The real competition as far as Labour and the Conservatives are concerned this week, with Thursday’s local elections looming, is not about winning votes or council seats but lowering expectations. Neither of the two main parties is going to have a particularly fun night.
From Labour, the message is that governments are always punished in “mid-term” locals (ignore for a moment the fact that ten months after a historic landslide victory can’t really be considered “mid-term”) as voters take the opportunity to give whoever is in charge back in Westminster a good kicking.
For the Conservatives, expectation management involves reminding everyone, as Kemi Badenoch put it, that the party “always knew that this election was going to be a challenge” because of just how well the party did last time these seats were fought. “Well” is an understatement: reaping the benefits of Boris Johnson’s vaccine rollout popularity, the Tories won two-thirds of all seats up for election in 2021. Four years later, they are in the unenviable position of defending 973 seats – which means 973 chances for defeat. Current polls suggest the Tories would be lucky to cling on to half of these. Losses of over 500 are being priced in. Over the weekend it emerged that Tory campaign director Rachel Maclean has been on holiday in the Himalayas. Good for her – and a good opportunity for CCHQ to take the “we lost because we didn’t bother trying” strategy to a whole new level.
As George Eaton wrote in Morning Call yesterday, much of the pressure comes from the Liberal Democrats – especially in erstwhile Tory heartlands like Buckinghamshire, Cambridgeshire, Oxfordshire, and even Warwickshire, where Ed Davey has his eyes on shifting the council from Conservative majority to no overall control. Indeed, the Lib Dems are hoping to leapfrog the Tories and come out of the local elections second only to Labour in terms of running councils.
Yet for all that, it isn’t Ed Davey that is haunting the Conservatives’ waking moments, but – of course – Nigel Farage. Ben Houchen, Tees Valley mayor and the most powerful elected Conservative in the country, is the latest to muse openly about the potential for a deal between the Tories and Reform at the next general election: “Obviously there’s going to be a conversation to form a coalition or some sort of pact” if the two parties were to win enough MPs combined to form a majority, Houchen told the BBC.
It’s true that Houchen was referring to a deal after the next general election, once the votes have been counted. But other Tories have other ideas and have been more blatant in their pleas to “unite the right”. Houchen’s comments come days after Robert Jenrick, shadow justice secretary and successor-in-waiting to Kemi Badenoch, was revealed to have said he was determined “one way or another” to “bring this coalition together”. And it’s only been a few weeks since Esther McVey mooted the possibility of Reform and the Tories agreeing not to stand against one another in certain seats – as the Brexit Party stood down in Conservative-held seats for Boris Johnson in 2019.
As I wrote last week, Reform figures have gleefully rejected any suggestion they could get into bed with the Tories. It is in Farage’s interest to do so – as it cements his narrative that Reform is the alternative to the so-called “uniparty”, with Labour and the Conservatives two sides of the same coin (or “two cheeks of the same arse,” to borrow a phrase of fellow political disruptor George Galloway). Seeming keen to make a deal could be ruinous for Reform’s anti-establishment image.
The Tories pushing the idea of a pact are counting on Farage’s opportunism, sure that the Reform leader would be open to changing his mind if the situation could be shown to work in his favour. And Farage has this week thrown them a (sort-of) bone by saying Reform will be “grown-ups” about what they do after the election in terms of co-operating on councils. He did add, however, that any deal would be “on tough terms”.
The Tories pushing the pact line consider it inherently logical that the right must be united in order to defeat Labour (note Houchen’s use of the word “obviously”, for example). But any pollster will tell you that hopefully tallying up Reform and Tory votes to reach a number that looks on the surface like an achievable goal for a united right is wildly deluded. While there clearly is overlap, much of Reform’s appeal comes from the fact that Farage hasn’t been in Westminster for the last decade and a half overseeing the country’s decline.
There is another problem with the pact talk: it makes the Conservatives look desperate. On Monday, More In Common director Luke Tryl (the man behind last week’s Chaotic Map Of Doom) shared an insight from his focus groups that should terrify the Conservatives: all the talk of a merger has voters thinking “you can tell they’re struggling because now they’re trying to get in with Reform”. The Tories are not projecting the image of a party that is calm and in control. Voters pick up on weakness. And no one likes voting for weak parties.
The one glimmer the Tories can hang onto is that on the expectation setting front, they are crushing Reform – as, incidentally, is Labour. Excitable Reform activists are bigging up their prospects to anyone who will listen, whether it’s Andrea Jenkyns winning the Lincolnshire mayoralty or the chances of taking the supposedly safe Labour seat of Runcorn and Helsby in the by-election. There has been so much over-egging of a Reform landslide, in fact, that a performance that is anything less than exceptional – not winning Runcorn, say, or failing to translate vote share into council seats – risks looking like a disappointment for Farage. Maybe Kemi Badenoch has something to teach him after all.
[See also: Mark Carney enters the arena]
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