Local elections: How bad was it for the Conservatives?

This is an audio transcript of the Political Fix podcast episode: Local elections: How bad was it for the Conservatives?

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George Parker
Crushing. Disastrous. Ominous. Pick your adjective for the electoral fate that befell Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives in local elections in England on Thursday. Mr Sunak promised to redouble his efforts. But is it too little, too late? Keir Starmer, on the other hand, celebrated a sweeping victory.

Keir Starmer
Make no mistake, we are on course for a Labour majority at the next general election. (Crowd cheers)

George Parker
So Labour claims it’s on course to take Downing Street. Are they really? It’s a huge mountain to climb. What about those strong performances by the Lib Dems and Greens? Welcome to the Political Fix, your essential insider guide to Westminster from the Financial Times with me, George Parker. To pick the bones out of the local elections, I’m delighted to be joined by FT columnist Stephen Bush and Northern England correspondent Jennifer Williams, along with a new entrant, Lucy Fisher, the FT’s new Whitehall editor, who you’ll be hearing a lot more from. Thank you all for joining, and Lucy, welcome.

Lucy Fisher
Thanks, George.

George Parker
We should mention straight off the bat that only a portion of the contested races have been declared as we record this podcast. Some 8,000 local seats were up for grabs across England. So far, Labour has made inroads in the North and the Midlands and the Lib Dems have captured seats in the so-called blue wall. Here’s what Rishi Sunak had to say about the Tory party showing.

Rishi Sunak
It’s always disappointing to these hard-working Conservative councillors, their friends, their colleagues and I’m so grateful to them for everything they’ve done.

George Parker
Mr Sunak insisted that his government was going to buckle down and get on with it. Meanwhile, Conservative party chairman Greg Hands expressed some doubts about whether these results would propel Labour through to the general election.

Greg Hands
Labour are not making gains across the board that they would need to be making in places like Peterborough, in Sandwell, in Bassetlaw. Now these are all seats that Jeremy Corbyn won in 2017. So it’s not a uniformly good picture for Labour, and that is because Sir Keir Starmer is not cutting through.

George Parker
So with me now are Stephen, Jennifer and Lucy. Lucy, if I could start with you. How bad a night has this been for the Tories?

Lucy Fisher
Well, Johnny Mercer has called it out as terrible, which has already excited a lot of backbench ire to have a minister describe it as that. I think people in government had been hoping to keep the spin to disappointing. But clearly this is worse than they expected so far, although as you’ve stressed, we are in the early stages of the count. Councils like South Gloucestershire, Welwyn Hatfield, Grant Shapps’s seat have gone from Conservative to no overall control. It’s a worse story in the likes of Plymouth and Stoke-on-Trent, key red wall seat in Staffordshire, which have gone from Conservative to Labour control. So it’s not looking good.

I’ve already started speaking to Tory MPs about how they’re feeling and the mood is pretty dire, to be honest. People think that this is going to spark a lot of concern about the general election. So far though, it doesn’t appear to me that people are gunning for Sunak. You know, one of the big questions is whether he is under renewed pressure. There had been a lot of talk some months ago about these set of elections being a real test for him, that there could be moves against him, sort of bring back Boris campaign. And while we’ve heard from David Campbell Bannerman, former MEP from a Ukiper Conservative from the right of the party, saying that, you know, we shouldn’t rule out as a party bringing about Boris, I’m not picking up that kind of sentiment, but it’s gonna be a really important couple of weeks ahead. We have got this conference next Saturday of the conservative Democratic organisation that Campbell Bannerman, Lord Cruddas, Priti Patel are the allies of Boris Johnson who want to bring back a greater degree of democracy in the party are hosting. That will be a key point of pressure on Sunak in Number 10.

Even more important is a national conservatism conference. There are key players like Jacob Rees-Mogg, Miriam Cates, Danny Kruger, who’s an interesting Tory MP. He’s a real rising star on the social conservatism side of the right of the Tory party who seem to be taking over a bit from the libertarian rightwingers. So I think there is this idea that although Sunak himself personally isn’t necessarily under huge pressure at this stage, there are big questions that are beginning to be asked about the direction of the party, and it feels like the rightwingers are really in ascendancy.

George Parker
So Steve, that’s really interesting that I don’t get the sense that Rishi Sunak is under a massive amount of personal pressure on his position. Certainly, judging by the mood in prime minister’s questions this week, his MPs seemed to be absolutely solidly behind him. But that doesn’t mean does it seem that he’s not under pressure or indeed, as Lucy alluded to, that he has now come under pressure on certain policy areas from the Tory right?

