‘D-day was the final straw’: Sunak’s blunders
ignite Tory party fury
Long-serving activists and MPs left aghast by unforced
errors, poor strategy and a growing sense of resignation
Rowena
Mason, Eleni Courea, Pippa Crerar, Jessica Elgot and Peter Walker
Fri 7 Jun
2024 15.32 BST
Conservative
candidates and aides have looked on aghast at the missteps of Rishi Sunak’s
campaign over the last fortnight.
Anger has
been building over Sunak allies being parachuted into safe seats, including the
party chair, Richard Holden, the lack of preparation for the snap campaign
within Conservative party headquarters (CCHQ) and the avoidable row over Frank
Hester’s donations.
But nothing
has come close to the fury within the party over the prime minister’s decision
to skip part of the D-day ceremony in France, leaving the stage clear for Keir
Starmer to show leadership and patriotism, as well as for Nigel Farage.
Ultimately,
the choice was the prime minister’s: to come home for an ITV interview or stay
to honour veterans and the fallen. However, many candidates are apoplectic with
rage at the strategists who allowed such a misstep to take place, questioning
the quality at the heart of the Conservative party campaign.
“The spads
and clown advisers who are making these decisions will never work on so much as
a Tory councillor’s campaign again in their lifetime,” said one irate
Conservative source.
Although
the campaign is being overseen in Conservative party headquarters by an
experienced elections strategist, Isaac Levido, Tory candidates are concerned
Sunak’s own advisers and allies appear to be in the ascendancy when it comes to
decision-making.
Conservative
sources described “a rupture that has not healed” between Levido and some Sunak
aides after it became public knowledge that the campaign chief had not been in
favour of a summer election.
Levido has
his own team of professional campaigners alongside the team of Sunakites who
have now taken up office in CCHQ. Those on Sunak’s team include his chief of
staff, Liam Booth-Smith, who was in favour of an early election, Rupert Yorke,
who is organising personnel, and Nerissa Chesterfield, the prime minister’s
communications chief.
Alongside
them is the policy adviser James Nation, who is holding the pen on the
Conservative manifesto, and is blamed by some MPs for the surprise nature of
the national service announcement with no pitch-rolling.
Among
staff, there is a feeling that the attack operation, led by the former special
adviser Marcus Natale, is failing to land enough blows and that they are being
outgunned by Labour, although spinners landed a key win during the head-to-head
debate when the prime minister relentlessly pushed the £2,000 Labour taxation
line. Though the figures have been debunked and Sunak took heat for misleading
the public about the civil service authorising the figures, it is still the key
line of attack.
Sunak has
been left to fight an almost presidential style campaign with so many key
politicians having to battle their own seats. Oliver Dowden, the deputy prime
minister and former party chair, who along with Sunak pushed for an early
election, appears to have spent most of his time on the road rather than in
CCHQ.
The 80/20
strategy has “morphed into a strategy simply to hang on to a bare minimum of
seats”, one Tory insider said.
Even in
southern constituencies that Sunak allies such as Holden have secured, there
are some doubts about how truly safe the seats are because of the low morale of
campaigners. Where Holden is standing in Basildon and Billericay, the
Conservatives lost control of the council this year.
Holden was
put to the local association as the only candidate at the last minute. “He’s
the poster boy for what could end up being a catastrophic election,” one
Conservative source said. “The selections are absolute fire for the party.
There’s a strong feeling that they’re putting Rishi’s people in.”
Holden
claimed earlier this year that he was “bloody loyal to the north-east”, where
his previous seat of North West Durham was abolished in boundary changes. The
former press officer and special adviser is also being blamed among Tory
candidates for poor CCHQ organisation at the start of the campaign and the
party machine being caught unawares by the announcement of the election.
Candidate
selections have created resentment among the party’s already demoralised
grassroots. Two Tory sources familiar with its internal workings said the size
of its membership had fallen by tens of thousands since the last leadership
contest in 2022, when it stood at approximately 172,000.
Insiders
described a dire situation with activists and campaigners, compounded by the
loss of so many local councillors at the past two elections. At events with
Sunak and cabinet ministers, party staff have sometimes been seen having
difficulty recruiting enough activists to attend and stand with placards for
the cameras with the prime minister.
At one
stump speech and photocall in Amersham, a prosperous – and currently Lib
Dem-held – town just outside London, several of the few dozen activists in the
bar of a local rugby club had driven as much as an hour to get there from other
places.
There is
also concern that safe Tory seats have overwhelmingly been handed to male
candidates, and that as a result the party’s new intake will be overrepresented
by men.
The
Conservative peer Anne Jenkin has urged women to stand in unwinnable
opposition-held seats at this election. She wrote in the Women2Win WhatsApp
group for aspiring female Tory MPs on 29 May: “Please put your names in for
opposition-held seats if you haven’t fought before or had much experience. I
hear on the grapevine that many of these seats are going to men because they
are applying and women are not. Which means that % of women candidates overall
will be low.”
Asked about
this, Jenkin said about a third of Conservative-held seats where MPs had
retired at this election had female candidates and about a third of the party’s
candidates overall were women.
There are
also concerns about party funding – at least three major donors have told the
party they cannot fund the election campaign, according to the FT, and the
Conservatives are facing a major backlash over their biggest donor Frank
Hester.
Sources
also said the party had been missing the tin-rattling and networking abilities
of the former Tory chair Ben Elliot. The businessman Stephen Massey is
notionally the chief executive, his first election inside CCHQ. The Tory
insider said he seemed “totally unpolitical which is not ideal”.
Sources
said there was a belief that donors were not stumping up the sums that HQ
believed they had pledged, and the party now had a problem on its hands with
associations complaining funds were not being released in time for them to get
election material out.
Former
special advisers who have taken redundancy money had been approached about
volunteering for CCHQ during the election campaign, which some have rebuffed,
citing the need to look for new jobs before a Labour government. Some have
agreed to join the election campaign but only after significant wrangling over
pay.
Some MPs
have made it known to CCHQ that they are focused on their own seats. One junior
minister who has been answering pleas to go on broadcast rounds said they were
at the point of going on strike. “The final straw for me was the sight of the
prime minister leaving the D-day commemorations early,” they said. “If anything says we’ve given up, that’s it.”
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