was not because of Conservative switching to another party, it was voters staying at home, and when this happened in the past with European elections, it didn’t reflect in a general election. I’m not sanguine about all of this but there’s not wholesale switching to Labour,” he said.
“If you remove the leader … part of the whole problem with the Conservatives is not only the cost of living crisis but what happened last year. So if we start to repeat that then we not only will not win the next election, we won’t deserve to.”
The turbulence of the last year is certainly weighing on the minds of many Conservative MPs who think changing leader for a fourth time in since the last election would be too much for voters to stomach – quite apart from concerns about returning to Johnson’s chaotic leadership.
But Sunak’s problem is that the party has lost ground to Labour in traditional “red wall” and bellwether seats, and to the Lib Dems in the “blue wall” south. There is no binding ideological message of getting Brexit done, or overcoming a global pandemic, for the Tories to latch on to, while Labour and the Lib Dems are increasingly cementing a narrative about a broken Britain where nothing works and public services have been hollowed out.
And as Sunak appears rudderless, those from opposing wings of the party will have different prescriptions for how the prime minister can try to boost his chances.
The Liz Trussite right are already pushing for low-tax policies, with John Redwood proclaiming that Sunak should “cut taxes, get better value for state spending and go for growth”. Others are urging Sunak to go “anti-woke” and fight Labour by pushing culture war buttons on immigration, trans rights and other issues, while the one nation contingent want Sunak to swing to the centre and try to win an election with the same kind of voter coalition as David Cameron managed almost 10 years ago.
With few fresh ideas, and pulled in different directions by his MPs, the main thing Conservative strategists will be praying for is a revival in the fortunes of the economy and a fall in inflation. “We almost feel like the next election is out of our hands now,” said one Tory MP.