Stephen Bush
Yeah. The big picture in terms of the Tory party politics is that the Conservative MPs believe, in my view, rightly, that Rishi Sunak is their best available candidate to lead them in the next election and he will do so. But you know, Jackie Doyle Price yesterday on the radio saying it was insane to go into this election talking about small boats, an issue which we are not going to tackle, we’re not competent on. We should instead be talking about cutting taxes, controlling public spending. There’ll be people saying, oh, well, Rishi said we talk about woke more, talking about this more. So although there is agreement about the leader, there are, I think, going to be an awful lot of arguments in varying to shades of unhelpfulness about the strategy.

George Parker
And what sort of things Stephen do you think are gonna come up and . . . presumably taxes, inevitably. Also an interesting debate on housing . . . 

Stephen Bush
Yeah.

George Parker
 . . . where the parties seem to be split just a bit between the sort of Nimby brigade and people, particularly northern seats who think more houses should be built.

Stephen Bush
Yeah, housing is really interesting because the problem is both sides are right, right? You have some people who say, look, the places where we are doing better are the places where we have built lots of houses, where young people are getting on the housing ladder, where there’s lots of people who’ve been able to take advantage of help to buy, and that’s true. The problem is, is then what other Conservatives will say is, well, look, the reason why I’m in trouble is we built Crossrail and a bunch of liberals are now commuting from my constituency into London and they brought their leftwing politics with them. And if we build more houses in my constituency, the first people to buy them will be these down from Londoners, and I’ll end up like Bristol West, a seat which William Waldegrave held and now is basically a Labour/Green marginal. And so they are both right and one of them is going to lose out from that. Ditto with taxes and spending cuts, right? Some people in the Conservative electoral coalition are feeling very overtaxed. Some people would like more state. The problem for Rishi Sunak is that he is going, I think, to struggle to adjudicate between those factions. And basically we have a situation where the Tory party agrees on him but not on much else.

George Parker
So Jen, just wondered how you thought the mood was on the doorstep. I know you spent some time in Bolton, I think in Barrie as well. I noticed that Bolton remained an overall control council. What’s your assessment of the mood, particularly in rebel seats, about the Conservatives at the moment? It seems to me that’s moved from anger that we saw probably during the end of Boris Johnson and certainly Liz Truss era to what a sort of almost apathy and sort of sullen indifference.

Jennifer Williams
Sulkiness would be the word that’s come up more than once from both parties actually about Conservative voters. I mean, in Bolton, one of the things that people were saying was that Tory voters weren’t necessarily raging, but more just sulking, might stay at home, might switch to the independents because there’s a lot of independent parties there. Bolton is a good example of Labour having done better than they thought they would in quite a lot of these Leave-leaning places so far in the north of England and Stoke as well. There was really very little expectation on the part of either Labour or the Conservatives privately that the Tories were not gonna still be the biggest party on Bolton council at the end of this. And actually, Labour are now the biggest party on Bolton council.

Similarly, if you look at Middlesbrough, Labour took the mayoralty there, which is a huge psychological boost and they also won back Stoke. Some of the possibly more salient questions will be around places that are not that kind of red wall 2019-type marginal seat. But the traditional marginal seats in places like West Yorkshire, Darlington — which Labour are hoping to take from the Conservatives — like if they can make gains there, then that really will be significant.

But I think the successes that they had in Bolton and I would particularly say in Teesside, because you’ve also got the factor there of the Tory mayor Ben Houchen of the Tees Valley, who is very much the Conservative party’s golden child in the red wall. Those gains are psychologically incredibly important for Labour. But they’ve also nearly took came two votes, I think, away from taking Hartlepool and they’re sounding pretty confident that they might take Darlington at this point from the Tories. So it has been much better across the Tees Valley, I think, for them than they had expected. And Labour has been very in the doldrums in Teesside for quite some time. So not only for Labour in Teesside but in other places as well, that move, that’s gonna have a big psychological impact, I would suggest.

George Parker
When you look across the North and indeed the Midlands and there are 40 or 50 seats in the so-called red wall that the Conservatives won in 2019, how many of those do you think, realistically, Rishi Sunak can look forward to holding on to the next election?

Jennifer Williams
Well, I don’t know. Don’t let me put a number on these things (Jennifer and George laugh).

George Parker
Go on.

