Were this a normal political cycle — or at least, an old-normal political cycle — the big story ahead of this week’s local elections would be the future of Kemi Badenoch.
Not that many months ago, this was supposed to be the big test. Last year’s results were written off by her supporters as coming too soon after she took the leadership for her to have made a difference. The extent to which that argument was fair is an open question — those six months were marked by a steady fall in Tory polling which began the moment she won — but the party broadly accepted it. No such excuse prevails on Thursday, at which point she will have been in post for a year and a half.
And the auguries are… not good. According to the latest forecast from pollster Lord Hayward, the Conservatives are on track to lose about 600 seats, a little under half the total they’re defending. This is definitely better than 2025, when they lost two-thirds of them. But it is still a very bad result; for reference, William Hague made gains at the local elections in both 1998 and 1999, and the Tories went on to pick up just one seat at the following general election.
Despite that, the question of Badenoch’s future isn’t really a story at all. And unlike last year, this isn’t just because the Conservatives are simply unmentioned in the press. She appears very much on the front foot, both in terms of the news stories the party is getting and the attendant commentary about her coming into her own as leader.
Yet beneath all that, the stubborn fact of the polling remains. If Hayward’s figures are correct (and nobody seems to be saying they’re wildly unrealistic), the best the Tories will be able to say on Friday morning is that they have stopped sinking. “Green shoots of recovery” might be squinted for, but in truth they will remain beneath the political permafrost until such time as the party actually starts actually, you know, gaining seats.
This dissonance owes to a few factors. First, it must be said, Badenoch is performing more strongly than she did in the first year of her premiership. There is also no longer an obvious challenger now that Robert Jenrick has defected to Reform UK. Beyond that, the Prime Minister’s many agonies both offer her more opportunities to land blows and flatter her by contrast. The media also has only so much narrative bandwidth, and Starmer’s fate is at once more interesting and, in a happy conjuncture which does not always guide journalists’ attention, more important.
Doubtless Labour will continue to be the main story after the locals. But the Conservatives can’t hide behind that mushroom cloud indefinitely. To be losing almost half your councillors eighteen months after the election, in the face of a satanically unpopular prime minister and openly warring government, is an extremely bad position to be in. Shedding councillors is also the sort of thing Tory MPs really notice, because in an age of withered volunteer bases it is councillors which provide the bulk of many MPs’ local infantry. The 2025 result came as a nasty shock to several who had assumed that surviving in 2024 meant they were safe.
Nor might that be the worst of it. If the Conservatives may in England be able to trace an upward trajectory from last year’s rout, Scotland and Wales look set to be unmitigated disasters. According to YouGov’s MRP forecast for Holyrood, the Tories might be about to record their worst-ever Scottish result at any election and could end up in sixth place; in Wales, the prediction is three Senedd seats — fifth place — and they could be wiped out entirely.
Those aren’t the sort of results where Badenoch’s previous “the plan is working” line will cut it — especially as a real rise in her personal ratings is not, yet, lifting her party with it. People liked William Hague too. She will have to respond to them.
But it isn’t obvious how. Her leadership still has the same fundamental problem it had back when people were last interested in them — to whit, that she won by explicitly positioning herself as the alternative to an ideological row the Party really needs to have. A shrunken parliamentary party would make reshuffles difficult even in otherwise good conditions. But she can’t assemble a team of true believers in a mission she hasn’t set out.
Where Badenoch has set out policy, it is often good; her proposal to abolish stamp duty won both good headlines and plaudits from economists. But she has yet to slaughter a single sacred cow. The Tories have donned once again their tattered mantle of “fiscal responsibility”, but remain committed to massive, unconditional fiscal transfers to older voters. James Cleverly recently revived the 2024 manifesto’s ambition to radically densify London housing, but has no actual mechanism to do so, because that would involve a fight over the shibboleth of “localism”.
And whilst it’s easy for someone in my position to point all this out, it is only fair to acknowledge that picking these fights might not work. The public wildly over-estimates how wealthy this country is and simply does not want to hear about hard choices; the rise of Reform and the Greens reflects a headlong scramble towards the easiest answers going.
That leaves the Conservatives, and Badenoch, in a deeply invidious position
That leaves the Conservatives, and Badenoch, in a deeply invidious position. Fighting hard internal battles and confronting the electorate with uncomfortable truths might simply deliver a mortal blow to a party clinging on for dear life. But the Tories have no hope of winning an auction of stupid promises with Nigel Farage, and taking power on so unrealistic a basis would in any event destroy them as it is destroying Labour.
On second thoughts, perhaps hiding behind the mushroom cloud of Sir Keir Starmer’s premiership isn’t such a bad plan after all.
