Summer election rumours swirl as Sunak faces poll reckoning

Two phone calls summed up Rishi Sunak’s week. When the prime minister spoke to Volodymyr Zelensky last week, he told the Ukrainian president: “I want you to know we are right behind you and we are going to stay with you all the way.” An aide said: “He is clearly conscious of the immense personal strain Zelensky must be under.”

As Sunak enters what could be one of the defining weeks of his premiership, with local elections set to deliver another blow, the same might be said for the prime minister.

On his way to the airport to fly to Poland, Sunak called a succession of Tory MPs to talk about his planned announcement that the government will raise defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2030, at a cost of £75 billion. “There were a few difficult moments. We were going in and out of tunnels,” the aide said. “There was lots of calling back.”

If this seems like a metaphor for the somewhat awkward relationship between No 10 and Conservative backbenchers, the defence spending pledge was also evidence that Sunak has listened to his MPs and adopted a policy which is popular with voters and the Tory right. The Tories said they would pay for the plan by axing 72,000 officials, returning the civil service to pre-pandemic levels — a move which meant Labour did not rush to back the plan, creating a potential election dividing line.

It came after Sunak made a big speech on welfare reform, and as the Rwanda bill finally got through parliament, opening the way for the first deportation flights to take off by July. In Labour headquarters in Southwark, south London, strategists looked at this onslaught and concluded that the Tories were sharpening up their act and honing a three-pronged message for the general election.

“Their policies are getting stronger as they get closer to general election,” a Labour source said. “It’s very unusual for a party of government to be spending £70 billion the week before local elections. These are general election-type dividing lines that they’re hoping to achieve on welfare, on the military and on Rwanda. Our argument is that weak leadership, pandering to your back benches, leads to chaos and chaos costs people more. In the middle of a cost of living crisis, they’re not talking about the economy at all.”

Derailed by a defection

Any hope that Sunak getting on the front foot would quell Tory jitters was sunk on Saturday night when the former Tory minister Dan Poulter, a practising doctor, defected to Labour, saying he could no longer look his constituents and patients “in the eye”. To add to the noises off, friends of Boris Johnson say he has now completed his memoir, which is likely to cause Sunak difficulties when it is published this year. And Liz Truss, Sunak’s predecessor, has made clear she will continue to make public interventions.

The Tories remain on course for a drubbing in the local elections. Conservative spin doctors are suggesting the party will lose half of the council seats it is defending on Thursday. Sunak’s personal fate is also closely linked with whether Andy Street and Lord Houchen of High Leven can cling on to their mayoralties in the West Midlands and Tees Valley. New polling from More in Common shows both contests too close to call.

Street is in a statistical tie with the Labour candidate Richard Parker, with a 41 to 39 per cent split. Labour’s Kim McGuinness is in a dead heat with the former Labour mayor of the North of Tyne turned independent candidate Jamie Driscoll to be the first mayor of the North East. The split is 35 to 33.

Despite Ben Bradley’s high profile as a Conservative MP and council leader, Labour’s Claire Ward looks set to become the first mayor of the East Midlands (Bradley has 28 per cent support, Ward has 41 per cent). Andy Burnham (63 per cent) is cruising to re-election in Greater Manchester with the Conservatives (9 per cent) languishing behind Reform (12 per cent).

Sadiq Khan is expected to win a third term as mayor of London but Labour officials are concerned that the new requirement for voters to present photographic ID, and a change to the first past the post voting system, could depress his vote. The Tories ran him close in 2021.

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Labour claims to have conceded defeat in the Tees Valley. Party officials say they are pulling activists out and redeploying them in the West Midlands, where the future of Street, the Tory mayor who is running a highly personal campaign devoid of Conservative branding, is on a knife edge. Labour has been hamstrung by the dire performance of the Labour-run Birmingham council and by opposition to Sir Keir Starmer’s stance on the war in Gaza.

“Houchen will win,” a Labour source said. “We are pulling people out. It’s 50-50 in the West Midlands.” However, the Tories are taking nothing for granted after Houchen came under attack last week from Steve Gibson, chairman of the Championship side Middlesbrough FC, over cronyism claims around the funding of Teesside freeport. “Houchen is more and more under threat,” said one Tory MP.

In the East Midlands, Bradley is still within striking distance of Labour after running what even Labour officials admit is a “strong campaign”. One Tory who has campaigned there said there was “cautious optimism” that the race was “much closer than many predicted”. Bradley winning would demonstrate to Tory MPs worried about their seats in a general election that it was still possible to retain them if they enjoyed high name-recognition among constituents and their individual campaigns were effective.

Labour think they will ultimately hold the seat. “We’re still a slight favourite in the East Midlands,” a party official said. “I think we’ll win North East, I think they’ll win North Yorkshire.” They are confident, too, of winning the Blackpool South by-election. Morgan McSweeney, Labour’s chief strategist, has focused efforts on winning councillors in seats the party is targeting in the general election. Labour is optimistic of winning in Hartlepool in the red wall and Milton Keynes in the south, where it has not held the council since 2000.

