Kemi Badenoch has said the results of the English local elections show the Conservative party is “coming back”. After two years in opposition to a historically unpopular Labour government, she has lost, at the time of writing, 300 council seats and control of three councils. That’s a relatively bad result for an opposition that has any hope of forming the next government.
So how big is the gap between rhetoric and reality, and what do these results tell us about the state of the Conservative party?
The headline is that Reform is crippling them by siphoning off right-wing votes in some old Tory heartlands. In the southern English borough councils – traditional fortresses of “Villa Toryism”, the party’s suburban support, for the past century – they have been all but replaced according to the first declarations on Friday.
In Suffolk, the Conservatives lost 40 council seats (Reform came from nothing to win 41). They also lost control of Hampshire, losing 29 seats to the benefit of Reform and the Liberal Democrats. And in Essex, the constituency home of Kemi Badenoch and a number of her shadow cabinet ministers – ie those who survived the Sunak wipeout in 2024 when the Tory party was brought to what we thought was its lowest possible ebb – the party has been ground into earth, losing 41 seats while Reform once again came from nowhere to win 53. Meanwhile in Havering, an outer London stronghold on the border with Essex, they were wiped out and lost all of the 23 seats they were defending to Reform (Andrew Rosindell, the local MP who recently defected from the Tories to Reform, looked chuffed).
Even in places where the Conservatives boasted they had done well, that so-called success meant standing still or only moving backwards slightly. In Fareham, for example, they only lost one seat to Reform and maintained control of the council. (The attraction of boasting about their endurance in Fareham was more motivated by animosity toward the town’s MP, Suella Braverman, who defected to Reform earlier this year).
Likewise in Bexley the Conservatives maintained control despite losing 4 seats (which Reform took from them along with 3 from Labour). In Broxbourne they lost two seats to Reform but maintained control. Fair’s far. They added 9 seats in the two-way of Westminster, taking back control of an old party fortress that was won by Labour the last time these councils were fought in 2022 (which was interpreted at the time as a sign of Starmer-led party’s broad appeal). In Harlow they performed well, increasing their number on the council by 5 and maintaining control. Are these the seedlings of national success? Definitively, no.
But one hope the Conservatives might take from Thursday’s elections in England is that they still have a social base in the country – something Labour will find it harder to argue after it lost vast swathes of territory in working class parts of the North and Midlands. That base includes affluent pensioners and high-earning professionals in the suburbs of southern England. It is much too small to give them a parliamentary majority, but it is probably enough to survive complete wipe out at the hands of Reform.
The question now will be how to grow that base. Obviously hewing close to Reform’s line has not delivered great success, though Badenoch may be reluctant to admit it. (“I am the right”, the Tory leader told a heckler recently.) Already the calls are growing from Tory centrists for Badenoch to look again at the suburban affluents who once voted blue in droves but now put their faith in the Lib Dems. It is said, for example, that a Tory party with a different approach could have given Ed Davey’s party a run for its money in once-blue Richmond, which became a one party state when the Lib Dems won all 52 council seats yesterday. “Kemi knows how to read a poll,” says one optimistic Tory centrist. Let’s wait and see.
[Further reading: Kemi isn’t working]
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