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drive the more they care about party-
gate,” a minister said.
Campaigners are trying to distance
themselves from the centre — concen-
trating on local issues — with varying
degrees of success. Yet several southern
MPs sense a broader change in the
political weather in their local patches,
with the re-emergence of the Liberal
Democrats as an electoral force after
seven years in the wilderness and a
Labour Party without the millstone of
Jeremy Corbyn around its neck.
“The glue that held the 2019 coalition
together was Jeremy Corbyn,” a new
Tory MP said. “Now for Remainer
Tories it’s not there. On middle-class
doorsteps I am having to talk people
round.” Although council candidates
emphasise local issues, another MP
joked: “The problem with the ‘bins not
Boris’ argument is that Labour is going
to make it ‘do you trust Boris to empty
your bins?’”
At a briefing for Conservative advis-ers at party headquarters yesterday,
officials played down prospects of a
successful night. After a slideshow on
key battlegrounds, an official told the
advisers: “If you could design a battle-
ground that’s as good as possible for
Labour, it would be this.”
A source said: “Expectation manage-
ment was the order of the day.”
Tory problems have been com-
pounded by what strategists see as a
pact by the two main opposition parties
to stand aside in favour of each other
where they have relative strengths.
Among the councils in the north
where the Lib Dems are not putting up
a complete slate of candidates is
Hartlepool, which returned a Tory MP
for the first time last year. It is a similar
story in Bury, where 51 council seats are
up for election. The Tories and Labour
are again fielding an almost full com-
plement but the Lib Dems have put in
nomination papers for only 15 wards.
Yet in the former Lib Dem heartlandof Somerset, Labour are contesting
only 45 of the 110 seats available,
whereas the Lib Dems are going head to
head with the Tories for almost all the
wards. In Cheltenham, where the
Tories hold the parliamentary seat with
a majority of only 981, Labour are con-
testing only 38 per cent of the seats.
The fear among Johnson supporters
is that such informal pacts will magnify
Conservative losses and increase polit-
ical pressure on him if the results are
worse than expected. Bad results in the
south, which still count for the majority
of Tory seats, will unnerve many MPs
and make them question again whether
Johnson is the right leader.
As one red wall MP put it: “There are
a number of my colleagues in the south
who would be prepared to sacrifice a
majority of 80 for a majority of 10 in
their own image.”
There is evidence in Westminster
that Johnson’s enemies are plotting for
such a scenario. One senior backbench-er said: “The parliamentary party has
moved into full campaign mode. There
are several candidates asking for my
support. The One Nationers are all be-
hind Jeremy Hunt and as soon as the
results are in it will come into the open.”
Another added: “Jeremy is the only
serious candidate who hasn’t been
tarnished by being in this government.”
Critics of Johnson play down the idea
that only a “bloodbath” will prompt
action. A senior MP said: “I have had
several people say they are waiting until
after the local elections [to move
against Johnson] but none saying they
are waiting for the result.”
This Johnson critic acknowledged,
however, that there “isn’t a central
guiding mind” co-ordinating efforts to
oust the prime minister. “People are
talking about it in the bubbles of people
they trust, although people whose
views are not known do not want to talk
about it with people they do not trust.”
One discontented member of the
2019 intake said that “even people with
majorities in five figures in Lib Dem-
facing seats are getting twitchy, which is
why they are talking up Jeremy Hunt
for leader because they think he’ll win
them their seats”.
The member added: “I do feel there is
a groundswell now [against Johnson].
The mood really changed last week as it
became apparent that the party is not
prepared to put themselves on the
record behind him. It needs bringing to
a head, so if it’s not after these results it
will be after another fine.”
Yet with Johnson determined to fight
on, his supporters believe that the
rebellion can be seen off, not least
because there is no obvious successor.
“We know there will be people out on
Friday trying to destabilise the boss,”
one confidant said. “But we know who
they are and what they’re trying to do.
They’re contained — the vast majority
of MPs are on side.”
Others in the prime minister’s circle,
however, are not so sure.
“I keep being told the rebels are just
the usual suspects,” a senior govern-
ment figure said. “Well there’s a lot of
usual suspects about.”Q&A
When are the local
elections?
On Thursday. The elections
being contested vary
depending on where you
live. There are 146 councils
in England holding elections
— unitary, metropolitan,
county, district and London
boroughs. In some places
only one third of council
seats are being contested.
In London, however, every
councillor in each of the
32 boroughs is up for
election.
In Scotland and Wales
every council seat is being
contested. In Northern
Ireland the assembly’s
90 seats are up for grabs.
