Beep. Beep. Beep. Beeeeeeeeeeee… | Conservative Home

One thing we learned from this week’s local elections is that the nation is still stuck firmly in the first stage of grief. Everywhere you look, ‘DEN GAIN from DEN’ is the result. Denial reigns.

Those who keep tabs on Luke Tryl’s abyss-gazing focus groups might be tempted to hope that we’d progressed at least to anger, or perhaps even depression – just one stop from acceptance!

But the actual politics tells its own story. Both Labour and the Conservatives are in deep denial about the depths of the hole this country has dug itself into. Unfortunately, so are the voters; there is no political space for the sort of extremely painful decisions which will be required to secure the border and put the public finances on a sustainable footing.

No matte how dire have both the major parties proved in office, however, they are not obviously less serious than Reform UK or the Liberal Democrats. Yet each of those parties benefits from its remoteness – or perhaps in Reform’s case, former remoteness – from forming a national government. Each can just say easy things, and as long as that works the political space for difficult change will not exist.

Nor does the denial stop there. Also notable in this campaign was the almost complete conspiracy of silence about the actual condition of local government.

Kemi Badenoch’s effort to refocus the campaign onto what councils really do (fix the roads, collect the bins, etc.) seems laudable until you realise it isn’t true. Whilst some local authorities have co-authored their own misfortunes with bad investments or legal recklessness, the real problem is that councils have for some time been the rug under which Westminster swept big-ticket welfare obligations, and now that rug is on fire.

As we noted last month when we looked at Birmingham, this is how council tax can keep going up whilst the services voters think of as the council’s job get worse and worse. It is an engine for dissillusion – but one in which it yet suits politicians to collude. Nt just the Tories, either: Reform’s pledge for a DOGE-style inquisition into local government spending is likewise setting the dogs barking up the wrong tree (although it will be interesting to see what comes of the party firing off thousands of FOI requests to councils it now runs).

But all this is very much just describing the train coming down the tracks. What is the Conservative Party going to do about it?

The expectation management ahead of Thursday was diligently done, but it is not adequate to the moment. The last election being a high-water mark is a good explanation for losing ground, but it does not cover going from 62 councillors to five, as we did in Kent. More importantly, the goodness or badness of a result is not measured simply by its variance from a party’s expectations.

Is this all the fault of the current leadership? Of course not. Britain’s problems are decades in the making, and the Conservatives slow-cooked their current predicament over 14 years in office (albeit with Boris Johnson cranking up the gas with the Boriswave). There is no obvious appetite on the part of the electorate for difficult truths; Badenoch has only been in post less than a year; the parliamentary party is deeply divided. Etc., etc.

But there are limits to these excuses. Despite the inevitable and fatuous comparisons with Margaret Thatcher, the critical difference between her leadership campaign and Badenoch’s was that Thatcher had a very clear diagnosis of what ailed Britain in 1975. Not a detailed policy prescription, but a diagnosis.

That meant that work could begin immediately on shifting the Conservative Party towards the new direction; just as importantly, it meant Thatcher had a mandate from the parliamentary party for that new direction.

Badenoch’s leadership pitch, by contrast, was a more-or-less explicit platform of electing her leader and working everything out afterwards. Its intellectual and ideological content was confined largely to anodyne restatements of the party’s ‘values’, meaningless because none of her opponents would have disagreed with any of them.

This has been at the root of her difficult start. Many MPs who backed her, especially those who rowed in behind her to block Robert Jenrick, were basically hitting the snooze button on the reckoning the party needs to have with its 14 years in office, at least until they have a better argument than the absurd ‘we lost on competence, not ideas’ line.

The lack of any ideological programme also made Badenoch’s day-to-day ability to do the job of leader of the opposition more load-bearing than it was in Thatcher’s case, which hasn’t been helpful either.

It has also been a slow start. Even though the grand policy review was the centrepiece of her leadership pitch, it took months to get going – a fact which gets less rather than more defensible if LOTO expected the eviscerating the party received on Thursday. In the interim, the party has been left with little with which to actually indicate a new direction, or take the fight either to Labour or Reform.

Little wonder that a majority of party members in our survey think the party has been too slow in developing new policy.

Pressed on this by Amol Rajan on the Today programme last month, Badenoch offered an interesting defence: that “policy is the beginning, not the end”, and that there is no point having policy “without a plan”.

Tali Fraser wrote about this interview at the time. But the chosen line also poses a couple of other obvious questions. First: how can you have a plan for implementing policy you haven’t decided on yet? Second, perhaps policy is merely “the beginning” – but is the beginning not traditionally where you begin?

Whatever the theoretical merits of a slower approach, circumstances preclude it. The prognosis of these results is plausibly terminal.

Getting almost wiped out on council after council means in swathes of the country, where there remain yet Tory MPs sitting on precarious majorities, the last reliable corps of the party infantry has been devastated. Worse still, Reform’s lead in second places means it is on track to become the default right-wing option.

Against this, the party’s response is what? The current timetable of the policy review, as I understand it, is that it will have concluded phase one in time for party conference this October. That means the Shadow Cabinet will be able to stand up and say what they think the problems are. Not the solutions, the problems.

How is that timetable defensible? On Friday, our editor wrote that “Badenoch’s team […] intend to hold their course on the process, progress and pace of their project.”

Do they know something we don’t? The party lost more than two thirds of the council seats it was defending this week; there are over 1,400 Tory councillors up for re-election next year. Can we afford to lose two thirds of them?

Giles also reported that: “Her team may not have said so in public, but they have run through all scenarios for these elections up to and including total wipeout. That means they have run the gamut in their heads from bad to catastrophic.”

Perhaps this was an inner-circle thing; the signals I’ve been picking up from LOTO are rather more shellshocked than this would imply. But even so, what is the point of having “run through all the scenarios” if the response in each and every case is not to change the plan? “We might lose almost 700 councillors.” “Indeed we might.”

Writing in the Daily Telegraph on Friday morning, Badenoch wrote that “we are making progress. The Conservative Party has stayed united since I took over.”

Setting aside that unity is both a low benchmark, easy to achieve with few policies, and an odd definition of a party beset by speculation over her own leadership – especially as Badenoch launched her own leadership bid pointing out that unity is “not enough”. This is also a very curious definition of progress.

The Conservative Party’s projected national vote share in these elections was 15 per cent, almost nine points down on the general election last year and ten down on 2013, the party’s last annus horribilis at the locals. Progress at this rate is not survivable.