The Daily Telegraph - Saturday
Two Rs leave Right pining for ‘dream ticket of Farage and Boris’
entered No10 in October 2022. This means Mr Sunak has overseen the highest average drop in vote share for a Tory incumbent since records began in 1950.
Sir John Major’s vote share fall by an average of 18 per cent points.
Compared with other incumbent Conservative prime ministers, the average losses of vote share accrued by Rishi Sunak and Sir John are almost double those of every prime minister from Harold Macmillan onwards.
A total of 10 by-elections have now been lost since the Tories were returned to office in December 2019, which is the most in the space of a single parliament since the 1960s. However, the net loss is nine, as the Conservatives gained Hartlepool from Labour on Boris Johnson’s watch in May 2021.
Six of the 10 defeats have taken place while Mr Sunak has been in charge. He has a success rate in defending seats of just 13.5 per cent, the lowest since Sir John Major, who did not retain a single seat at a by-election.
As well as the Kingswood and Wellingborough losses, Selby and Ainsty and Somerton and Frome fell to Labour and the Liberal Democrats respectively on July 20 last year, while
Six of the Tories’ 10 by-election losses since 2019 have come under Mr Sunak
Labour was victorious in both Tamworth and Mid Bedfordshire on Oct 19.
Mid Bedfordshire previously had a Tory majority of 24,664, which became the highest numerical majority overturned at a by-election in history.
The second biggest was 24,239 in Tiverton and Honiton, which was also won by the Liberal Democrats in 2021 towards the end of Mr Johnson’s premiership.
Downing Street will be watching the progress of Reform with caution after Richard Tice’s insurgent Right-wing party achieved its best ever results on Thursday, securing 10 per cent of the vote in Kingswood and 13 per cent of the vote at Wellingborough.
These figures mean Reform has almost quadrupled its previous average by-election vote share since its creation in 2020.
Reform’s performance in Kingswood was enough to deny the Tories victory, with its vote share being greater than the size of the Labour majority.
The only crumb of comfort for the Tories is that Reform is struggling to replicate the success of Ukip at by-elections in the early 2010s, when the Eurosceptic party win two contests outright.
Ben Riley-Smith Political Editor
AMID a blizzard of political news this week, perhaps the most telling moment came when a young man in Co Durham stepped up to a microphone and spoke to the
Prime Minister.
He was one of a few dozen Rightleaning voters sitting in a GB News studio for a live question and answer session with Rishi Sunak on Monday night.
“The Reform Party are surging in the polls, they’re hitting a note with many disillusioned Conservative voters like myself,” explained Jack, a softly spoken 28-year-old.
“What are you going to do to convince traditional Conservative voters that their vote is still better off with you?” The wave of applause that followed showed he was not the only one.
The Prime Minister launched into the defence, laying out a line he will use again and again in the months ahead to tempt people away from Richard Tice and Nigel Farage’s party.
A vote for Reform is simply “a vote to put Keir Starmer into No 10” argued Mr Sunak, trying to force minds onto the reality that only one of those two men will end up as UK leader.
Yet come the end of the week there was an indicator of just how much success that strategy is having, in the form of a pair of by-election results that were Reform’s best ever.
In Wellingborough, Reform won 13 per cent of the vote. In Kingswood, it was 10 per cent. Both broadly matched the party’s nationwide polling. In other words: the surge of support for Reform is real.
When Tory strategists plot out their Great Escape plan from the bind of the current polls, at its centre is a determination to convince 2019 Tory voters not to switch to Reform.
There are few hopes in CCHQ of another grand bargain like the one in the 2019 election that saw the Brexit Party not stand in Tory seats to help deliver Brexit, an underappreciated factor in Boris Johnson’s whopping victory in that general election.
Not least because Mr Tice, Reform’s leader, appears on a one-man mission to destroy the Conservative Party. Some Tory MPs suspect hurt feelings are a factor after Mr Tice’s attempts to be the Conservatives’ London mayoral candidate in 2018 were rebuffed.
Quite what Mr Farage’s game is remains a topic of speculation among Mr Sunak’s inner circle. He is remaining at arm’s length from Reform, putting GB News commitments ahead of the obligations his “honorary president” role might be expected to bring.
This week he heads back to the United States, appearing on a line-up including Donald Trump and Liz Truss at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).
Mr Farage has, notably, not decided to run in this election cycle. Why? One Tory MP thinks sitting out this campaign would make it easier for him to try to rejoin the Tories afterwards.
“There are only two rock stars in British politics: Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage,” the Brexiteer MP said.
“I think that colleagues, at least on the Right of the party, would love Farage to come in. The fragmentation of the party is becoming increasingly obvious. The dream ticket would be Farage and Boris.”
As the former man spent by-election night broadcasting and rubbing salt into Tory wounds, the latter was keeping his head down.
The former prime minister has let it be known that if Mr Sunak really wants him to hit the campaign trail – as
disclosed last week Tory strategists hope – he needs to call and make amends.
The pair have barely talked in the past year except for a nodding hello at a Remembrance Sunday service, Mr Johnson has told others.
Mr Sunak has at least been spared one potential Boris-shaped headache. The tell-all book Mr Johnson is penning about his time in Downing Street – one with an advance believed to be in seven figures – will not be released until after the general election.
But another of Mr Johnson’s endeavours remains a potential pitfall. He and his team have been holding talks about when his new GB News show will launch, giving him a broadcast platform to question current Tory strategy.
Along with Reform, there was a second R that created the one-two blow for Downing Street at the end of this week: Recession. Or, as Labour and the Liberal Democrats have dubbed it “Rishi’s recession” (the
front page went for “Rishession”).
So delighted were both parties with this framing that a squabble erupted among aides about who got there first, with the Lib Dems accusing Labour of pinching their idea.
“We haven’t even noticed what the Lib Dems have been doing,” sniped an ally of Rachel Reeves, the Labour shadow chancellor whose team pumped out the line.
“It wouldn’t be like Rachel Reeves to have plagiarised,” a senior Lib Dem source shot back – a reference to the fact that a book the shadow chancellor released last year was found to feature passages lifted from Wikipedia.
The Labour shadow cabinet team in fact had been preparing for the “recession moment” for weeks.
Two economists working for Ms Reeves, Spencer Thompson and
Neil Amin-Smith, both in their thirties, had been working contacts in the financial world trying to pinpoint when it would happen.
When it came on Thursday morning, two quarters of negative growth last year confirmed by the Office for National Statistics, a press conference with Ms Reeves was called for her to hammer home the point.
In the days ahead, when people google “how much tax am I spending” or similar, Labour adverts declaring “Rishi’s recession” will pop up. They have also taken out advertising space with the
“It was as much a political moment as an economic moment,” said a Reeves ally of the recession declaration. “It was the chance for us to do a ruthless dissection of all the Tory attack lines.”
For the Tories, it was a case of what could have been. The two Rs switched the narrative on a week that otherwise had been politically damaging for Sir Keir, the Labour leader.
Senior Labour folk privately admit they dropped the ball by not suspending Azhar Ali, their Rochdale by-election candidate, on Sunday when his controversial remarks on the Israel-Gaza conflict first emerged.
As for the fortnight to come, one big political moment will loom into view: the Budget.
The Treasury has been scrambling to downplay tax cut expectations this week after the fiscal headroom it is estimated to have roughly halved back to about £13billion.
Mr Sunak and Mr Hunt have more one-on-one chats scheduled for this month, while new groups of Tory MPs will take their requests to the Chancellor on Wednesday.
‘There are only two rock stars in British politics: Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage’