LONDON — Swathes of the British public took their first proper look at the Conservative Party under Kemi Badenoch’s leadership on Thursday night.
The verdict? That their punishment must be more severe.
After crashing to its worst-ever defeat in the last year’s general election, the Tories have now suffered another electoral battering. The party was squeezed from left and right in the latest round of local elections, wiped out in areas where they reigned supreme just four years ago.
It puts them well behind Nigel Farage’s populist right-wing Reform UK in key areas across the country. The question now for Conservative MPs, officials and members is a simple, yet existential, one: could it get worse?
Decline and fall
Conservative Campaign Headquarters (CCHQ) officials spent Friday surveying the wreckage of yet another failed electoral campaign.
The party came a distant third in a key by-election as Reform gained their fifth member of parliament.
Badenoch’s party — in national government less than a year ago — also lost hundreds of councillors across the country, and all but one mayoral race. The Tories performed at the lower end of expectations from pollsters.
The BBC’s projected national vote share for the Conservatives was a scarcely-believable 15 percent — behind Reform (30), Labour (20) and the Lib Dems (17). If that trend continues, it would upend a century of British politics.
Not only did Reform pick up votes in traditional working-class Labour stronghold, but it also ripped through Tory shires in true blue areas like Kent and Hertfordshire, a clear two fingers to the Labour-Tory duopoly.
There were a few bright spots for the Tories — winning the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough mayoral race over Labour — but even Badenoch was quick to say on Friday that it was a “very difficult set of elections.”
Conservative MPs were already expecting a terrible night. The Tories have been consistently polling below both Reform and Labour over the past few months. The party also had the most to lose Thursday, with the 1,641 seats up for grabs last contested during a bounce in popularity for Boris Johnson back in 2021 .
Yet the brutal and widespread nature of the results has sent shockwaves through the Tory ranks — and left them openly questioning Badenoch’s comeback strategy.
“It’s all pretty dire for [Badenoch] frankly,” one Conservative grandee, granted anonymity like others in this piece to speak frankly, said. “People are not really sure what she stands for and that’s the problem.”
Is the worst yet to come?
Badenoch’s allies point out that the public are still angry with the Conservative Party after its 14 years in power, which ended with soaring migration numbers, economic calamity and endless political psychodrama.
One Tory official said: “It’s no surprise that less than a year after we have more to do to prove to voters that our party is changing under new leadership.”
However, many in the party fear that the Tory hole could get deeper still.
A recent YouGov poll found a quarter of those who voted for the Conservatives under their last leader Rishi Sunak in the 2024 general election prefer Farage to Badenoch.
Reform insiders believe one of the few things stopping some of these voters from switching to their side is concern that the operation around Farage may not be altogether serious. It is for this reason that Farage brought in Zia Yusuf, a former investment banker, as Reform chair, in a bid to imbue the party machinery with more professionalism.
“What tonight does, is that it embeds us,” Farage told Sky News on Friday morning. “We now are the opposition party in the United Kingdom to the Labour Party.”
Farage laughed away yet more questions about a Conservative-Reform pact, something Badenoch swears she won’t sanction, with the Reform leader suggesting such a set-up would only hold him back.
Scarlett Maguire, founder of the polling and consulting firm Merlin Strategy, said the results so far “indicate that the Conservatives still have further to fall.”
She said results in Staffordshire and Lincolnshire, where Reform won control of county councils, show the Conservatives’ voter base has shrunk even more since the disastrous 2024 election.
“At the moment, one-in-four Conservative 2024 voters think that Reform is doing a better job of holding the government to account,” Maguire said. “That number will increase and we will see more Conservative voters switching to Farage if they think he is their best chance of defeating [Prime Minister Keir] Starmer.”
One Conservative strategist said “things can definitely get worse” for their party and that Badenoch is “slipping into irrelevance.”
“We will lose volunteers to Reform now,” they predicted. “[Badenoch and her shadow Cabinet] need much more energy, they’re slow to get on issues … and it’s run as a think tank — lots of speeches about principles.”
A Conservative aide also complained Badenoch was focusing too much on trying to come up with a policy platform a full four years before the next general election.
“The policy renewal plan is just not a priority for people in the wider party right now, but that’s what the leader’s office is most concerned with” they said.
Badenoch’s allies in the Cabinet say the party will eventually get a fair hearing from the public, after a little more time in the wilderness, and that she will continue to detoxify the brand name in the meantime.
Her next big test will be 2026’s set of crucial local elections, which will include voting for the devolved Welsh parliament, where Reform are tipped to perform very strongly.
“If Badenoch’s not showing improved performance in 2026 I think she’s got problems,” the Tory grandee quoted above said. “She needs to get control of the party, deliver a coherent message and tell it like it is.”
Getting it from all angles
It’s not just the Farage surge on the right: Badenoch also faces a buoyant Liberal Democrats to her left.
Once famed for their anti-Brexit credentials, the centrist Lib Dems have reinvented themselves as a catch-all party with a fierce focus on Conservative seats in their more affluent, socially liberal southern heartlands.
After using this strategy to great effect in last year’s election they did so again Thursday, winning control of several county councils and bagging hundreds of new council seats.
Some in the party are concerned that chasing Farage only opens more space for the Lib Dems on their other flank.
“Kemi is chasing Reform too much — you can’t out-reform Reform,” one former Tory cabinet minister, speaking before the elections, said.”We have to worry about Labour and the Lib Dems.”
Unless the Tories can start to make inroads in either direction, they may well keep plummeting.
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