Tories try to pull themselves together
A looming election defeat seems to have concentrated minds. Too little, too late? Emily Hohler reports
Boris Johnson could be sent to campaign for the Tories in the Red Wall seats in a bid to avoid “wipeout” at the general election, says Lizzy Buchan in the Daily Mirror. Following the defection of “former Tory attack dog” Lee Anderson to Reform UK on Monday, reports “swiftly emerged” that Johnson could be “deployed” to help the Tories “cling on in the North and the Midlands”. Anderson, the former deputy chairman of the Conservative Party, defected to the Nigel Farage-backed outfit after losing the Tory whip for claiming that Islamists had “control” of London mayor Sadiq Khan. Although many Tories say Anderson was “never a true conservative anyway”, there is a chance that more defections could follow, says Katy Balls in The Spectator. If this happens, “predictions of a coming Tory wipeout will only grow louder”.
Meanwhile, the party’s poll ratings remain dismal. A poll released on Wednesday put the Tories on 25%, 18 points behind Labour, who are on 43%, says Ned Simons on HuffPost. If the result of the Savanta poll is repeated at the general election, it would mean a “landslide” victory for Keir Starmer and a 262-seat majority in the House of Commons, eclipsing Tony Blair’s 1997 electoral victory, which handed him a 179-seat majority. The result confirms a tracker poll, which finds that support for the Tories has fallen back to the level it was at during Liz Truss’s “disastrous premiership”.
MPs had been “praying” that measures in last week’s Budget would be “big enough to somehow bridge the yawning poll chasm”, say Ben Riley-Smith and Dominic Penna in The Telegraph. However, a survey by the More in Common think tank found that it produced “zero poll bounce”. This, along with “multiple” other political problems and Sunak’s perceived failure to take control of events, have led senior Tories to warn that his power is “seeping away”, say George Parker and Lucy Fisher in the Financial Times. There have been “renewed mutterings” about prime minister Rishi Sunak’s leadership, and claims that letters of no confidence have been submitted to Graham Brady, chair of the backbench 1922 committee (53 need to be submitted to trigger a vote of no confidence).
The return of Boris
According to energy minister Graham Stuart, Johnson’s return, which has been confirmed by Johnson’s allies and senior government sources, is a sign that the Tory party is uniting, says Steven Swinford in The Times. Johnson and Sunak fell out after Johnson was forced out of Downing Street in 2022 and Johnson has been publicly critical of Sunak, but relations have allegedly thawed and the pair issued a joint statement on the anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last month.
It’s “hard to pin down” what constitutes a “return”, says Patrick O’Flynn in The Spectator. Is Johnson going to “clear his diary to help his hated usurper out of the goodness of his heart and an overarching loyalty to the Tories”? Or are we talking about a couple of “wet Wednesdays in Wigan and Worksop” and the odd photo opportunity? “Long-time Boris confidante” Nadine Dorries says there is “no thawing of relations, no plans to campaign” and that Johnson and Sunak “have not even spoken for over a year”. A more plausible interpretation is that both are “acting entirely out of self-interest”. Johnson is burnishing his image as a loyal Tory with a view to a possible return as an MP and “another tilt at the leadership”. Sunak’s camp is almost certainly trying to “ward off defections” in the Red Wall. Having 40 MPs thinking they have been “made the political equivalent of human sacrifices by a PM who has ruthlessly pivoted to a Blue Wall strategy is far from ideal”.