For the last nine months, since the Conservatives’ well-received conference, the Tories have told themselves that things are improving. Kemi Badenoch and the party are performing well in Parliament, where they’ve landed several blows on Labour. Badenoch’s personal poll ratings are up.
This election was the first test of whether that is translating at all into votes. It could have been a clarifying moment. It could have shown that, yes, the party is on the mend, or that it is finished. In the end, it was not such a moment, since it showed neither.
The Tories did well enough in a few places to be able to claim, as Badenoch did, that they are “coming back.” They literally have come back, taking power from Labour, in two important London councils, Westminster and Wandsworth, the latter as a minority administration. In other places they held on: in Harlow, winning seats from Labour, in Fareham, in Broxbourne, losing only two seats to Reform, and in Bexley, losing only a handful to Reform.
But those are, for now, exceptions. At the time of writing, 4pm on Friday, the Tories have lost 44 per cent of the council seats they were defending off what was already a poor 2022 result and a low 2022 base. They have been heavily defeated in Essex, losing 37 of their 50 seats, and in Suffolk, down at least 36 seats. These are, or were, parts of the remaining Tory heartlands, even in 2024 electing large numbers of Conservative MPs. Later today, the Tories are likely to come fifth in Scotland, maybe even sixth. This is not a comeback.
Britain’s five-party politics (six in Scotland and Wales) looks complicated. But psephologists say you should think about it as two blocs – a left bloc, comprising Labour, the Lib Dems, the Greens and the nationalists; and a right bloc, the Tories and Reform. Those two blocs have actually flatlined – level on more or less 50 per cent each – for the last year. The movement has been almost entirely within them, not between them: Tory voters moving to Reform, and latterly Labour voters moving to the Greens.
This election could have been the moment it became clear that both the former main parties of the right and left blocs, Conservatives and Labour, were done. It isn’t, quite. It could still trigger a chain reaction, with more voters flooding away from Labour and the Tories as they decide those parties are over. Again, my hunch is that it won’t, quite.
Labour’s results were even worse than the Tories,’ losing 57 per cent of the seats they were defending at the time of writing. But they are still the government, still have the overwhelming majority of Commons seats and still have power to shape events. The Tories still have the depth of experience and talent which Reform lacks and needs. And they still have the ability to win in some places without which the right is unlikely to be able to win a majority.
After these results, the future looks better for the right than for the left. Not just because of Reform’s big gains – but because it has taken many of those seats from Labour in places such as Wigan which even the post-Brexit, Boris Johnson, 2019-election Tories could not manage. Splits between Labour and the Greens may help explain this, letting Reform through the middle. The Tories have also lost big to Reform, of course – but there are at least some places where the party has managed to fend the Faragists off. The Red Wall is collapsing. Parts of the Blue Wall are still standing.
The intellectual climate favours the right, too. Policy Exchange’s recently-launched “Project 2029” is part of a swathe of right-wing thinking about how to reform the state and re-dynamise the economy. On the left, even with a change of prime minister, there isn’t much more on offer than an intensification of brain-dead tax-and-spend, or a closer relationship with the EU, neither of which addresses the country’s problems.
There may be more talk of right-wing pacts after these results, as Reform starts to realise that the Tories cannot be completely destroyed. For the Conservative Party, just staying alive is a sort of success.
Image: Phil Hearing [Link]