Politics Home | “We Can’t Be Going Backwards”: Tories Warn Party Against Local Elections Complacency

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“There is not a world in which these elections are not going to be tough in terms of numbers,” Conservative MP Jack Rankin told the most recent episode of PoliticsHome podcast The Rundown.

The MP for Windsor, widely seen as one of the party’s brightest talents, spoke frankly about what likely awaits the Tories when voters in England, Scotland and Wales go to the polls for a highly anticipated set of local elections on Thursday.

Two years on from their devastating general election defeat, the Conservatives are braced for more electoral discomfort later this week. Tory peer Lord Hayward recently predicted that the party would lose around 600 council seats on 7 May, losing votes to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK to its right and Ed Davey’s Liberal Democrats to its left. The party also faces dramatic collapses in support in Scotland and Wales. 

In Westminster, Conservative MPs are generally in a more upbeat mood about the state of their party than they were a year or so ago, when there were questions over how long Kemi Badenoch would last as Leader Of The Opposition. There is now a belief that Badenoch is clearly growing into her role, particularly in her Prime Minister’s Questions performances, while her personal ratings have steadily improved in recent months. Appearing on The Rundown last week, Rankin described the mood as “buoyant but realistic”.

It’s partly for this reason that very few Conservatives believe that Badenoch’s position will be put at risk by the results of these local elections.

A senior Tory MP acknowledged that they are “going to be very bad” but said “there is nothing that can be done” given the situation the party is in, namely, still in the process of repairing its brand after being emphatically removed from office less than two years ago. “I see this as something we have got to live through to get to the other side,” they told PoliticsHome.

But there is some concern with this approach, particularly in parts of the country where the party is expected to suffer major losses on Thursday, like Essex, Hampshire, Norfolk and Suffolk. Conservative MPs in those areas make up more than a fifth of the total parliamentary party. “In reality, it’s highly likely we’ll lose control of all those councils,” said one Tory MP.

In Hampshire, the Conservatives currently have 50 of 78 council seats, having held overall control of the local authority since 1997. Seven of the county’s MPs are Tories. One of them told PoliticsHome that losing the council “would stop the small recovery that the party has made over the last nine months, and it would show that actually, we have a lot more work to do before we’re anywhere near winning the next election”.

There is a similar picture of Essex, where 49 of the council’s 79 councillors are Conservative. A more pessimistic Tory MP said “it could be a total wipeout” in Essex, where Reform, like in Hampshire, is eyeing significant gains. Speaking to PoliticsHome, Hayward pointed out that the county is home to “a string of Tory front benchers” including Badenoch herself.

There is nervousness in these areas that Tory losses on Thursday could resemble what happened in Kent at last year’s local elections, when the number of Conservative councillors was dramatically reduced from 62 to 5, with Farage’s party being the beneficiary.

Results that bad would “pose real questions over the party’s direction”, according to one Tory MP, who told PoliticsHome it would “cause a huge amount of soul searching in the party, especially as there is a feeling that there has been a lot of gain over the last year, with conference seen as the turning point”. Another Tory backbencher said: “If Reform does as well as in Kent, it’s obviously problematic for the Tory party and would be really bad news.”

A different Conservative MP stressed that losing councillors has “very serious” practical consequences, as it means a weakened “grassroots campaigning force”. They added: “[We] can’t be going backwards at this stage. We’re nearly halfway through the Parliament.”

Badenoch denied being “complacent” in conversation with The Times at the weekend, and insisted that the public was starting to listen to what the Tories have to say. In an interview with The House magazine in the run-up to last year’s Conservative Party conference, she said that she would be a leader who peaks in time for the next general election, rather than “on day one”.

However, speaking on the most recent episode of the Political Currency podcast, former Tory chancellor George Osborne said his party required an “ethical reset” before it can win again, arguing that it was yet to “really confront” the reason why it lost in such devastating fashion in July 2024.

He added that Badenoch had not yet answered the fundamental question of “what do the Conservatives offer, which is distinct and better for the country than Reform”.

While major losses later this week are unlikely to raise questions about Badenoch’s leadership, they could put her under more pressure to produce an answer.