Local elections: Tory leadership prepares MPs for the worst

The Tory leadership is getting increasingly nervous that the party isn’t sufficiently braced for bad local election results this Thursday. They’re worried that too many MPs assume the party won’t lose much more than 300 seats.

The problem is that, for understandable reasons, MPs are treating all of CCHQ’s dire predictions — one source there is talking about 750 loses if the UKIP wave doesn’t break — merely as expectations management.

In an attempt to persuade people of how bad the results could be, senior figures have taken to showing people this bar graph and map which illustrate the Tories’ current dominance. Their argument is that there is only way they can go from here, and that’s down.

I’m told that Stephen Gilbert, the Prime Minister’s political secretary who ran the Eastleigh by-election campaign, is particularly adamant that the party should expect to sustain heavy losses. But given the current political atmosphere and the Rallings and Thrasher predictions it is going to be hard to persuade Tory MPs, and the Westminster chattering clases, that the Tories will lose far more than 300 odd seats.