Jennifer Williams
I feel, I mean, to come back to what I was saying before, I think you’ve got to not get too generalising with your use of the phrase red wall, right? Because red wall means the things that switched in 2019. What really Labour need to be thinking about is not only winning back, say, those Tory MPs in Stoke, which is looking quite positive on the basis of that Stoke council result, but also some of the seats that are also traditional bellwethers in places like, as I say, West Yorkshire. The result for Kirklees could be interesting, the result for Darlington could be interesting. And the second psychological reason why Darlington could be interesting is very much Rishi Sunak’s neck of the woods. He’s relocated part of the Treasury there. Huge amount of political and financial capital have been expanded by the Tories on securing and holding on to those kinds of places.

George Parker
Right. Stephen, if we could just turn to Labour. I suppose the big question arising from these results, we can pick through the results, is Keir Starmer heading for Downing Street?

Stephen Bush
Yeah, and which I suppose the answer thus far would be yes. But contrary to that clip of him sounding very chipper, it is far from clear that he is heading to Downing Street at the head of a majority. I mean, in many ways the comparison with him and David Cameron is well-made; both inherited a party that had gone down to record-breaking defeat; had to come a long, long way; also got a very favourable helping hand from various crises that befell the government. But in the end, of course, David Cameron could not get all the way in one go.

And looking at these results thus far, you would have to say then that basically where the Labour party looks to be with the interesting question and again, as with David Cameron and Ukip, is this group of Green voters going to behave like Liberal Democrat and Labour voters have done since time immemorial, where they split and vote tactically in the local elections, but then they fall in behind whoever the anti-Tory vote is? Or is this a more pronounced problem to his left flank? Because if the answer to that question is yes, it’s a more pronounced problem, then this is not a very good set of local election results for the Labour party. If Green voters are basically just Liberal Democrat voters and they’re behaving the same way the Liberal Democrat and Labour voters have always behaved, then it’s very good for them. But yeah, almost certainly heading to Downing Street, but open questions about what form of government that would be.

George Parker
What’s your hunch on that question, Lucy? it seems to me that the lesson of the recent parliamentary by-elections in places like Tiverton or North Shropshire or Chesham and Amersham for that matter, is that the anti-Tory vote is proving very efficient in deciding to vote tactically. And do you think some of the people who voted Green, Lib Dem in this election will go into the Labour column in those Labour-Con marginals at the next general election?

Lucy Fisher
Yeah, I think we will on balance see a lot of tactical voting at the next general election. I think we do have to distinguish between the Lib Dems and the Greens. I know Stephen this is something you’ve written about in recent days too, but the Greens tend to be more to the left of the Lib Dems and the Labour party. They are people that more broadly were on board with the Corbyn project. And I do think there is the slight question mark over that left flank. You know, for all Jeremy Corbyn’s faults electorally, he did really keep together the Greens, odds and sods from parties like Tusc, the trade union-based party. So there is a question mark whether some of those people sort of head back to their smaller parties, whether they just sit on the couch, don’t bother to vote at all. And that could be a factor that slightly depresses the Labour vote in some marginals, I think.

George Parker
I think anyone who’s been out during these local elections talking to voters, as I know you have, Jen, would say that, while there may be disillusionment with the Conservatives, there’s not a noticeable enthusiasm for Keir Starmer. Is that fair to say, particularly up in the North?

Jennifer Williams
Yeah, and I think that’s certainly been the pattern that I’ve seen over the last year, going out to talk to people for various different reasons. So for example, during the Wakefield by-election, after Boris Johnson went, when I did some stuff during the Conservative leadership election and then again this time. What Labour needed to get past in the first instance was the complete toxicity of Jeremy Corbyn on the doorstep. And that was partly what they were hoping to see out of last year’s local elections. And in fairness, that did start to come through. What people were saying to me and have been saying to me for ages is that yeah, we don’t get that visceral reaction that we got to Jeremy Corbyn on the doorstep. It’s more just that Keir Starmer doesn’t come up or there’s a degree of indifference. And actually, if you go and talk even to Labour voters out on the street, very often people don’t necessarily know who Keir Starmer is. Now, I don’t think that’s necessarily super unusual, but we are getting closer to a general election and I think that, OK, you’ve overcome the hurdle of Jeremy Corbyn is viscerally hated, but then they still seem to be unable to quite get that level of enthusiasm for Keir Starmer.

George Parker
Stephen, Jen touched on this a bit earlier, but from the early results we’ve seen so far, is Labour winning in the right places?

