The Tories have suffered the worst fate of all: irrelevance

Yahoo

02-05-2025

On what otherwise looks set to be a miserable day for the Conservatives, Kemi Badenoch can take heart that she still has one fan. Sky News asked Nigel Farage for his message to the Tory leader. Flushed with Reform UK's Runcorn and Helmsby success, he was effusive: 'Kemi Badenoch, please stay. Please don't resign. We want you to stay on as leader. I'll out some money if you want to keep you there'.
Not, perhaps, the endorsement Badenoch was looking for. But Farage's enthusiasm is understandable. Across the country – Northumberland, Hertfordshire, Lincolnshire, Staffordshire, and elsewhere – the story is the same: Reform usurping the Tories in areas where once the party's vote was weighed, not counted. Even if Runcorn was gained from Labour's expense, the Conservative vote halved.
As the days draws on, the news will only get worse. These elections were in Tory heartlands – rural, provincial, and won with stonking majorities by Boris Johnson back in 2021. But now the Conservatives are besieged on all sides – by Labour in the Brexit-voting North and Midlands, by the Lib Dems in the leafy South and South-West, and by Reform everywhere. Farage's grin will get wider and wider.
If there is any great Tory success in these results, it will be one of expectation management. With various suggestions circulating in the last few days that the Tories might lost all the 19 councils they had, to even hold one will be treated as a triumph. suggest Paul Bristow has won the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough mayoralty: expect him to become CCHQ's poster boy.
Yet even as unfortunate Shadow Cabinet members do the Comical Ali routine on the morning media round – always going to be difficult, party under new leadership, nothing to see here – reality cannot be fooled. Andrea Jenkyns may not have been the greatest loss to the Tory ranks. But the ex-MP's victory for Reform in Greater Lincolnshire is a totem of the ongoing loss of previously safe Tory areas.
Repeating Boris Johnson's stonking 2021 success in these elections was an impossible task. Since then, we've had Partygate, Trussonomics, and Toryism's worst defeat since James II's exile. But Badenoch has now been leader for six months. Under her, the Conservatives have only gone further backwards. Her approval ratings are dire and getting worse. The more voters see of her, the more they dislike her.
Farage cuts through because he articulates a vision that speaks to the frustrations voters have with our broken political system. By contrast, Badenoch has nothing to say. The public aren't interested in her Potemkin policy commissions. They want solutions, but this Tory Party has no interest in providing them. They are an irrelevance: yesterday's party, loathed, ignored, and moribund.
Even with a government as shocking as this – releasing criminals early, cutting winter fuel payments, hiking taxes, and surrendering the Chagos Islands – the Conservatives aren't landing any blows. The stark reality is that politics is the Farage vs Keir Starmer show, with no room for Badenoch. She has little appeal to voters lost to Reform, Labour, or the Lib Dems. Tories are becoming disillusioned.
However bad today is, expect MPs to give Badenoch the benefit of the doubt. Too many, having kept their seats at the last election, suffer from survivorship bias, and want to deny how bad the situation is. But they can't fool themselves forever. The party is dying on its feet. The buck stops with Badenoch. It's now not a case of if she goes, but when.
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