Catastrophic local election results reveal how futile it would be for Sunak to tack hard right

If constantly lurching to the right were the answer to the Conservatives’ problems, the party would have won every mayoralty in the country, have gained control of multiple councils, and be heading for a historic fifth successive general election win sometime in the next few months. Rishi Sunak would now be making plans to take Britain into the 2030s. It would have been the biggest comeback since Lazarus. Instead, the prime minister faces oblivion in a flood of biblical proportions.

This is, in fact, already the most right-wing government Britain has had in decades. So far from Rishi Sunak being the “socialist” he is accused of being by his own colleagues, absurdly enough, he has adopted steadily more rightist positions over the past few months, but to no avail. He has abandoned interim targets on the decarbonisation of home heating, and postponed the transition to electric vehicles. He has introduced ever more draconian legislation to make the ill-starred Rwanda policy a reality, made legal migration harder, and promised to ignore the European Convention on Human Rights if it suits him.

He’s dished out cuts in national insurance and offered the prospect of abolishing it. He’s announced potentially devastating cuts to disability benefits. He even gave the Conservative conference that infamously asinine soundbite: “A man is a man and a woman is a woman, that’s just common sense.” By background, he is a genuine, longstanding Brexiteer and Thatcherite.

Not enough, say the hard right, who have never been completely satisfied with any Tory leader since the fall of Margaret Thatcher. Mr Sunak has been subject to renewed and intense pressure from his right wing to shift rightwards once again, as The Independent reveals today. Sir John Hayes and Sir Edward Leigh, men with menace, have visited the prime minister in an effort to encourage him to change course. Suella Braverman, who is displaying signs of mania, has done the same, in public, fearing that “at this rate” there won’t be any Tory MPs left after the general election.

Liz Truss, fresh from rewriting history in her memoir, is pressing once again for the reinstatement of the economic policy that caused so much trouble when she was in charge and ultimately cost her her job. Dame Andrea Jenkyns, who has demanded Mr Sunak step down, is now urging him to bring back Boris Johnson for the election campaign, presumably to storm to power once again. The ironically named Common Sense Group of Tory MPs also wants red meat. Some of Mr Sunak’s colleagues regard him with all the suspicion they usually reserve for Jeremy Corbyn, and would happily depose him were there time to do so.

Mr Sunak has heard it all before, and he would be wise to ignore his critics’ advice for the precise reason that moving to the right has plunged his party and his own ratings to levels even lower than where they stood when he took over from Ms Truss in 2022. Likely defeat has turned into certain catastrophe because the party has done what the right wanted.

The public want none of it, and the last round of municipal elections and the Blackpool by-election prove the point. If the country were crying out for a dose of reborn Thatcherism, why is it voting in remarkable numbers for the social democratic programme of Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Party? It is true that the Tories have leaked support to Reform UK, but they will never be able to outflank that party on the right, because, as a party of government, they cannot adopt Reform’s cranky, illegal and impractical policies.

As the narrowly defeated Conservative mayor of the West Midlands, Andy Street, pointed out, the further the national party drifts from the political centre ground, the worse will be its prospects, the more it will find itself bullied by the Farageist extremists, and the longer it will spend in opposition. Mr Street very nearly won his contest, because he was rightly perceived as a moderate and competent leader of the kind the Conservatives have sometimes produced. He was personally popular, but not popular enough to overcome the mix of fear and loathing much of the electorate feel about the Sunak administration.

Contrast Mr Street’s relatively strong performance with that of Susan Hall, the Tory candidate for mayor of London. Ms Hall, a devout Trussite and someone who has posted on Twitter/X quoting Enoch Powell, is everything that the likes of Ms Braverman want to see in a Conservative. Apart, that is, from the share of the vote she attracted from Londoners, which was below that achieved by the previous candidate.

In a contest with a slightly jaded and not wildly popular Sadiq Khan seeking a record third term in office, Ms Hall finished about 200,000 votes behind him. Mysterious and overheated talk about the election being very, very close turned into a comfortable win for Mr Khan. Ms Hall’s platform was so hardline that she wasn’t much troubled by the candidate standing for Reform UK. Yet she was trounced. She was, in many respects, pushing the kind of policies the hard right is demanding of Mr Sunak. If the Tory hard right were correct in their reading of British politics, Ms Hall would now be mayor of London. For that matter, Ms Truss would still be prime minister.

The hard right, in other words, has had its chances. Its ideas have been road-tested and found wanting in every sense. The Truss mini-Budget showed how dangerous it is to take a political gamble with the public finances. Ms Hall proved that a negative, divisive, extremist campaign isn’t enough to succeed in an eminently and unusually winnable contest for the Conservatives in London.

Mr Sunak’s obsession with Rwanda (he doesn’t really need any encouragement on that front), his renunciation of green policies, his anti-woke rhetoric, and his tax cuts have utterly failed to turn his fortunes around. Now that a leadership challenge is impossible for all practical purposes, Mr Sunak’s only hope of mitigating the coming disaster is to try to move closer to the centre ground. But it does feel as though his time has run out.