David Gauke is a former Justice Secretary, and was an independent candidate in South-West Hertfordshire at the 2019 general election.
By Friday, we could all make our preliminary assessments of the various elections held on Thursday, even if many of the results had yet to come in. I certainly had a go.
My initial views were that it was a very bad set of results for the Conservatives suggesting that a heavy general election defeat is on the cards but that there probably was not going to be an attempt by Tory MPs to remove Rishi Sunak; holding on to second place in Blackpool South and Ben Houchen retaining the Tees Valley mayoralty had seen to that.
Saturday brought more good news for the Blues, by which I mean Ipswich Town got promoted. But for the Conservatives, it was bad news. Andy Street just failed to cling on in the West Midlands and Susan Hall got defeated more heavily in London than many activists from either of the main parties expected. Even so, Sunak seems safe for now.
If looking for Tory consolation, one could at the Rawlings and Thrasher analysis that suggests that on a national share of the vote basis, Labour’s lead of seven points is not enough to obtain a Parliamentary majority. There are, however, good reasons to be sceptical about this.
Labour seem to be performing well where they need to, “others” (on 23 per cent) will be squeezed and are generally left of centre (the Greens did well), and national polls generally provide a better indication of public opinion. There may be a lack of enthusiasm for Labour, but that does not look like stopping them winning a big majority.
To a large extent, these were a set of elections that has changed very little. An imminent Tory May meltdown is avoided, we remain on track for a Labour victory in the autumn.
Perhaps more interestingly – at least in terms of the future of the Conservative Party – has been the electoral fates of the three highest profile candidates in the mayoral elections – Street, Houchen and Hall.
Had Street won by 1500 votes, rather than lost by that total, everyone would have hailed it as a personal triumph. Small margins matter. But the fact remains that Street substantially out-performed his party and had established himself as a competent, effective, and pragmatic mayor who could get things done.
Politically, he is an authentic centrist, able to appeal to and work with people across the political spectrum; he articulated a pro-growth, pro-business agenda and his defeat is a loss to the West Midlands and the Conservative Party. I hope he continues to play a prominent role in centre right politics.
Houchen also substantially out-performed the Tories. His result in 2021 was truly extraordinary and a swing against him was only to be expected but, for anyone familiar with the traditional political geography of this country, it is remarkable that Tees Valley returned a Conservative mayor (even one who “forgot” his blue rosette) in a year like this.
There will be those who argue that Houchen provides the model for the future of the Conservative Party. Like Street, he presents himself as an energetic problem-solver, a man who gets things done.
But in style and substance they differ. While Street is a natural conciliator, Houchen is more combative. Street is a social liberal; Houchen has more populist instincts on cultural issues. And whereas both argued the case for more government investment in their areas, Houchen has been more economically interventionist – even nationalising an airport.
Houchen represents a form of big-state conservatism that many in the party might find attractive. Free market-sceptics, like Nick Timothy and Michael Gove, will point to his success and argue that this is a route back for the Tories after an election defeat.
It is impossible to deny that his agenda and style has worked for him in Tees Valley. But there are reasons to be sceptical that this is the right model for the country as a whole.
Some of those economic interventions are already controversial on value-for-money grounds. Tees Valley has long been treated favourably by central government as the testing ground for levelling-up and that might not always be the case. Houchen is no fiscal conservative and those parts of the country paying for the subsidies going to Tees Valley might just start to resent it.
Houchen is evidently a very effective politician and his success was a personal triumph. It does not follow that his model – based on creating lots of manufacturing jobs – will work across the country.
The lessons from London, however, are very straight-forward. Labour campaigners reported that there was little enthusiasm for Sadiq Khan and that turning out their vote was going to be difficult. He is not seen as having delivered on crime or housing, and his ULEZ policy could be described as “brave”.
London does lean left and this is a bad time for the Tories but there genuinely was a chance to run him close and even, at a push, win it.
Instead, the Tories put forward a candidate who was embarrassingly poor. David Frost may have welcomed Hall’s selection and announced that Khan “may not realise it but he has a fight on his hands” but in reality the biggest fight the London mayor had was to keep a straight face.
Every Hall broadcast interview was a car-crash; her historic social media contributions were a litany of horrors; she gave every indication that she hated London. Against a vulnerable opponent, all she achieved was to drive Liberal Democrat voters in south west London (who in 2015 were often voting Tory) to turn out to support the Labour candidate.
How she got through the vetting process is something of a mystery. It is easy to say that more effort should have been put in to persuade a stronger candidate to run (I have said it myself), but London Tories claim that they tried.
But it is not good enough to say that there just were not the right people coming forward: the absence of the right people coming forward to run as a Conservative candidate in London is the issue.
Anyone with a hope of winning as a Tory in London would have to do so as a liberal internationalist – as Boris Johnson presented himself in 2008 and 2012 – but those are exactly the type of people who have been told in recent years that the Conservative Party is not for them.
Following these elections, there are many voices saying that the Tories are failing to deliver proper conservatism, which is code for saying that the party should move to the right. London is probably the last place in the country to try out that theory but that is what the Tories did with Hall and looked what happened: she did not even succeed in squeezing the Reform vote.
These mayoralty elections might not tell us much about the result of the next general election, but they do give us a clue about where the Conservatives should go afterwards. Be more like Andy Street – and less like Susan Hall.
The post David Gauke: The lesson of the local elections – more Street, less Hall appeared first on Conservative Home.
Click this link for the original source of this article.
Author: David Gauke
This content is courtesy of, and owned and copyrighted by, http://www.conservativehome.com and its author. This content is made available by use of the public RSS feed offered by the host site and is used for educational purposes only. If you are the author or represent the host site and would like this content removed now and in the future, please contact USSANews.com using the email address in the Contact page found in the website menu.