It’s always sad to discover that one of your favourite quotations was made up. After communism’s fall, Robert Conquest’s American publisher was said to have asked him for a new title for a republished edition of The Great Terror, his seminal book documenting Stalin’s mass murder of his own citizens. His suggestion? I told you so, you fucking fools. Alas, I recently learnt that the faultlessly polite Conquest never said it, the anecdote being an invention of his swearier chum Kingsley Amis.
Nonetheless, ‘I told you so, you fucking fools’ would be a rather cask strength way of describing how those of us who have long been gloomy about Tory prospects under Kemi Badenoch feel after Thursday’s local election drubbing. They results were even worse than expected – not just an epochal defeat, but extinction territory. It is now not a case of if she goes as leader, but when.
Coming to that conclusion requires two things. Firstly, examining just how awful these results are, and the existential challenge they pose to the survival of the world’s oldest political party. Secondly, the extent to which they can be attributed to Badenoch, only Conservative leader for six months. In both cases, the data speaks for itself – impossible to ignore for even the party’s most loyal denialists.
Barring the 2019 European Parliament elections – where the party won only 9 per cent of the vote and placed fifth – this can be considered the Conservative Party’s worst-ever performance in a national election. Losing 676 councillors and control of every local authority was bad enough, far beyond the losses expected by pollsters and the party’s worst internal predictions. But an ever greater humiliation was the BBC’s projected national vote share: a paltry 15 per cent for the Tories, behind Reform, Labour, and the Lib Dems. Reform, by contrast, were on 30 per cent.
Plug the figures into an online swingometer, and the Conservatives win only 12 seats – an insignificant blot in a parliament dominated by a Farage landslide. After 300-odd years, this would be the end of the Tory party as a significant political force. A few Hiroo Onodas might linger on, encamped in their rural redoubts. But we would be an irrelevance, an afterthought, a ghost.
CCHQ might rush to suggest these elections can’t be read across like that. Badenoch has already been out doing her Comical Ali routine – always going to be difficult, party under new leadership, nothing to see here – and Paul Bristow, the new mayor of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, has been wheeled out to distract from the cataclysm elsewhere. But Tory MPs cannot avoid the legions of new Reform and Lib Dem councillors now ensconced in their constituencies, plotting for 2029.
Staffordshire, Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire – areas where the Conservative vote was once weighed have switched, in one fell swoop, from Tory majorities to Reform. This is not a protest vote, but the abandonment of the party en masse by its previous core supporters. A few Tory MPs still linger on in each. There is nothing to stop their seats switching just as readily as their councils.
The result could have been far worse had nine other authorities not taken Angela Rayner’s offer to postpone a year. The results will be far worse next May, when 149 councils vote, alongside elections in Scotland and Wales. On this week’s performance, the Unionist party will be wiped out in every part of the United Kingdom – not so much ‘One Nation’ Tories as ‘No Nation’ Tories.
Unless Conservative MPs have a sufficient hankering for unemployment that they are happy to walk towards the guns, they must ask themselves what can be done to save the party. The buck stops with Badenoch. Excuses can be made. Repeating Boris Johnson’s 2021 success would always have been difficult. She has only been leader for six months. Her policy commissions have been established, she claims to have a plan, and last week she even deigned to do a few media appearences.
But such prevaricating ignores the extent to which Badenoch is an active barrier to the party’s saving itself. Her greatest defence was that she remained relatively unknown. Yet the more voters have seen of Badenoch, the more unpopular she has become. Her approval ratings have gone backwards since the year’s start. She has a favourability rating of -22 with Reform voters – exactly the people she needs to win back. Only 8 per cent of voters see her as a future PM, a third as many as Farage.
Even against a government as hopeless as Keir Starmer’s – hiking taxes, cutting welfare, surrendering the Chagos Islands, depopulating prisons – Badenoch has struggled to land any blows. She appears uninterested in the basic duties of leading the opposition, from engaging with the media to properly preparing for PMQs. In the Starmer vs Farage show, she is an irrelevance.
Under her leadership, the party will continue to drift towards certain doom. Excuses will be pumped out by the CCHQ Führerbunker– Farage can’t run bin collections! Wait for some policy! Just let her get to conference! – as Conservative ratings continue to tick down. Just how low can she take her party? 15 per cent might soon seem optimistic. Will the last Tory to leave please turn out the lights?
Defeat is not inevitable. But it requires the party to stop the bleeding. Fighting back against Reform means relentless campaigning: flooding the zone, outflanking Farage on immigration, understanding why voters repudiated us, and offering a clear vision for government as quickly as possible. Do MPs believe Badenoch can do this? If they do not, if she will not change, they must act.
Party members already feel buyer’s remorse, disillusioned with a leader who is not the Thatcher Recidivus they were promised. Her core support is limited to a few columnists still impressed that she has read Thomas Sowell. Politics is being played at ten times speed. Badenoch had her chance to prove herself and has been found wanting. The longer MPs wait, the more painful it will be.
Today, the Conservative Party reminds me of another Amis creation – Lucky Jim. This weekend, we have woken up with the mother of all hangovers. We feel bad. Yet with a bit of boldness, we might yet have a happier ending. But that requires my party to have eyes to see – and the will to act.
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