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At a carefully staged factory visit rich in pre-written lines, one part of Keir Starmer’s delivery felt entirely unscripted: his insistence that Reform is now his main electoral challenger, rather than a Conservative party “sliding into the abyss”.
This was, one No 10 source said afterwards, “not posturing”, but simply an acknowledgement that under Kemi Badenoch there appeared to be no way back for a party slumping in the polls and that followed up a disastrous general election with almost equally bad local results at the start of this month.
It has almost become a political truism to speculate whether the Conservatives’ sequence of crises are now becoming existential, but there are good arguments against writing a definitive obituary for a party that has repeatedly proved itself able to adapt, reinvent and come back.
There are, however, several very compelling reasons for wondering whether this time might be different. For starters, in Reform the Tories face a challenge from the right; one that, unlike Nigel Farage’s previous parties, is – at least for now – well organised, heavily funded and able to win elections.
Even more importantly, the sense of a party spiralling around the political plughole is shared by increasing numbers of people from a constituency Badenoch should care about – her own party.
“A lot of people are spitting feathers about how the party is being run,” said one senior local Conservative activist in a very traditionally Tory area where the party fared terribly in the local elections.
“We’ve been effectively wiped out over the last two years – we’ve lost control of every part of local government and have lost almost all our MPs,” they said. “What is so scary is that people don’t really see a route out of this. It’s not even about Kemi or [Robert] Jenrick or whatever. The brand is broken on the doorstep.
“If we can’t win places that are so traditionally Conservative, because there’s another rightwing party that doesn’t have our baggage, then we’re in real trouble.”
Such sentiment is understandable even from the raw numbers. After a general election in which its 2019 contingent of 317 seats was slashed to 121, in this month’s local elections the party lost nearly two-thirds of its 1,000 or so council seats, shedding control of 16 councils.
And the losses have continued. Analysis by the BBC this week showed that since the local elections the Conservatives had lost another 47 councillors, some of them to Reform, with others quitting to become independents.
As party activists of all persuasions know very well, such attrition is only sustainable for so long. As they also understand, political hopefuls generally enjoy winning elections and are drawn towards parties that look like they can do this.
“We are very quickly reaching that point where it all pivots towards Reform,” the senior Tory activist said. “I know a lot of people, really senior people, some on the parliamentary candidates list, who are considering defecting to Reform. It is not good.”
Badenoch has begun restructuring her increasingly cash-strapped party, with a series of local officials asked to reapply for their jobs – in some cases just before the local elections.
“Fantastic people who have been in the party for 20 or 30 years, and who have been brilliant and loyal, were basically sacked,” the senior activist said. “And what amazed us all is that they were doing this during the final two or three months of the local election campaign, when stability is really important.”
How can the Conservatives fight back? The response to Starmer’s comments from Mel Stride, the shadow chancellor, was to present the Tories as the only remaining beacon of fiscal credibility, contrasting this with what he called “Jeremy Corbyn’s uniparty” in Labour and Reform.
Aside from the slight mental stretch required to see either Starmer or Farage as Corbynistas, the challenge for the Conservatives is that many traditional Tories who prize sober fiscal policies were scarred by the brief Liz Truss experiment, and often dislike Badenoch’s shift towards the culture war, Reform-mimicking harder right.
Increasingly, the grassroots disquiet is directed at the top. Badenoch is safe for now, mainly because party rules forbid a challenge in the first year and she was only elected last November. But what then?
The general acceptance had been that nothing would happen before another set of local elections next year. For at least some Tories, matters are now accelerating. It is not only Starmer who can see the abyss ahead.
