The Tory vote squeeze

When the cabinet gathered on Tuesday morning, the meeting started as a sombre affair. Just days before, the Conservatives had suffered – in the words of polling expert Sir John Curtice – ‘one of worst nights any government has endured’. The Tories lost both the Tamworth and Mid Bedfordshire by-elections to Labour. The Environment Secretary, Thérèse Coffey, managed to lighten the mood when she intervened to say that it hadn’t gone unnoticed that it was Rishi Sunak’s 365th day as Prime Minister. Loud banging on the table ensued, led by Jeremy Hunt.

A year into Sunak’s premiership, neither he nor his supporters are where they would have liked to be. Aides said in January that they wanted to get Labour’s lead down to ten points in a year. That looks ambitious. The Tories are currently 20 points behind. And the Prime Minister’s approval ratings aren’t much better. The day before Sunak entered No. 10, 29 per cent of voters said they expected him to be ‘poor’ or ‘terrible’ at the job. A year in, 50 per cent say he falls into the latter category. At the moment, any talk of a springtime battle at the ballot box looks like electoral suicide.

‘Last year things were bad, but at least there was a sense of what we stood for’

The Australian election strategist Isaac Levido, who ran the Tories’ 2019 campaign, told those assembled at political cabinet that one of the party’s big problems in last week’s by-elections was voter apathy. In Tamworth, turnout was just 35.9 per cent. In the South Staffordshire by-election in 1996 (as the constituency was then known), which saw a similar vote swing, turnout was 62 per cent. So, Levido argued, the party’s challenge ahead of a general election is to give their voters a reason to turn up. He said this will require message discipline.