"It’s not, as they say, over until the fat lady sings. But I think most people can now hear her clearing her throat."

PopCon Director, Mark Littlewood, provides his analysis of May 1st elections.

What to make of the message sent to the political classes by voters on May 1st? 

From a Conservative Party perspective, I am reminded of a comedy skit featuring Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. Cook assumes the role of the aristocratic and rather unhinged owner of the Frog and Peach restaurant and Moore of his interviewer. Moore suggests that the financial record of the restaurant suggests the enterprise has been a disaster. Cook firmly rejects this assertion saying that “disaster” is not the right word at all. Instead, he insists, it would be much more apt to describe it as a “catastrophe”.

For Tories, it is impossible to pretend that the vote last week was anything other than appalling. Two thirds of seats being defended were lost and the Conservatives failed to retain control of a single council. Paul Bristow did manage to claim the Cambridgeshire mayoralty from Labour, but everywhere else the picture was between bleak and apocalyptic.

According to Sir John Curtice, had last week’s voting patterns been mapped onto a nationwide General Election, the Conservative Party would have come fourth in vote share – with a risible 15% - and secured just twelve seats in the House of Commons. That would not be a disappointing or mixed set of results, it would count as an extinction level event.

Of course, Labour also took an absolute shellacking. Clinging on to a couple of mayoralties by their fingertips, they nearly contrived to come 5th in council seats behind the Greens. Labour and the Tories account for more than 80% of MPs – had a General Election taken place on Thursday, the two parties would have secured barely a third of the total vote between them.

The spectacular rise of Reform is the electoral phenomenon of these times and, so far, the Conservatives have not found a way to deal with it.

For some of those on the regicidal wing of the Tory party, the preferred approach might be to continue to burn through leaders at a rate of knots until we eventually stumble across someone with the magic formula.

I suspect the problem facing the party runs far deeper than this and the solution will therefore have to be considerably more imaginative. Kemi’s current approach is to take her time in developing policy and seek to portray the Conservatives as having properly worked out, in considerable detail, how to implement a programme in government that would bring about meaningful change.

There’s a logic to this strategy, but it misses a wider point. The electorate are not going seriously to listen to any party unless it believes that the party has correctly diagnosed the nation’s ills and has the public’s interest at heart. The most brilliant surgeon in the world won’t attract much custom if people feel his diagnosis is wildly inaccurate and he doesn’t have much care about the interests of his patients.

To my mind, this means the urgent task facing the Conservatives is to show through a series of actions, not words, how it has changed since it was in office. This might involve rolling out some policy papers, but that can’t be the totality of the exercise. Frankly, it will also need some eye-catching stunts.

Nigel Farage was initially keen to set up his own inquiry into the rape gang scandal. He subsequently went off the idea (fearing that the inability to subpoena witnesses would render it meaningless). However, it was an elegant way of signalling how seriously he took the matter.

Similarly, Reform-led councils are now indicating they will seek to use all the tools they can find to eradicate DEI, arrest the insane march to carbon net zero and fight back against our hotel industry being pivoted to the purpose of housing asylum-seekers. They may not succeed in all – or even any - of these endeavours but it makes it unambiguously clear where Reform stands, what it considers to be the major problems facing Britain and underscores a willingness to tackle them.

In contrast, the Conservatives are embarking on a lengthy consultation process to attempt to draw up the party’s values, principles and – eventually – some policies. This sometimes feels a bit like the political equivalent of being held in a telephone-queuing system. For two years.

The Conservatives shouldn’t be written off though. Things can change in politics both rapidly and unexpectedly. The death of the Conservative-Labour two-party system has been heralded many times before only for a remarkable resurrection to take place. It’s not, as they say, over until the fat lady sings. But I think most people can now hear her clearing her throat.

Keep the flag of freedom flying.