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Roula Khalaf, editor of the FT, picks her favorite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Although there are still high-profile mayoral elections in London and the West Midlands that could give the Conservatives reason to celebrate, the simple truth is that the local election results are an absolute disaster for the party.
The inadequacy of the plot to remove Rishi Sunak as Tory leader is demonstrated by the fact that the would-be conspirators allowed the Prime Minister to do his own homework by turning the results of the Tees Valley and West Midlands mayoral elections into “key tests “ did. on the viability of his leadership.
What the mayoral contests really show is that if the Tories can make elections a referendum on the mayoral records of Ben Houchen or Andy Street or the deficits of Sadiq Khan, they will do better than if voters are asked to make a direct choice between Labor and Labor to meet the Conservatives. As a result, the Tories are losing councilors all at once and have been defeated in all three “open” mayoral elections.
As for what these polls tell us about the general election, there is a simple answer: it won’t be about what voters think about Street, Houchen or Khan. It will be about what people think about the Conservative Party’s program and record and whether they are prepared to support the election of Sir Keir Starmer and Labor as an alternative. All the evidence we have suggests that they will choose the latter in large numbers.
Even more worrying for the Conservatives is that these election results – even worse than last year’s defeats – come just as the prime minister’s allies were proclaiming a good week for their man.
Sunak chose the ground on which he wanted to wage this campaign. He chose to base the Tories’ closing argument on the news that the government had given a failed asylum seeker from Africa £3,000 to voluntarily move to Rwanda and start a new life. He chose to focus on further cuts to disability benefits – many of which go to people already working – and his party’s nebulous ambitions to squeeze public spending to finance the elimination of Social Security.
How could it be any different? In the winter of 2019, Boris Johnson showed how the Conservatives were able to win large majorities in the post-Brexit era. Promises of increased public spending were paired with tough messages on crime and immigration control. Plans to “get Brexit done” were accompanied by a commitment to meet the UK’s net zero target and spend big on infrastructure projects.
Last autumn, Sunak decided to slow the UK’s march to net zero; In the latest budget, Jeremy Hunt opted for tax cuts and planned to reduce spending. The country’s prisons are almost full and Sunak’s immigration strategy is to tell the Liberals that Britain’s border regime is cruel and the Conservatives that it is incontinent.
Unsurprisingly, he led his party to a worse election result than in 2023. If Sunak follows his instincts any more, he will lead them to an even worse defeat in the general election, which must take place by January 2025 at the latest.
And even if the Prime Minister now ends his disastrous experiment and returns to the ground he left behind in the autumn of 2023, these elections have shown that Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, while not doing as well as the polls suggest, is still doing well There is enough This would do serious damage to the Conservatives’ prospects.
There is a small but not negligible risk that the next general election will mean not just a 1997-style defeat for the Tories, but a catastrophe on the scale of what befell the Canadian Conservatives in 1993, when they demoted the governing party to a parliamentary remainder by only two MPs. Sunak’s chosen battleground turned out to be a battleground for Conservative councilors this time. The rest of the party should be on guard.