This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
The most striking aspect of the Conservatives’ response to May’s local election results is how extraordinarily calm they are. This is a party, after all, to which fits of the vapours had become almost second nature, its leadership a knife-strewn, blood-slicked carousel on which the parliamentary party chased itself in circles.
Yet as the dust settled on the latest elections, the tone struck by Kemi Badenoch was almost … buoyant. The Tories are back, the plan is working! She moderated this tone somewhat over subsequent days, but the remarkable thing about this rosy prognosis is that her party seems to share it — or at least, share it enough not to fall to pieces over the results, as they have previously done over results far less dismal than these.
This owes in part to the complexities involved in divining meaningful national implications from particular local election results. Local elections have lower turnouts (and thus different electorates), are fought only in certain parts of the country and are each measured against a different set of prior results. As such, it is relatively simple to cobble together an optimistic picture out of the BBC’s projected national share and the recapture of Westminster council.
But on any dispassionate assessment it seems clear that this month’s results were very bad. Outperforming last year’s local election performance is just about the lowest bar of which it is possible to conceive, but Professor John Curtice suggests the Tories may not even have done that, writing in the Spectator that:
Amongst a sample of councils where the BBC collected the detailed voting statistics as they were declared on Thursday night and Friday are eleven places where a county council election took place last year. On average, the overall Conservative share of the vote in these districts was two points lower this year than last year.
Other cracks in the Tory story are visible even to those of us without Curtice’s expertise. The victory in Westminster and gains in Wandsworth, for example, came about not because of any advance in the Conservative vote, but because their vote fell less sharply than Labour’s.
That doesn’t make the victory worthless — councillors are vital to maintaining a party’s presence on the ground and control of a council can pay its own dividends. But it does mean that even in London, the one place the old party system is supposed to be holding up, Labour and the Tories are currently leapfrogging each other backwards into oblivion.
Speaking to party insiders, it is interesting how close are the optimists’ and pessimists’ readings of the near future. There seems to be general agreement that these results point towards a future where the Conservative Party survives. This is a low bar to clear, perhaps, but an important one. If last year showed the teal tsunami sweeping all before it, in May 2026 at least the peaks and channels became visible, and the reefs and shoals of what might be the Tory archipelago start to reveal themselves.
❂
What divides the Tory optimists from the pessimists is rather what they think happens next. The former expect, or at least hope, that somewhere in the haze of the middle-future will come an opportunity to overtake Reform UK, perhaps after Nigel Farage’s party has a rude encounter with the realities of office. The latter see no reason to think that voters would default back to the Conservatives even in those circumstances and foresee it instead becoming permanently a smaller party of the centre-right: the party of rural holdouts, affluent suburbs, certain high-earning private sector workers and particular communities such as Hindus and Jews. “A right-wing version of the Liberal Democrats”, as one current staffer put it to me.
This difference, however, has profound implications. Without a change in the voting system, its only realistic partners in parliament would remain the usual right-wing block (Reform and Ulster’s Unionist parties), and there would be strong pressure for an eventual arrangement or merger to reunite the right, as there has been in Canada and Australia.
But it would also require a clear vision of who that party’s new voters are and a relentless focus on an agenda specifically tailored to them — and this the party is not producing. Under Badenoch, its approach to policy remains ponderously governmental; responsible to a given value of responsible, but unfocused and unexciting. The overall strategy is to re-establish credibility on the economy and let Reform fail.
That’s a big bet on the hope that the Conservatives remain the default option of Britain’s right-leaning electorate. Yet according to research by Merlin Strategy, only 14 per cent of voters who have defected from the Tories to Reform (or the Greens) say they would return to the fold if their new party failed to deliver. This does not mean these voters are unwinnable, but it does suggest they need actively to be won back.
It also means that the Party seems psychologically unprepared for what is a very real possibility: that it loses seats at the next election. You would not think, to look and listen to the Tory Party, that numerous projections forecast just such a result, including that of More in Common, who have a strong track record with MRP (multi-level regression) seat projections.
Many Tory MPs thought, prior to last year’s local elections, that having survived the near-death experience in 2024 they were safe. Not only do subsequent election results not bear out that hope, but town-hall routs have practical consequences. In an age of withered memberships, councillors are now the core of a party’s election machine: they deliver leaflets, knock on doors, collect local intelligence.
Whatever the hopes of MPs, that machine is being washed away beneath their feet. Some counties which recently were counted as Tory heartlands now boast more Conservative MPs than councillors. This could not have come at a worse historical moment: historically, such things only really mattered in a relatively narrow band of marginal seats, but this is the most marginal Parliament (in seat majority terms) since 1945, and the next election promises to be a chaotic five-way brawl in which the smallest edge could make the difference in hundreds of seats. An edge the historic parties are losing.
