Lee Cain is the founder of Charlesbye Strategy and served as Downing Street Director of Communications
Most people in the Conservative Party are not yet willing to admit this publicly, but it is time to face reality. Kemi Badenoch is failing as leader, the party is in a worse position than when she took over, and the comfort being taken from her personal ratings is the same comfort William Hague’s supporters took before he led the party to a second consecutive landslide defeat.
While I am in the minority in saying this, the evidence is beyond dispute. More than a year and a half into the job, last week’s local elections were her first real electoral test – and from a low base, with the party on the floor in the polls when she took over, Badenoch has taken it backwards. This time the Conservatives lost nearly 500 seats and eight councils, the sixth consecutive election in which the party has shed support. Project those results forward to a general election and the forecast is roughly 96 Conservative MPs, against around 284 for Reform. This shouldn’t come as any surprise – the party’s national polling is now even lower than Liz Truss’ chaotic 49-day tenure in Downing Street.
Despite the losses, Kemi’s supporters have a ready answer – and it has some merit. The brand damage runs too deep for any leader to recover quickly, they say, and Kemi’s personal ratings tell a more encouraging story. This is, in part, true.
In our research, conducted with Merlin Strategy ahead of the local elections, Kemi was the leader most likely to be described as “intelligent” and a “leader”, and her performances at PMQs have been improving. Give her time, they argue, and the personal ratings will eventually drag the party ratings with them.
I understand the argument. I just don’t believe it, because we have seen it before and we know how it ends.
William Hague was a formidable parliamentary performer: witty and well-prepared. He regularly got the better of Blair at the despatch box. Hague’s personal ratings improved and his supporters made exactly the case that Kemi’s supporters are making now. He still led the Conservatives to a second consecutive landslide defeat, because the country doesn’t elect leaders on the basis of PMQs and personal approval ratings only take you so far when the party itself has nothing to say.
The truly alarming signal from last week was not what happened to the Conservative vote, but was what happened to Labour’s. Starmer’s support collapsed in large numbers and Kemi failed to attract them – they went to Reform. In the minds of millions of people who once formed the Conservative coalition, Reform has already replaced the Tories as the real opposition, the vehicle for change, the answer to a Labour government that has disappointed them. The Conservative Party has not just been beaten in these elections: it has been replaced.
Most concerningly, those voters are not coming back. Our research found that only one-in-seven former Conservatives who moved to Reform say they would return to the party even if Reform fails to deliver on its promises. This is the permanent abandonment of the party, on Kemi’s watch, without any serious strategy to arrest it.
The damaged Tory brand is a big reason for this – but Kemi also has to take responsibility for the failure. In the critical first year of her leadership, Kemi deliberately abandoned the field – saying her party needed time to conduct a policy review – providing space for Nigel Farage to fill.
Reform is the public alternative to Labour on the right because Farage has been given the space to define what insurgent conservatism looks like in this political moment, set the terms of the debate about Britain’s future and occupied the ground the Conservative Party had vacated. Eight months on we are still to see a serious policy platform but the position of opposition has been lost. When voters were asked who is best placed to stop Labour, 52 per cent named Reform while just 21 per cent named the Conservatives.
Under her predecessor, voters were furious at the Conservatives. Under Kemi, they are simply indifferent, and in many ways indifference is the harder condition to recover from because people aren’t thinking about you at all.
Our research bears this out: only 25 per cent of voters say their view of the Conservative Party has improved since the last election while 19 per cent say it has worsened. And 19 per cent say they no longer think about the Conservative Party at all. Among current Reform voters, most of whom voted Conservative in 2024, and precisely the voters Kemi most needs to win back, that figure rises to 42 per cent.
This is because people don’t believe they are a vehicle for change. Just six per cent of voters now describe the Conservatives as “radical” – against 31 per cent for Reform – in a country where 69 per cent of voters want “radical change” to the political system.
In short, Kemi must define what she and the Tories stand for. What problems does it exist to solve and what is its moral story it must tell to the country? Why should any voter conclude that something has genuinely changed when the party says nothing new and the faces at the top of the shadow cabinet are largely the same as those they voted out a few years ago, and when the radical policy platform that has been promised for so long remains nowhere to be found?
A reshuffle is long overdue, and new talent needs to be put in front of the country in the shadow great offices of state roles, people who are hungry and have something to prove and who give voters a concrete reason to believe the party has actually changed rather than simply rebranded.
After last week’s results, Labour is at least beginning to confront the uncomfortable reality that its leader and its direction need urgent correction. The Conservatives appear to be moving in the opposite direction, convincing themselves that things are on the right course and ignoring all the evidence to the contrary.
If nothing changes, the most positive outcome is that the Conservative Party ends up propping up a Nigel Farage government, and Kemi will come to those negotiations with almost nothing to bargain with. A party in third place, still falling, will have to accept terms that make the Treaty of Versailles seem generous. It would be the end of the Conservative Party as a national force, and the tragedy is that it was entirely preventable.
Last week should have been a wake-up call – the country wants radical change and a party bold enough to offer it. If the Conservatives keep waiting for a Kemi bounce that doesn’t exist, it will not just be managing its own decline. It will be accelerating Farage’s rise to Downing Street.