Stephen Bush
Broadly speaking, yes, all right. Although this is in of itself a fun internal Labour debate they’re gonna have, right, in that Labour has done better in places with fewer graduates that voted more heavily to leave, both sort of new marginals in the red wall, your Stokes; and also older marginals like Redditch or Worcester. The flipside, of course, is there are some people in the Labour party who say, look, we have been obsessed with these voters who we lost in 2019 and who we had less well in 2017. We are not doing anywhere near enough to attract voters who like Rishi Sunak but don’t care for the Conservative party who moved towards us in 2017 and stayed the course in 2019. And I think one of the things that these results are going to accelerate in the Labour party is some people will say, look, we’re doing the thing which is difficult, which is we’re winning back Leave voters who are socially conservative and these Lib Dem and Green voters will fall in behind us because that’s how first past the post works. And other people around the shadow cabinet table will go, that’s insane, we need to have a message for those voters who want to vote for us. We can’t just be obsessed with all Stoke all the time. And the thing about these results is you can argue either of those perfectly reasonably from what we’re seeing thus far.

George Parker
And Lucy, I think even Keir Starmer’s most loyal supporters would admit this isn’t 1997. It doesn’t feel like we’re heading for that kind of seismic change in the political landscape, does it?

Lucy Fisher
No, it doesn’t. But I’m interested, George, because people seem to have such different experiences in their memory of the lead-up to ’97. And I’ve spoken to some who were there for it in Labour circles who say, no, there was this kind of big buzz in ’96. You just knew you were heading into it. It was just the enormous scale of that landslide victory, a majority that came as a surprise. And there are others who say, no, this does feel like ’95, ’96, when we thought we were kind of edging there. But there was this sort of the Ming vase strategy of carry it carefully across the floor without dropping it, trying to be cautious, not complacent. And there wasn’t the sort of the certainty that, of course, can creep in with hindsight. So recollections do vary. But I think there is this sense that, you know, Keir still has a mountain to climb. A lot of concerns that Rishi Sunak has for a long time been outpolling the Conservatives whose numbers have been dire. He’s recently, in some polls, been viewed as being a better prime minister, a better leader than Keir Starmer, and that’s often treated when the leader is doing better than the party as a sort of an indicator that the party’s fortunes could be going up themselves. When you look at where the polls have travelled since Rishi Sunak took over, I think it was an average polling lead of 25 points-plus back in October. That’s been crunched down to about 15, 16 points now. So the trend is going in the Conservatives’ favour, still would be difficult for them certainly to get a majority at the next election. But this big question is of whether Labour becomes the biggest party, whether it can get a majority might be just without its grip. There is a lot of concern about that in Labour circles.

George Parker
Interesting. And Stephen, perhaps talk a bit briefly about the Liberal Democrats. Ed Davey said he had a smile like a Cheshire cat’s. Is that right the response from a Lib Dem leader after these sets of results?

Stephen Bush
Yeah, I mean for loads of reasons, obviously, the final set of the three elections in 2019 was a disaster, but the local elections in 2019 were basically the best-ever results for the Liberal Democrats in their modern history, right? You have to go back to Asquith to find a better set of results. And they managed to make significant gains on top of what was already a pretty good set of gains despite the unravelling of the tactical alliance they had forged with the Greens, which was so closely bound up in the personal and political relationship between Vince Cable and Caroline Lucas and against a Conservative leader in the shape of Rishi Sunak, who is, if you wanted to design the Conservative candidate of Lib Dem nightmares to lead the party, it would basically be Rishi Sunak. And they’ve seen that off. They’ve made gains despite not having this Green alliance. They’ve made gains despite the Conservatives having a pretty Lib Dem-friendly leader in terms of this, you know . . . 

George Parker
In Windsor and Maidenhead.

Stephen Bush
Yeah, right. The thing is that they’ve hit them where they live, right? And that’s like the thing that they really want to do. So I think he’s right to be pretty chipper, all things considered. It’s a great set of elections for the Liberal Democrats, although, as keen listeners will remember, the question you put to us in this room remains, which is what are the Liberal Democrats for other than being a way for the rural poor and posh inner city dwellers to vote against the Tories? And the answer to that, I’d say, is less clear than perhaps was under Paddy Ashdown or Cable and Farron, and then in some ways in a slightly negative way on the Jo Swinson thing.

George Parker
That’s certainly the case on their housing policy, which seems to be simultaneously Nimby-ish and indeed full of enthusiasm for houses for younger voters. Jen, just from your perspective, because you talk about the Lib Dems, how have the other parties done in your area, the Greens, but also I noticed some sort of the important thing you mentioned in the context of local elections, independent candidates as well?

