Is this Tory party hungry enough?

Anyone who has been around Parliament recently is likely to have picked up on what one Tory source refers to as the “febrile” atmosphere following local elections. One in which a malaise has set in amongst the Tories, while Reform – with its now five MPs and start-up party infrastructure – are hungry for power. They simply seem to want the win more.

One Tory MP tells me: “We need a militia of people who really want it. That isn’t what we have. It just doesn’t seem like we want it enough.” And they may well be correct. 

“We’re crawling on the floor exhausted,” a shadow cabinet minister tells me, “those of us who have been around for a while, through the Brexit rows, Covid, partygate and now coming out of government are feeling it”.

“We are still working out how to behave now that we’re not in government. We’re used to checking every little fact and detail, being on the defensive rather than the offensive. We’ve got to make adjustments and improvements to being in opposition.”

The generous take is that with Labour’s ghastly start to government, people are looking to opposition for answers ahead of schedule and the Tories haven’t had time to get their house in order.

But it could also be a faltering of efforts from within the party, as that same backbench MP complains “we need to remove the dead weight” clogging up the system. “If you don’t want to put in the hard yards. Get out of the way,” they tell me of members of LOTO and the shadow cabinet that they think aren’t pulling their weight.

“The NHS is our biggest public service. What are we saying about it? Who knows? It doesn’t exist. On transport, nationalisation will cost taxpayers. Have you seen anything from us? Would anyone have heard what our position is?” 

It falls back to one of the Tory party’s main issues: whether it is really up for the battle when going against Labour, the Liberal Democrats and, especially, Reform?

It was a topic of discussion at the latest shadow cabinet and in this week’s meeting of backbench MPs at the 1922 committee.

The party’s co-chairman Nigel Huddleston told the 1922 committee of MPs that the party was divided down the line on how to deal with the Reform threat, between taking them head on and waiting for them to be shown up while the Tories rebuild. “It requires a reconciliation,” one MP tells me.

A lack of consensus was evident in this week’s meeting of the shadow cabinet too, which overran by half an hour, as Kemi Badenoch’s top team discussed the “dismal” local election results and where the party goes next. It was the first time that real worry and critiques came up, one source says: “It’s like the penny finally dropped. We need to use this as a wake up call to move, almost like Starmer has, further and faster.”

The Tory leader herself was “quite calm” one shadow cabinet minister tells me – and, in her worst scenario, had expected losses of 600 to 700 seats. The party lost 674 council seats overall, “so at the top end”, but apparently Badenoch felt that “we now have space and time to continue the rebuild and renewal process”.

The only thing is that some of the shadow cabinet came away feeling “there wasn’t really a plan” moving forward.

“There was a lot of disagreement on what the direction was and how we should tackle Reform in particular,” another shadow cabinet minister tells me.

“I would say that it ended without consensus,” they added, “there were no conclusions or plans agreed”.

Two schools of thought were revealed following the locals: don’t take Reform seriously as “they will basically prove themselves to be bad administrators and show themselves up on policy”, or treat them as a real threat as “they could become entrenched in local government in the way Lib Dems are”.

But one shadow minister thinks the answer is obvious: “The idea that Reform having councils will show them up is nonsense – if anything goes wrong will just be able to blame others.”

“We used to think we shouldn’t give any air to Reform … that’s changing slightly,” another shadow cabinet minister admits. “Look, we all think we need to be more agile.”

Still, they encourage those within the party “not to fall into a flap… that is not what we need right now”. But an itchy MP cannot see their logic.

“This is an extinction level threat and people are saying don’t panic. Panic! We should panic! If we’re not throwing the kitchen sink at it now then when are we?”

They add: “Change the name, change the logo if you want. Try all the things you can because if you don’t do it now, you might never be able to.”

After all, some keep talking about the Tories being in a marathon, but it is not a marathon if you’re not still standing after mile one.

There are still MPs in denial of the seriousness of the threat, who make comparisons to the May 2019 European elections with an insurgent Brexit Party and reinvigorated Liberal Democrats that fundamentally didn’t come good when in the context of a general election.

Some of their Scottish colleagues compare Nigel Farage to Alex Salmond, both personally charismatic individuals, but again Salmond’s Alba party flunked.

And some Tory MPs even bring up the response to Corbyn in the 2017 vs 2019 elections: “When the public realised Corbyn was actually close to getting power they then voted accordingly. We’re hopeful the same would happen if it came to a similar situation with Farage.”

This head in the sand approach, one Tory MP suggests, comes down to a safety problem. Being left with what were viewed as the safest Tory seats in the country following the election has made people too comfortable and not scrappy enough to be leading the fightback. “They all f***ed off skiing instead of campaigning for the locals,” one less-than impressed Tory MP laments. 

As a shadow cabinet minister warns their colleagues: “There is no such thing as a safe seat – it could always get worse.”

Tory sources speak of a lag time that gets in the way of action when it comes to MPs. It’s not exactly a surprise that things haven’t been going fantastically and culminated in a bad set of locals.

But now that Tory MPs are looking at their own patches and seeing their councillors gone, meaning their voluntary operations for their own seats are decimated, those who were trying to ignore the issue cannot afford to on a personal note anymore – and it has pushed them to finally want action.

“Something has got to give,” one Tory source says. While an MP adds: “We are currently circling the drain. It is catastrophic.”

But still there is not the mass appetite for leadership change, a shadow minister says.

“Whoever is leader, and it happens to be Kemi, we would have to stick and get behind because if it’s not them at the next general election we’d be immediately done for. There’s a premium on us not looking totally mental and regicidal.”

So if it is not in leadership, what will change? The shadow minister thinks it is not Badenoch but the people around her that pose the problem, even if she was the one that selected them.

Director of strategy Rachel Maclean continues to spark ire amongst her former MP colleagues, especially after she was meant to address the 1922 committee this week but was subbed out for the party co-chairman. 

One Tory source says: “I don’t know who was running the campaign, whether it was Rachel, whether it was Nigel. I don’t even know what the campaign was.

“They are missing that political sense and nous. They are in desperate need of getting some political c***s in that team.”

One shadow cabinet minister says there are discussions on how to streamline through CCHQ and LOTO to make processes faster, with all decisions currently running through chief of staff Lee Rowley and often getting held up in the queue.

But as one MP says: “There’s a group of us that are politically minded and losing our heads watching what is going on. It just doesn’t seem like anything would change, even if LOTO had the answers.”

It is only Badenoch that can do something about that. Fundamentally, it all stems from the leader, but I’m with the backbench MP; I’ve so far not been convinced that the necessary change is there. It is time to see some real appetite.