On Thursday 2 May, there will be local government elections for 107 councils, the mayor of London, 10 regional mayors, and for police commissioners in England and Wales. Last year’s local election 2023 England results were bad for the Conservatives and this has led to rumours of internal conflict and plots to replace the PM. This year there has been no improvement in the UK opinion polls for the Conservatives, the Sunak government remains unpopular with poll ratings consistently low, no matter how hard the government struggles to improve its chances of re-election.
Why are things so bad for the Conservatives?
- Incumbency: this government and its basic concepts on tax, the welfare state, and economics, has been tested to destruction with five successive administrations over 14 years. Britain may also be bored with the Conservatives.
- Corporate Britain: the government has not been able to respond to the growing public mood to return to a mixed economy. Continual scandals on sewage discharges, the Post Office and the failure to deliver an equitable and transparent planning system in England are examples of where the public feels excluded and badly treated, because regulation is failing.
- Multiple crises: the cost of living, housing, poverty, post-Covid sickness in the workforce and failing infrastructure are being blamed on the government.
- The PM’s personal pledges: none have been met.
- Inflation has fallen: but the public has not been grateful, probably because the government blamed inflation on external factors and the Bank of England raised interest rates accordingly, so the Bank, not the government, gets the blame or praise on inflation.
- Stop the Boats: news reports suggest that more people are crossing the Channel than ever.
- Grow the economy: the UK economy returns to growth, but the growth is anaemic and barely better than the recession experienced by many.
- Cut NHS waiting lists: NHS waiting lists have grown remorselessly over the last decade, and even getting to see your GP is a trial.
- Reduce government debt: at 97.5% of GDP it remains stubbornly fixed at a high level, with interest payments now amounting to 12% of income tax take, larger than the 10% needed for all UK pensions.
- The character of the PM: He is seen as rich and out of touch with ordinary voters. His wife’s ‘non-dom’ status really hurt him and has never really gone away, even though she now pays UK tax. Former prime ministers have played down their wealth, except for Boris Johnson who was a one-off and who lived a wealthy lifestyle without the income. Sunak has not cottoned on to the understanding that the British public likes their PMs to be modestly middle-class. David Cameron understood this, but Sunak’s rise in wealth and power causes him to misstep every time. The impression one gets from Sunak is that everything can be solved by manipulating money and people via a universal spreadsheet, which is why policies and people seem to change with alarming frequency. His work rate is unimpeachable, but life is not governed by spreadsheets. Sunak’s prime ministerial approval ratings are going down, just when he needs to show his internal critics that he is their only hope.
What happens after May?
With just over a month to go, the prospects for Conservative candidates seem grim. Labour’s polling remains firmly in the ascendant, and the Reform Party are nibbling away at the red wall Conservative voter base in the North, while parts of the South and South West may fall to the Liberal Democrats and, to a lesser extent, the Greens.
If things go as badly as they are looking from here, Sunak can explain that in 2021:
- That there was a post-Covid bounce for the Conservatives.
- Labour and the Lib Dems were in the doldrums regarding public support.
This argument can only succeed, however, if the damage is not too great and there are some holdouts, such as Andy Street in the West Midlands mayoral election. Birmingham University researched the mayoral election 2021 and put Street’s success down to the post-Covid bounce mentioned previously, and poor election management by the Labour Party. The research also said that the Conservative Party was at maximum popularity, pointing to “the giant balloon of the Prime Minister (Johnson) at Hartlepool, the Conservatives were at their fullest possible size last week. The inflated figure will surely lose some air over the next three years – but Labour needs to find a way of puncturing it to win”. I don’t think the researchers envisaged the Conservatives shooting holes in the balloon themselves.
The Corbynite/Momentum period of the Labour Party is a lesson in what happens when politicians veer significantly from the centre ground in the UK. Here I agree with Peter Mandelson for once, because he has been banging this drum for years. You can push the envelope a bit, as David Cameron, Theresa May and Johnson did but, as soon as you go overboard as Liz Truss attempted, the penalty is a painful rejection by the electors.
Sunak’s constant manoeuvres to outflank his internal critics on the right, as well as externally against the Reform Party by espousing ‘pro-car’ and ‘anti-woke’ policies, only harms his centrist support base among voters.
It hasn’t helped that the Conservatives have picked yet another poor candidate to stand against Sadiq Khan in London. If they do really badly elsewhere but take London, they can claim some sort of victory. Alas, as far as we can tell, unless the polls have got it badly wrong, Khan is the likely winner, in part because Conservative contender Susan Hall is a poor candidate. This disadvantage was not helped by the Conservative campaign’s attack ad which tried to imply that London was facing a crimewave and mistakenly showed a video of fleeing underground passengers. This purported to be in London but was, in fact, in the New York subway system.
Flight or fight for Sunak?
Let us assume that the Conservatives do very badly at the local elections – what are the options for the Conservative Party and Sunak?
Change leader: Sunak is not a campaigner, like May, he is a technocrat. He works hard but lacks vision. However, who could replace him, would they do better, and is a succession of five PMs in five years tenable? If there was a Conservative coup and he was replaced, it would be almost mandatory to hold a general election within weeks of the change, and would that make things worse?
Whither Sunak? This assumes Sunak will stay the course and go down fighting, and perhaps pull a rabbit out of the hat and either lose by a small margin, or deliver a hung parliament. Will he just leave the Conservatives to stew in their own juice by saying he has tried his very best but the situation is irrecoverable?
Sunak gives the impression of not taking failure at all kindly. All through his life, he has succeeded by applying a ferocious concentration on the job at hand. This methodology works well when passing exams, or working in a financial institution, but not in politics. Here, the margin between failure and success is open to chance and fickle public opinion. All PMs fail in the end, but some fail better than others. Will he want to be the man who leads the Conservative Party to its worst-ever defeat – as predicted by Survation in their latest poll?
When Sunak lost the Conservative leadership election following Johnson’s downfall in 2022 to Truss, a candidate whose policies were clearly unsound, he took it badly, dropped out of the limelight, and took himself off to California, where he has a house. Will he really shrug off the humiliation, as John Major did, by going to watch a cricket match after visiting the palace to resign as PM? I think not. The difference was that Major had won an election against the odds, so he could blame the party for its own failings. Sunak was very much the second choice and has only met with abject failure so far on all fronts. He may well have been set up to fail, by those whose perspicacity exceeds their ambition for office.
Do not be surprised if Sunak faces a Conservative Party coup after the local elections, and allows it to succeed, thereby dumping the liability onto someone else whose ambition exceeds their sense of survival.
