There was plenty for Rishi Sunak and his cabinet to discuss on Tuesday morning. The Conservatives had lost half of the seats they defended in the local elections and Andy Street narrowly lost the West Midlands mayoralty to Labour. ‘We’re doomed,’ was one cabinet member’s verdict. Ben Houchen’s victory in Teesside was just enough to stop any serious move against the Prime Minister: he is safe until the general election.
Isaac Levido, the Australian political strategist who ran the Tories’ successful 2019 campaign, did his best to fight off a sense of defeatism. He briefed the cabinet that this year’s election race is much closer than commentators and opinion polls suggest. Look at Dudley, he said. Keir Starmer had kicked off his campaign there saying he was ‘looking to win’. He used his final campaign visit to go to Harlow to make the same point. Yet Labour failed to take control of either council. Something was not going according to Labour’s plan.
Levido went on to argue that an election in which almost four million people voted offered a better sample than any focus group, than any opinion poll. And in that vote, there was not a 22-point Labour lead as some opinion polls had suggested. Instead, both the BBC and Sky had found the projected national vote share was a nine-point lead for Labour. Such a lead could easily narrow during a general election campaign. Michael Thrasher, the doyen of local election psephologists now used by Sky News, said that the evidence points to a hung parliament.
A member of government adds: ‘It’s so sad how much misery is priced-in now’
The BBC’s John Curtice had a bleaker reading of the same numbers. He said the results point to ‘a very comfortable Labour majority’, because local elections in England and Wales don’t take into account a Labour recovery in Scotland or other factors such as anti-Tory tactical voting in a general election.
Levido described Professor Curtice as a mere ‘political commentator’ compared with the ‘professional’ Professor Thrasher. He also shared some old predictions of political pundits – including a lobby hack who shared YouGov London mayoral polling ahead of the vote and confidently claimed that the polls would not narrow. In the end Susan Hall lost by 11 points, half the level claimed by YouGov.
The battle of the pollsters explains why some in Downing Street can find a silver lining. It’s not that they believe a hung parliament is the most probable outcome; it’s that there is at least the chance that things could be closer than the current Westminster consensus. The argument goes that if Labour were to do well in Scotland at the general election, they could still end up ruling with only a tiny, volatile majority. In the words of one CCHQ figure: ‘Good luck governing with that. It will be the people’s republic of Angela Rayner.’
The problem for No.10 is that this view is shared by very few outside the building. Most Tory MPs think they’re about to be bulldozed. One Tory MP – Natalie Elphicke – decided the results were so bad that she this week joined the list of Conservatives defecting to Labour. ‘It’s all very depressing,’ says a close ally of Sunak. ‘It shows we really are doing as badly as people think.’ A member of government adds: ‘It’s so sad how much misery is priced-in now.’ Anyone who does think Sunak will lead either a majority or minority government now can get 20:1 odds from the bookmakers.
The Tories are especially despondent about losing the Conservative stronghold of Rushmoor to Labour for the first time. ‘Rishi announced a boost to defence spending and then lost in the spiritual home of the British Army,’ says a senior Labour figure. ‘You couldn’t make it up.’ Sunak’s Tory critics such as Suella Braverman and Miriam Cates argue that the results show the party needs to move to the right to win back 2019 voters who are either staying at home or backing Reform. In response, Michael Gove invoked the spirit of Kate Moss at cabinet, warning against comfort eating on right-wing policies that make them feel good – ‘nothing tastes as good as skinny feels’.
Reform won only 15 per cent of the vote in the handful of places where the party stood. This was enough for several defeated Tories to blame Richard Tice’s party for their loss. But Sunak’s team argue that Tice made a misstep in saying he was ‘delighted’ to help Labour defeat Street in the West Midlands. The only other crumb of comfort for the Tories is that Reform came fourth in Ashfield, the seat of the former Conservative deputy chairman Lee Anderson who defected to Reform.
There are also calls for some personnel changes. There is plenty of ire towards the party chairman – Richard Holden – which tends to happen after a bad defeat. ‘He would start a fight with himself,’ says a member of government. ‘He turns off more people every time he does media.’
Starmer’s team is watching this aftermath with some amusement. While a few Labour aides have expressed surprise at the absence of a coup against Sunak, despite the fighting talk in the months before, they say it’s still a good result. ‘Tory psychodrama is clearly good for us but this result suits us just fine,’ says one party figure. ‘Rishi stays but with an awful set of results – and we know how to attack him. He helps us.’
As for Labour’s successes, beating Andy Street in the West Midlands is seen as a symbolic victory but not the most significant. Instead, the results celebrated most by Labour’s data team were the wins in the East Midlands and North Yorkshire mayoralties. ‘It’s prime Tory territory and it shows we are making the right inroads,’ says a Starmer aide.
Both the Tories and Labour have found their own narrative of how the local elections – the last significant encounter with the electorate before the general – offer hope. But it’s Labour that for now has the most to point to. The one thing the two sides can agree on is that after these results, Sunak is probably going to play for time and hold out for an autumn election. ‘It’s going to be a long six months,’ says one minister.
Politics / Inside No. 10’s battle of the pollsters
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09.05.2024
There was plenty for Rishi Sunak and his cabinet to discuss on Tuesday morning. The Conservatives had lost half of the seats they defended in the local elections and Andy Street narrowly lost the West Midlands mayoralty to Labour. ‘We’re doomed,’ was one cabinet member’s verdict. Ben Houchen’s victory in Teesside was just enough to stop any serious move against the Prime Minister: he is safe until the general election.
Isaac Levido, the Australian political strategist who ran the Tories’ successful 2019 campaign, did his best to fight off a sense of defeatism. He briefed the cabinet that this year’s election race is much closer than commentators and opinion polls suggest. Look at Dudley, he said. Keir Starmer had kicked off his campaign there saying he was ‘looking to win’. He used his final campaign visit to go to Harlow to make the same point. Yet Labour failed to take control of either council. Something was not going according to Labour’s plan.
Levido went on to argue that an election in which almost four million people voted offered a better sample than any focus group, than any opinion poll. And in that vote, there was not a 22-point Labour lead as some opinion polls had suggested. Instead, both the BBC and Sky had found the projected national vote share was a nine-point lead for Labour. Such a lead could easily narrow during a general election campaign. Michael Thrasher, the doyen of local election psephologists now used by Sky News, said that the evidence points to a hung parliament.
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