They were bad results at the 2025 local elections and it’s fair to say that most Conservatives were braced for it.
The high water mark of 2021 was always going to be a challenge to match and coming less than a year from an almighty General Election defeat, where the public still haven’t forgiven the party. Most Conservatives knew beforehand that it was going to be bad and our panel reflects that with 49.6 per cent saying the actual results were about what they had expected.
However those who said the results were worse than expected (32.8 per cent) or much worse than expected (13.8 per cent) totalled 46.6 percent. Now given how much internal Party bracing there was before the results, how much expectation management there was put out there, that’s still a lot of people who read ConservativeHome and had seen all that on our site and still thought the party got a worse result than they’d expected.
It also suggests a deal of frustration within the membership and sympathy for hard working Conservative councillors who lost out through very little to do with their personal record in their former wards.
There’s a reflection of that when we asked our panel to judge on results in their own area. Clearly over half didn’t have elections in their area and of those that did 23.7 percent said the results were what they had expected. Of those who said the results were worse, the larger number (17 percent) is in the ‘much worse’ option, than the somewhat worse option (10.7 per cent) and taken together is 4 percent larger than those who got what they’d expected.
Now, Kemi Badenoch wrote on ConservativeHome last Monday to announce a review into the results to take whatever lessons there are. One party staffer pointed out the day after to our team that they hadn’t actually seen the results of a review into the 2024 General Election, so was perhaps a little sceptical about another ‘review’ into these results.
Nonetheless dates matter.
We published the leader’s article early on Monday the 12th May, and this survey was conducted over the 12th and 13th, and the overwhelming response from the panel was that the party has responded inadequately to the local elections results.
59.4% of our panel thought the Party’s response was inadequate. This does not suggest what response they would have preferred and we cannot read into this any uniformity of view on what response would have been ‘more than adequate’ or ‘adequate’.
It does, however, point to a level of frustration amongst our panel that what they are getting at the moment is not good enough and they’d like it addressed, quickly.
