‘Morale is shot’: Tory campaign mood sapped by candidate row

The Conservative party risks losing swaths of northern England at the general election, officials have warned, after its chair became the fifth Tory MP to migrate south to contest a safer seat.

Richard Holden was confirmed on Wednesday as the new Conservative candidate for Basildon and Billericay in Essex, which the party won with a 20,412 majority in 2019, compared with the 1,144 majority he previously achieved in North West Durham.

In addition to claims he had performed a “chicken run” by moving south, Tory critics complained he had been imposed on the local party, after he was the only name presented on the shortlist.

The move has damaged already-poor morale inside the Conservative campaign, and risks alienating activists whom the party will rely on to stem the scale of the defeat currently predicted by polls at the July 4 election.

One minister branded the handling of Holden’s candidacy “ludicrous”, while other Tories warned it projected weakness.

The flight of MPs southwards is an admission the party will cede northern ground it won in 2019, one party official warned.

“We’re going to revert back to being the party of wealthy, rural seats, mainly in the south-east and south-west,” the person added. “It’s the end of the Conservatives being a credible party across the whole country.”

A party insider said that Tory staff were “calling around, trying to work out what they do next” in their careers, as the Conservatives still languish about 20 points behind Labour in the polls. The person said there was a “low-energy” vibe among some campaigners.

More seasoned operatives in the party questioned why Prime Minister Rishi Sunak had not engaged his political fixers to do a deal behind the scenes with right-wing party Reform. In 2019 Reform agreed not to stand candidates in Tory safe seats, although Reform had ruled out a repeat pact in this election.

“Everyone assumed someone was talking to Reform,” said one party insider, who added that “morale is shot” following Nigel Farage’s decision to seize the reins of Reform and stand as a candidate in Clacton, Essex.

Tim Montgomerie, founder of the ConservativeHome website beloved of the Tory grassroots, said he was anticipating Reform achieving a temporary bump in the polls off the back of Farage’s announcement, which could darken the mood even further in the Conservative campaign.

“The worry for the party is crossover,” he told the Financial Times. “I am expecting a poll in the next day or so that shows Reform has overtaken the Conservatives. I don’t think it will be sustained, but the main thing is that everyone on the campaign behaves. If there’s panic, it will harden the Reform vote. But people are just so angry at the centre. These next 72 hours will be a very, very vulnerable moment.”

Reform MP Lee Anderson, who defected after losing the Tory whip over inflammatory remarks, said his phone had been “on fire” since Farage’s intervention on Monday.

While Anderson admitted he was not expecting any Tory MPs to defect to Reform following feverish speculation in recent days, he told GB News: “I’ve had lots of calls and text messages from some [Tory] colleagues who are very concerned about losing their seats.”

Meanwhile, grumbles continue to abound about Sunak deciding to call an early election when the party lagged Labour by such a significant margin in the polls.

The party has had to rush to finalise candidates in scores of vacant seats in recent weeks, which senior Tory figures say shows poor preparedness heading into the campaign. They argued this was unforgivable given the timing of calling the election was in Sunak’s gift.

One former Tory party executive highlighted that Sunak’s strategy guru Isaac Levido had pushed to wait until the autumn to call the election. “It just feels like we’ve rushed into something that we’re not prepared for,” the person added. They added the situation “feels a lot like 2017”, when Theresa May called an election with a strong poll lead and ended up losing her overall majority.

They added: “We don’t seem to have used the local elections or by-elections to test a theme or message. It seems to have been scattergun, ‘let’s throw something out there’.”

Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, warned that alongside triggering resentment among Tory MPs left behind in hard-to-win areas, the “chicken run” would also dent morale among grassroots campaigners — crucial to knock on doors and deliver leaflets during a campaign — in seats to which they had fled.

Incumbent Tory MPs have also accused the party of failing to support enough women to win candidacies in safer Tory seats. Flick Drummond — defending a majority of less than 1,000 in Winchester — said she would like to see “fewer male special advisers being imposed and more women coming forward and given a fair chance”.

Others familiar with the process accused Conservative Campaign Headquarters of seeking to usher women into “hopeless” seats in the past week, as it dashed to fill the last 80 candidacies, in an eleventh-hour effort to improve the gender breakdown of its candidates list.

Michael Crick, the journalist behind the “Tomorrow’s MPs” transparency initiative that has been tracking candidate selections across all the main parties, said he had received numerous complaints from Tory insiders.

“They’ve complained about the party getting on the phone to women to be candidates for rubbish seats in the past week, clearly to improve the gender statistics. There’s huge unhappiness about that,” he told the FT.

A Conservative party spokesperson said: “The Conservative party is fighting for every vote at this election, and we are standing candidates with a fantastic breadth of experience across the country. We have a clear plan, and are taking bold action, to deliver a secure future for our country.”