Rishi Sunak faces a furious backlash from angry Tories demanding his exit after his party suffered massive losses in the local elections.
Polling expert Sir John Curtice predicted the Conservatives may have recorded their worst results in 40 years by the time counting ends. A bad night for the Tories saw them narrowly avoid finishing third in the Blackpool South by-election as Labour convincingly won the seat back.
The party has lost over 120 council seats. The dire results have piled even more pressure on Tory MPs to oust the PM before the general election. It sets up an ugly civil war within the party ahead of the general election later this year, with plotters expect to be busy in coming days.
Former Tory MEP David Campbell Bannerman, who chairs the Conservative Democratic Organisation, warned the party is “finished” if it doesn’t dump Mr Sunak. He told The Telegraph: “The lesson is clear: enough of this disastrous, visionless, vacuous leadership. Rishi must go and go now.” He branded it a “reality check” for Tory MPs as he warned: “If you don’t dump Sunak now the party is finished for at least a decade or more and the country is in danger under a hard left woke Labour. Do the necessary and do it quickly!”
Kwasi Kwarteng, the Tory former chancellor responsible for the disastrous 2022 mini-Budget, told LBC: “All of our seats are under threat. There’s no such thing really as a safe Tory seat anymore.”
And Lee Anderson, who defected from the Tories to Reform UK in March but still has several allies within the party, said nothing could save the PM now. He said: “I think Rishi Sunak could fly over the UK tonight in a helicopter and drop £1million down every chimney and they’d still vote him out come October.”
Tim Montgomerie, founder of ConservativeHome, said things are getting worse for the Tories under Mr Sunak. He wrote: “Going to bed now after a night of punditry but the evidence is clear: things are getting worse rather than better under Sunak. The Tories continue on the same path at their peril.”
No10 is braced for an angry reaction within the party, knowing that 53 letters from disgruntled MPs could trigger a leadership race. Dame Andrea Jenkyns, who was the first Tory MP to publicly put in a letter of no confidence in the PM, said the party should never have got rid of Boris Johnson. She said the shamed former Prime Minister should be brought back into the fold after admitting it’s “unlikely” Mr Sunak will be ousted.
She said: “I think we shouldn’t have got rid of Boris in the first place, but we are where we are. And it’s looking unlikely that MPs are going to get the letters in. So we’ve got to pull together. I mean, I think we need to find a role for Boris as well to ensure that we show that we are united front.”
One low point for the PM in a disastrous night was the walloping the Tories suffered in Thurrock, Essex. The party lost half its seats and saw control of the council shift to Labour. Group leader Andrew Jefferies told the BBC the result reflected widespread anger with the Government. He said: “People were frustrated, it was a national poll. People were looking at the Government.”
He said people were “angry and frustrated” with the Tories locally and nationally as “things aren’t right, things aren’t working properly”. He said Rishi Sunak was not the problem but said the Tories need to get the message right.
Party chiefs have pleaded with mutinous MPs not to move against the PM. Chairman Richard Holden told Sky News: “Parliamentary colleagues need to look at this and see… and wait through the weekend as well.”
And former Cabinet member Baroness Nicky Morgan has said it is “inevitable” that voters want change after 14 years – but called on the party not to get drawn into civil war. She told there “will inevitably be people who are grumbling and calling for change” but warned against changing leader. This will make little difference, she warned.
Baroness Morgan said: “I think that the message has got to be that divided parties do not win elections. They get punished by the electorate. And so I hope that the message from this to the national Conservatives and Parliamentary party is that actually they will double down, carry on doing what they’re doing in Government and not think about any sort of leadership challenges and focus on the really big election, which is obviously coming.”