Jennifer Williams
Yeah, so I think I mentioned earlier on that one of the reasons that Bolton was not being predicted as a particularly great result for Labour ahead of time was because you’ve got the fracturing of votes there over the last few years into a lot of other little independent parties. And this has been something that’s particularly starting to come through in terms of hyperlocal parties, especially since the referendum. So if you take Bolton, for example, Farnworth and Kearsley wanted independence for Bolton, which then resulted Farnworth and Kearsley First, which has actually done really rather well since 2018, I think they started, and those votes tended to come from Labour, you see. So people were then kind of saying, well, we’ve got the strong independent vote here actually that works against Labour and it works for the Tories and that doesn’t necessarily seem to have played out as expected. If you look at what the leader in Stoke said after the Conservatives lost in Stoke, the point she was making was that actually the independent vote there had gone back towards Labour. But actually the Tories themselves haven’t necessarily done as badly as it might appear, and that’s what had helped Labour. So actually that independent dynamic is playing out in different ways in different places and because it’s so localised, it’s quite difficult to work out what that means to the general election.

George Parker
And finally Lucy, to you, there has been some chatter in the opposition parties that Rishi Sunak asked that the palace organise their royal coronation a couple of days after the local election, specifically to bury what he expected to be a dismal set of results. Do you think that’s possibly true?

Lucy Fisher
I wouldn’t put it past the good burghers of the Conservative party and the government administration to come up with such a ploy. It feels to me it would have been slightly high-risk or jeopardy for that to get out and to, frankly, to insult the King, to offend the palace, who I think considered the coronation very much within their remit to decide the appropriate date. But of course, it is incredibly handy for Rishi Sunak. And even if you kind of log on, you know, not necessarily to the FT where we concentrate on these very important matters . . . 

George Parker
Of course.

Lucy Fisher
 . . . but also the popular press. Of course, they’re running high with local elections coverage, but a lot of it is still about the coronation. And then, of course, next week there’s Eurovision, which we also shouldn’t discount. For another sector of the population, I think, that is quite exciting. Obviously being hosted in Liverpool on behalf of the Ukrainians. But no, it is handy for the government that this is being eclipsed in many way by other more shiny and easy-to-interpret events. I think that’s the thing with locals. There’s always such a mixed picture that unless you’re a geek, unless you wanna get into the weeds of it, sometimes it’s hard to sort of cut through the spin.

George Parker
And Steve, do you think that Rishi Sunak will move on pretty quickly if hopefully these results get buried amongst a wave of royal coverage over the weekend and then it just gets back on with business?

Stephen Bush
Yes and no. It means that unfortunately for all of us, we don’t get our sort of moment in the sunlight to do as much TV as we would usually hope (George laughs), unless the two of you are royal correspondents who have been holding out on me. But that will deepen the debate in Downing Street about the timing of the next election. You have some people who’ve been saying, look, wait till October, something might turn up. You have some people going, we can’t possibly have a battle of local elections and then hope when we go into the election after that, not publicly fighting. And I think as you’d expect from a man like Rishi Sunak, he’s very polite. It’s an affable debate being held in Downing Street about the timing of the election, but it is a very fierce, affable debate, and that debate’s not gonna go away. And in some ways, the really important thing about this result is where do the parties sort of land on all of this once they’ve counted the results? And I think the two things we’re gonna see is debate in the Labour party about the type of voters they’re targeting. Are they over-targeting on one particular type of marginal and then debate in the Conservative party about, you know, look, are these results so bad, you hold on till October or do you look at these results and go, we can’t possibly go through a set of local elections like this in May and then be in anything like a disciplined position to win an election. Let’s just go in May next year and hope for the best.

George Parker
Yeah, that is a debate. And Jen, look finally, see that Lucy mentioned it, but I think I should ask you, are you going to be going to the Eurovision Song Contest in Liverpool?

Jennifer Williams
So I’m actually not. But we are having a Eurovision party in our house, but our house is not very big. So between my group of friends, we kind of had to split it across three houses. So I feel I’m loyal to Liverpool, but I’m not actually going to be there and I’m gonna let that carnage play out down the road.

George Parker
OK. Well, there will be carnage of a different kind on my streets tomorrow with the royal street party. We’ve got to get the gazebos out. I fear it’s gonna be pouring with rain all afternoon. But listen, that’s it for this episode of the FT’s Political Fix.

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The FT’s Political Fix was presented by me, George Parker, and produced by Anna Dedhar and Josh Gabert-Doyon. The executive producer is Manuela Saragosa and the sound engineer is Breen Turner. Until next time, thanks for listening.