Clare Golby: In Warwickshire, we forgot what it means to be Conservative

Clare Golby is a former councillor on Warwickshire County Council. She stood down last month.

The 2025 local elections have been a wake-up call.

In Warwickshire – where I sat on the county council for two terms – it wasn’t just a political upset. It was a reckoning. And it was delivered, in the most part, by Reform UK, who bulldozed their way to dominance in the north of the county. They won 19 of the 20 available seats. In my patch, Nuneaton and Bedworth, they took 12 of 13 divisions.

The Conservative vote collapsed. In 2021, we had around 57 per cent. This year? 22.4 per cent. Nuneaton & Bedworth went from solid blue to Reform UK in a single election cycle. This wasn’t a marginal wobble – it was a total wipeout.

And before anyone reaches for the usual excuses – yes, national issues played a part. But this wasn’t just about Westminster or the ghosts of Brexit past. This was local. Painfully local. And entirely predictable.

A few of us – me included – warned that this was coming. After last year’s local elections, I wrote about what had gone wrong and what needed to change. The response from leadership? Silence. Or worse – outright dismissal. A year later, the electorate gave their response. They were far less polite.

Despite the warnings, Warwickshire forgot what it means to be Conservative. The Council became officer-led. Decision-making was replaced by a leadership obsessed with process and paralysed by caution. Conservatives increasingly acted like administrators, not elected representatives. Everything took too long. Everything was too safe. And that’s exactly what our voters rejected.

We had nothing to offer to counter the national picture. And let’s be honest – you can’t campaign on being a good bureaucrat.

Reform didn’t just pick off Conservative seats. They hoovered up votes from everywhere – from habitual voters, first-timers, and everyone in between. Why? Because people are fed up. They feel ignored. They are ignored.

Take our roads. Money poured into cycle lanes – most of which are barely used – while the same potholes are reported, patched, and reopened like a bad recurring joke. Everyday services, the ones that affect the majority, are deteriorating. Yet councils are increasingly fixated on minority views. People are asked to pay more, but when they ask where it’s going, they get a shrug.

Reform didn’t need a complicated message. They told people they’d be heard on the issues that matter to them. That was enough.

As someone who’s spent a decade in local government, I see this crisis as threefold: national disillusionment, local disengagement, and raw, grinding apathy.

I’ve sat through endless group meetings in Shire Hall listening to colleagues bemoan how national Conservatives squandered an 80-seat majority. And yet, in Warwickshire, we had a 42-seat haul of our own – a 27-seat majority – and still failed to do anything meaningful with it.

Our majority was bigger than the entire make-up of the largest party today, Reform UK, who now hold just 23. You’d think with that kind of political breathing room we’d have done something that looked remotely Conservative.

But no. The leadership fell into the trap so many do: confuse management with leadership, protect the status quo, hand over power to officers, and hope no one notices.

They noticed.

We became obsessed with process. Input over outcomes. We stopped listening to residents. Some of us who dared raise concerns were treated like the enemy within.

And while all this was happening, people kept paying more and getting less. Council tax went up, services got worse, and priorities drifted into the absurd.

Residents were told to care about ‘Refugee Week’ and climate change podcasts while they were scraping together money for second-hand school shoes. That disconnect? That’s what people voted against.

Just look at the council’s social media: cycle lane promos, climate campaigns, ‘Refugee Week’ spotlights. Then there’s the “Let’s Talk Warwickshire” podcast, which kicked off with the bold declaration that “climate change is one of the biggest challenges facing Warwickshire.” Really?

Try telling that to someone who’s one mortgage payment away from eviction or juggling three jobs just to afford rent. Climate change might matter, but I’ve knocked on thousands of doors – and it’s not even in most people’s top ten concerns.

What I have heard is:

“I can’t afford to buy my kids new shoes.”

Or:

“I’m one mortgage payment away from losing my home – why is my tax funding asylum hotels?”

And by the way, why are £150k-a-year directors sitting in podcast studios anyway? Since when was “chatting into the void” part of a senior management job description? They should have much better things to do!

When I asked these questions, I was treated like the problem. A disruptor. Difficult.

That’s part of why I didn’t stand again. I didn’t leave because I lost faith in Conservative values. I left because Warwickshire stopped standing up for them. Local politics increasingly valued image management over conviction, courage, and plain common sense.

It’s in those moments you see how wide the gap has grown between the people in the town centre and the people in Shire Hall.

Meanwhile, the core services councils must deliver – adult social care, SEND, home-to-school transport – continue to consume more and more money. Most taxpayers will never use them. But they keep paying more. And they see less.

I was told more than once that Warwickshire was effectively being run for the benefit of about 10,000 people. The problem is 490,000 others are picking up the tab. That’s not just a bad headline – it’s political poison. People don’t begrudge support for the vulnerable. But they do wonder when it’s their turn to be heard.

What do councils do in response? More meetings. More strategies. More cosplaying as charities or campaign groups because that’s what sounds good in a press release. “We can’t do that, councillor.” Fine. What can you do? That bit never gets answered.

This wasn’t just a Conservative beating either. Labour lost ground too. Reform wasn’t the only winner. The Lib Dems and Greens made gains, especially in the south of the county.

Even the Council Leader, Izzi Seccombe, lost her seat. When you try to out-Green the Greens and out-Lib Dem the Lib Dems, don’t be surprised when voters just go for the real thing. If you blur the lines between parties, people stop seeing the point in voting for you at all.

And that, right there, is the biggest threat to democracy: apathy. People no longer vote for what they want. They don’t even vote against what they don’t want. They just don’t vote. Because they don’t think it makes a difference. And far too often, it doesn’t.

Reform offered something. It might have been simple. It might have been populist. But it was clear. And it was aimed at people who feel ignored.

That’s why they won.

Reform UK just redrew the political map and arguably we Conservatives handed them the pen. The road back for us in Warwickshire – and everywhere else – will be long. But even a marathon starts with a single step.