The coronation, and the heavy-handed tactics of the police in handling the small band of protesters, distracted from last week’s dire local election results for the government and the further implosion of the SNP in Scotland. We are witnessing the slow demise of Rishi Sunak, and it is hard to see how he can now turn it around by the time of the general election expected next autumn.
The results were disastrous for the Tories, not just because of the loss of 1,000 seats. The local elections across most of formerly Tory provincial England (London was not voting) saw both a resurgent Labour party and, crucially, also a resurgent Liberal Democrats. The Greens had a strong showing too. The common thread was that—as in the run-up to the 1997 election—the party best placed to defeat the Tories generally won, with massive anti-Tory tactical voting. This bodes seriously ill for the Tories come the general election.
Keir Starmer’s safe-and-moderate Labour won a string of councils from Plymouth and Swindon to Medway, all vital southern battlegrounds in the coming general election. At the local level, Labour also largely won back the northern “red wall” districts which fell to the Tories on the back of Brexit and Boris Johnson populism in 2019.
On the basis of these local elections, Labour’s projected national vote lead of about 9 per cent over the Conservatives is less than that recorded by opinion polls. But that is little consolation in the context of such a strong showing for the Lib Dems, who have recovered at local level from their collapse eight years ago that followed Nick Clegg’s disastrous coalition with David Cameron.
As in the 1990s, the Lib Dems are now a popular centrist anti-Tory party. Their leader Ed Davey is keen to see Labour win nationally, mobilising tactical voting to the serious disadvantage of the Tories across all types of community: north and south, provincial and metropolitan. Tactical voting lay behind many of Labour’s southern gains, while the Lib Dems even won Michael Gove’s district of Surrey Heath, formerly the bluest of blue. The Tories could now easily lose 20 or 30 parliamentary seats to the Lib Dems in England and Wales, as well as 100 plus seats to Labour.
Then there is Scotland, where the post-Sturgeon SNP government is in freefall, mired in a scandal about its finances, amid mounting concern about the quality of public services. Humza Yousaf resembles Rishi Sunak as a weak, fag-end stopgap leader, but without even the ex-banker’s sheen of competence. There is of course a strong anti-Tory sentiment north of the border, keen to see a change of government at Westminster. Labour is the beneficiary of both these trends and could now win 20 or more seats in Scotland, up from just one in 2019.
In response to last week’s defeat, Sunak’s monotonous repetition of his determination to “deliver” on his five pledges (can you even remember them?) is wooden and whining. Sunak may be more popular than his party. A less chaotic replacement for Johnson and Truss, he is personally inoffensive and at least tries to address problems rather than making them worse. But he is polling below Starmer for “best prime minister”, and appears increasingly irrelevant to the nation’s mounting problems. Facing a Labour leader who could be portrayed as a left-wing threat, Sunak might have had some hope of becoming the least-worst option, as Johnson managed to achieve—it was the sum of his achievements—in the 2019 election. But Starmer is not Corbyn, and he has now even barred his predecessor from standing as a Labour candidate for the general election.
Sunak looks increasingly like Jim Callaghan in the “winter of discontent” before the 1979 election: affable but ineffectual in the face of mounting economic woes which are having a devastating effect on families nationwide. Real-terms pay cuts, big interest rate rises and huge cost-of-living increases, particularly for food, fuel and housing, are the reality of every almost family of moderate means or less—and will still be so by next year’s general election, even as headline inflation falls. After last September’s disastrous mini-budget, which cut through to the public because of its immediate effect on their mortgages, the blame for this economic mess looks set to land firmly on the Tories.
Then there is the NHS. The worst of the strikes may be over—although even that is still not certain—but the legacy of longer waiting lists and staff bitterness is catastrophic. Sunak appears powerless to stop the disintegration of the NHS and the public services, issues which greatly affect the lives of families nationwide. This week’s soft soap about a future expansion of pharmacies just highlights the crisis in the national GP service, which is the gateway to the NHS.
On top of all this is Brexit, which is making all these economic and public service problems worse. Have you met anyone recently who thinks Brexit is going well? And who is more likely to vote Tory because of it? However timid Labour is on Brexit, it has the freedom to search for better relations with Europe in a way that Sunak is not allowed even to explore by Suella Braverman and the Tory right wing.
An electoral tidal wave is heading towards Sunak. Maybe it will dissipate somewhat over the coming months. But I wouldn’t bet on it.