If the Conservatives do go backwards at the next general election, that will likely precipitate the meltdown they are not having now. The question is, why aren’t they having it already?
❂
Robert Jenrick’s defection to Reform was, on the day, an underwhelming event. Badenoch managed to get ahead of the story and was broadly, and rightly, acclaimed to have acquitted herself well. It was then followed by several months in which her star seemed genuinely to be waxing, buoyed by a much-improved media profile and rising personal ratings. But it may nonetheless have been a sliding-doors moment for the Conservative Party.
Prior to Jenrick’s departure, Tory leadership speculation remained on the rolling boil we had come to expect of the party. In fact, it was noted that Badenoch was in the uniquely destabilising position of having a universally-recognised heir apparent in her shadow cabinet. Jenrick provided a locus for discontent and, crucially, an alternative to which the party could turn.
It was in that context that, just a year ago, this month’s elections were being built up as the make-or-break moment for Badenoch’s leadership. The cataclysm of 2025 could perhaps be written off (she had been in post only six months, not nearly enough time to steady the ship), but no such excuses would be possible in 2026.
I know well the case against Badenoch’s leadership that was being honed back then, because I was one of the people making it. It had two essential components. First, that Badenoch had won the leadership by cannily pitching herself as an alternative to an ideological row the party really needed to have. Second, and relatedly, she had upon winning ceded the pitch to Nigel Farage with her slow-and-steady approach to policy, with catastrophic consequences.
This story is told, in cold numbers, by the polling averages since the last election. From July until November 2024 (when the leadership contest concluded), the Conservatives were closing on Labour. They then immediately went into reverse, falling from 25 per cent to just 18 per cent by July 2025. In part this was because in January 2025 Reform overtook the Conservatives, and a couple of months later there began a big direct transfer of votes from the Tories to Reform, just in time for last year’s local elections. Worst of all, the subsequent deflation of Reform’s polling has not been mirrored by an equivalent revival in Tory fortunes.
One can still make this case. Indeed, it has been made. Here is Lee Cain, formerly a senior advisor to Boris Johnson, writing in ConservativeHome:
In the critical first year of her leadership, Kemi deliberately abandoned the field — saying her party needed time to conduct a policy review — providing space for Nigel Farage to fill.
Reform is the public alternative to Labour on the right because Farage has been given the space to define what insurgent conservatism looks like in this political moment, set the terms of the debate about Britain’s future and occupied the ground the Conservative Party had vacated.
All this remains as true today as it was a year ago. Nor is the ponderousness of the still-ongoing policy review a testament to any epoch-defining radicalism. On the critical question of the most problematic public expenditures, the Conservatives remain wedded to things like the pension triple lock and the winter fuel allowance; on housing, they are beholden to NIMBYish MPs (and their NIMBYish voters).
Instead, the review is producing good, granular technical work on second-order issues. Abolishing stamp duty, Badenoch’s headline commitment at last year’s party conference, exemplifies it perfectly. It is good policy: a tangible retail offer, practical and affordable and targeting a tax widely reviled by economists. It would help. But it isn’t going to change the world or even make a serious dent in the housing crisis. It might tip you over the line into supporting the Tories if you were already considering them. But it isn’t the sort of thing to persuade voters who have given up on the party to give it a hearing.
Yes, Badenoch’s personal ratings are up, and she now comfortably leads her party. But her personal ratings really matter only to the extent that she lifts her party with her, and this she has not done. Had you told the Conservative Party of a year ago that the 2026 results would be what they have turned out to be, we would expect Cain’s analysis to be widely shared, if not shouted from the rooftops by Jenrick supporters trying to precipitate a contest.
But what was the Jenrick camp is now leaderless; nobody has stepped into his shoes as the prince over the water, and thus there is nobody urgently inclined to rock the boat. Others point out that whether or not the leadership case for Jenrick in 2024 has been vindicated, the critical injury — being overtaken by Reform — has now been sustained. And so the party drifts on, against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
❂
It is counter-intuitive to suggest that the Conservative Party is not divided enough. Surely the current spirit of amity is preferable to the non-stop rumble of regicide that marked its past few years in office? Surely it benefits from the contrast with Labour? Does anybody, excepting the hopefuls and their partisans, think the battle to replace Sir Keir Starmer is going to help Labour?
Probably not. But for all their superficial differences, the serene calm of the Tory pond and the churning of the Labour waters are actually different manifestations of exactly the same phenomenon: parties putting off profound intellectual and ideological battles they have no stomach to fight.