There are also sevendirectly elected mayors
being chosen, in South
Yorkshire, Croydon,
Hackney, Lewisham,
Newham, Tower Hamlets
and Watford.What will be a good result
for the main parties?
It can be difficult to impose
a national narrative on
results that are often highly
localised.
That said, this will be the
first real opportunity to test
whether the Downing Street
parties have hurt the
Conservatives at the ballot
box. Tory campaigners are
especially worried that the
announcement that Boris
Johnson and Rishi Sunak
had been fined by the
Metropolitan Police came
just as postal votes were
beginning to be delivered,
meaning that they mightface an especially intense
backlash.
The key comparison for
Johnson is not necessarily
when the seats were last
contested, in 2018, or even
the 2019 general election —
but the 2021 local elections,
when the Conservatives
were far ahead of Labour in
the national share of the
vote and did especially well
in places where they had
previously not had much of
a foothold. That showed
that the red wall
realignment process did
not end in 2019.
However, if the
Conservatives go
significantly backwards,
some in the party will draw
the conclusion that
Johnson’s unique appeal
has been extinguished. The
results will therefore play a
big role in determiningwhether Conservative MPs
leave Johnson in place as
their leader.
Conversely, Sir Keir
Starmer must demonstrate
to the Labour Party that its
relatively positive polling
does indeed mean that
some of the voters who
abandoned the party in
recent years are returning
to the fold under his
leadership.
However, Labour
strategists are concerned
that expectations are sky-
high. Although they hope to
stride ahead of the
Conservatives in vote share,
they do not believe that
they are likely to gain a
large number of councillors
— which would risk the
story being that Starmer is
not making as much
progress as his supporters
would wish.Sir Ed Davey, the Liberal Democrat leader, on the campaign trail in Hampshire this week. His party’s resurgence in the south has the prime minister’s allies worriedNews Politics
It’s grim down south for Johnson
Resurgent Lib Dems
and Jeremy Hunt are
among the local
election threats, write
Oliver Wright, Chris
Smyth, Steven Swinford
and Henry Zeffman
Last Saturday evening, somewhat
jet-lagged from his overnight flight
back from Delhi, Boris Johnson logged
on to a Zoom call from Chequers with
more than 80 of his MPs.
For the prime minister, who had
spent the previous 48 hours 4,000 miles
away, where he was still dogged by the
Downing Street parties scandal, the
meeting was something of a tonic.
In an hour-long discussion about the
local elections no one raised the scan-
dal directly with Johnson and the only
mention came from an MP who re-
assured him that they’d spent the
whole day campaigning and it had not
been raised on the doorstep even once.
“The mood was very upbeat,” an ally
of the prime minister said. “What we’re
hearing on the ground is very different
from all the noise in Westminster.”
Yet the noise in Westminster is hard
to ignore. In private MPs say that
although the party’s vote in Thursday’s
local elections is holding up in the
north and Midlands, the picture is
much grimmer in the southern heart-
lands. They expect to lose hundreds of
councillors amid a resurgent threat
from the Liberal Democrats.
Downing Street is privately bracing
itself for new calls for the prime minis-
ter’s resignation after the polls close,
with Jeremy Hunt, the former foreign
secretary, said to be “on manoeuvres”.
A senior minister loyal to Johnson
said: “Hunt hasn’t been very subtle. We
know exactly what he’s up to.”
MPs say the root of Johnson’s prob-
lems is the coalition that gave him an
80-seat majority in 2019 is beginning to
fracture. In the so-called red wall seats
the Downing Street parties scandal has
begun to recede as an issue and by and
large the government is not getting the
blame for the rising cost of living.
“People are still giving us the benefit
of the doubt,” one MP said. “They still
like Boris and insofar as partygate
comes up at all it is in the context of
politicians being all the same.”
It is a very different picture in places
such as Wokingham, St Albans and
Cheltenham, where Tory campaigners
are meeting a hostile reception.
A cabinet minister who has been can-
vassing said Johnson “electrifies” voters
in red wall seats but was far less popular
among middle-class voters in the
southeast. “He faces questions of sub-
stance,” the minister said. “Keeping that
coalition [of seats in the red wall and the
southeast] is going to be very difficult.”
Here the parties scandal is still an
overriding issue, often among tradi-
tional Tory voters on whom the party
used to be able to rely at election time.
“The rule is that the longer the gravel
FINNBARR WEBSTER/GETTY IMAGESRishi Sunak and Boris Johnson have
been tarnished by the parties scandal