Praise from Pelosi

Opposition morale was boosted on Wednesday by a visit to party HQ by Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic former speaker of the House of Representatives in the United States. In an address to staff, she commented on the winning mindset Starmer has introduced. “He made a decision to win,” Pelosi said. “And he’s made every decision along the way in favour of winning. And sometimes, that changes things.” She added: “This election is a heartbeat away. It’s right around the corner, so thank heavens you’re so ready and organised.”

Labour’s impatience for a general election revealed itself again last week when party officials warned general election candidates they should prepare for Sunak to announce a summer election on Monday. Labour aides were instrumental in whipping up the idea, which threw Westminster into one of its periodic frenzies on Thursday.

Senior sources in both Downing Street and Conservative campaign headquarters (CCHQ) say the plan is still for an autumn election. However, there is a firm “Plan B” in place, if results this week force Sunak’s hand. A senior party figure said: “The contingency is June 27 but they have looked at several dates in October, November and December. There is a 90 per cent chance still of the election being between those three months.”

The most likely scenario is Sunak announcing the election in his speech to the Tory party conference on October 2, with parliament dissolved the next day and November 14 as polling day.

A government source pointed out that holding a summer election would be a logistical nightmare for the Conservative campaign team. There are four or five waves of parliamentary candidate selections still to take place, running into August or early September. While the Labour manifesto is already written, work is continuing on the Tory policy offering.

Despite a better couple of weeks for Sunak, the Tory right is planning a fresh onslaught against the prime minister, with public statements against him and letters calling for a vote of no confidence in his leadership. Rebels say the count, which needs to hit 53 to trigger a vote, is currently in the high twenties but that could rise if the election results are disastrous. Rebel leaders met last week at Henson’s Bar and Social, an oak-panelled cocktail lounge in Soho, central London, to draw up their plans.

A few weeks ago it was suggested that Tory right-wingers would be prepared to back Penny Mordaunt, the leader of the Commons, as a caretaker prime minister. Mordaunt’s allies dismissed this as a smear by her opponents. She says there should be no “Westminster gymnastics” but senior figures insist there have been several conversations in the past two weeks about exactly that.

A leading rebel said: “Penny has had two meetings in her parliamentary office with leading figures from the right, the kind of people she would not want to be seen meeting with in public. The figures on the right have been saying that if this comes to pass, we have to come together. She is asking for people’s support but keeping it implicit. Her outriders have been having more detailed conversations in other parliamentary offices about whether there could be a coronation and who she might need to give jobs to. Essentially, they have come to an accommodation.”

Downing Street is watching Mordaunt closely, as she has been on a media blitz over the past week. Tory whips are aware of chatter that she might resign in the next six weeks, but her intervention today suggests that is not on the cards.

Rebel sources say work has been done on how a new leader would take the fight to Labour. “The strapline they have come up with is ‘100 days to save Britain’,” a leading rebel said. There have also been conversations about giving Tory grassroots members the right to confirm the decision of MPs in a rubber-stamp yes-no vote so they feel they have been consulted.

MPs on the right think the presumptive frontrunner Kemi Badenoch is not interested in the job before a general election, while Mordaunt would be palatable to most Tory factions and the public if she was surrounded by senior figures on the right, such as Suella Braverman, the former home secretary, and Robert Jenrick, the former immigration minister. “We should not have a long, protracted battle,” said one of those familiar with the conversations. “We can’t afford it. So it’s scenario-planning. It has been happening this week and last.”

Jenrick is putting down a marker by unveiling plans to cut legal migration without the need for primary legislation, in an attempt to force Sunak to act before a general election as a final throw of the dice to revive Conservative fortunes. He said: “National insurance cuts haven’t worked. The one play left open on the chess board is to go much further on legal migration to stop the bleed to Reform and get our wavering voters out. It would marry good Conservative policy with smart electoral politics.”

Sunak’s commitment to defence spending led to another outburst of leadership activity from Grant Shapps, the defence secretary, who has been openly wooing MPs for weeks with drinks dos, in an attempt to position himself as a possible successor to Sunak if he falls. Shapps had a “glossy brochure” printed up and distributed in the MPs’ tearoom, in effect claiming credit for the cash boost. At least two MPs complained to the whips about his behaviour.

Separately, fellow cabinet ministers say a senior official in the MoD has complained to No 10 and the Cabinet Office that several of Shapps’s political advisers are spending the bulk of their time plotting his leadership bid rather than helping to run the department. “I think we have reached Peak Grant,” said a minister.

Shapps appears to have had his wings clipped, since he last week publicly urged MPs to get behind the PM. “Let him get on with the job,” he said of Sunak. “He’s doing a great job. He’s doing it under difficult circumstances.”

Sunak will do a public event on Friday and again the following Monday to show he is not hiding away. The Tories will also keep up the pressure on welfare reform, publishing a green paper on tackling the country’s “sicknote” culture. The following week, Downing Street is hoping for good news in the form of quarterly inflation figures and GDP data they expect to show a “bigger lift” in growth.

Perhaps most importantly in terms of persuading MPs to let him continue, Sunak’s personal funk of the past few months seems to have lifted. Maybe he took some inspiration from Zelensky.

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