Consider the actual terrain over which the Labour leadership contest is being fought. For all the heady talk of “Manchesterism”, as of Monday Andy Burnham has confirmed that he will not deviate from Rachel Reeves’s fiscal rules, nor exempt defence spending from them.
At a stroke, barring a belated intervention from Angela Rayner, the ideological front of the contest has all but closed. Unless Burnham wanted to pick a fight with Labour backbenchers over significant spending cuts — a fight he would lose as such attempts are the reason they are deposing Starmer at all — his ministry would devolve into the same scrabble for nameless “efficiencies”, endless deferring of capital investment and tax hikes as the one before it.
It is not that Burnham is insincere. He is a prisoner of his political circumstances. Labour has no idea what Labour politics consists of if not endlessly increasing spending, and its MPs do not want to confront the question. That leaves its leaders, real and prospective, nowhere to go.
The Conservative problem is different. Intellectually and ideologically, the right actually has quite a lot of options in an environment where spending cuts are required; nor is it as wedded as the modern Labour Party to the legal proceduralism underpinning our membership of the ECHR or the social engineering that was the object of mass tertiary education … the list goes on.
Can the Tories survive without pandering to the over-60s?
In practice, however, the Tories are every bit as paralysed as Labour because the connection between the theory and practice of conservative politics has almost completely broken down. In theory, the party believes in fiscal responsibility, a smaller state and lower taxes; in practice, they support the pension triple lock, the winter fuel allowance and the stealth taxation needed to pay for them. They have no plans for NHS reform (spending on which doubled in real terms during their term in power) or social care and, thus, nothing substantial to say either on the trajectory of the public finances or taxation.
If the exam question facing Labour in 2024 was what Labour politics looks like without money, that facing the Conservative Party was how its conduct in government ended up so divorced from its idea of itself.
The problem runs deeper even than the big revenue spending accounts. All the environmental or equality regulations against which shadow ministers now rail were either enacted by the Tories or sustained by them for 14 years. The unsustainable explosion in undergraduate numbers was made possible by a Tory chancellor, George Osborne, lifting the cap on university places. Most damningly, the “Boriswave” that issued 3.8 million long term visas to immigrants between 2021 and mid-2024 was a deliberate policy choice by Boris Johnson and Priti Patel, the latter of whom publicly asked to be thanked for it and remains in Badenoch’s Shadow Cabinet.
Any confrontation with these facts would be extremely unpleasant, so the party has avoided it. Badenoch did not create this reluctance, but she did exploit it. Where Jenrick offered at least a partial diagnosis in his leadership pitch, she explicitly rejected doing the same, focusing instead on the party’s “values” (platitudes to which no Tory could object) and the pledge to work everything out afterwards. But that would be enormously divisive, so she hasn’t done it.
This doesn’t mean that Badenoch’s intellectual posture is fake, anymore than Burnham’s is. Such interventions as she makes are usually thoughtful; the policy review is producing solid work. Like “Manchesterism”, it would probably add up to a passably interesting agenda for the prime minister of a country with completely different public finances to our own. But history does not remember fondly leaders or parties which might have risen to the challenge of easier times than they faced.
❂
The paradox of the Conservative Party is that it is behaving neither like a sectional interest party fighting for its very place on the political scene nor like a party of government that might in a few years inherit a radioactive set of public accounts. Either would demand a focused, energic and radical response, and the party will not or cannot provide one.
Instead, its strategy can be broadly described as “look credible, wait for Labour to fail and pick up the pieces”. The biggest indictment of this approach is not that it reflects a delusional assessment of the party’s current position (although it does), but that it would be catastrophic for the party if it worked. A return to office without confronting the bone-chilling reality of the public accounts would destroy a Badenoch government — just as it has destroyed Starmer’s — and likely the Tory Party with it.
Any path to being fit for office lies, for the Conservative Party, on the other side of an intellectual overhaul on the same scale as that which Margaret Thatcher delivered in the 1970s. Many Tory MPs would be up for this, no doubt, until they realised that their role in the drama would be that of the Wets and that the sacred cows being slaughtered would be theirs.
Formidable as the Iron Lady was, she never had to contend with a Britain where the main beneficiaries of runaway public spending and the remorseless expansion of the state were her own party’s core voters. It is not clear either that the Tories can survive without pandering to the over-60s nor give anyone younger much reason to vote for them if they do.
The existential threat to the Conservative Party is not Reform but the near-complete failure of its politics and its inability to correct it or even recognise it. Reform’s rise is merely a symptom of that, and, if the Tories cannot change course, then the only consequence of Farage failing will be that the honour of delivering the coup de grâce to the oldest democratic party in the world will fall to someone else.
