Is Rishi ready for the rebels?

Ever since Rishi Sunak became leader of the Conservative party, he has been preparing for this week. Entering 10 Downing Street without winning a general election or even the Tory membership vote, he owes his position entirely to Conservative MPs. At any moment, they could decide to replace him as they did Boris Johnson. This bank holiday weekend, as the results of the May elections roll in, has always had the potential to be his moment of greatest vulnerability.

The results will show how the Tories are performing now compared with the local elections of 2021 when a triumphal 30ft giant-sized Boris balloon in Hartlepool came to symbolise his political dominance. At the time, Johnson had led Europe in the vaccine rollout and the Tories were ten percentage points ahead in the opinion polls; a lead reflected in the local results. Now, the Conservatives are 20 points behind – the biggest lag for a governing party in any recent election year. The electoral implications have been obvious for some time, as has the delicate psychological state of the Tory party. That’s why Sunak has been building his defence.

In general elections, the result is clear in a few hours. But the Cameron-era enthusiasm for devolution means that local election agonies are drawn out over days. Some 2,600 council seats will vote and the Tories are predicted to lose half of the 1,000 seats they are defending.

Then come elections for the London Mayor (‘We’ll do better than people think here,’ insists a Tory staffer); for 37 police and crime commissioners (30 of whom are currently Tories); and for nine ‘metro-mayors’.

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‘It won’t be until Saturday afternoon that we have a proper sense of the result,’ says a Tory strategist. This means any fallout could wait until next week. ‘It’s a bank holiday weekend, everyone will take time to think – if something happens it will be from Tuesday, when we’re back together,’ says an MP. The ‘something’ that might happen would be a challenge to Sunak’s leadership.

The thinking in both No. 10 and the parliamentary party is that if Sunak can hold on to at least one metro-mayor – Ben Houchen in Tees Valley or Andy Street in the West Midlands – he will have enough of a success story to quell the doubters. ‘Ultimately, a lot of MPs are looking for an off-ramp,’ says one Sunak critic. ‘They’re not happy but they don’t want to have to pull the trigger.’

The biggest Tory sensitivity is the fate of Houchen, who won almost three-quarters of the vote last time and has become an emblem of the Tories’ ability to win outside their heartlands. Tees Valley is also a test of whether Labour can reclaim what used to be part of their core vote: the party has been piling resources into the seat and Keir Starmer has paid visits. The view in Labour high command is that the party needs to claim at least one Tory mayoral scalp in order to keep up a sense of momentum ahead of the general election. Who better to topple than the Tories’ emblem of the Red Wall?

Next, the Tories need to beat Richard Tice’s Reform party into third place in the Blackpool South by-election, which is also to be held during the local elections. Labour are poised to win, but the Tories are fighting to keep Reform from claiming second place. Reform is hoping to make inroads in Lincoln and Hartlepool council elections too. If Tice’s party underperforms, the Tories will argue that it is just an opinion poll phenomenon rather than a threat. But that will not hold for long if, as is rumoured, Nigel Farage announces his intention to return to an active role in the party in a few weeks’ time.

Agitating from the sidelines, ready to blame Sunak for any losses, are the rebels – a loose alliance of former donors, jaded ex-advisers and some peers. All have been pushing for his defenestration since Suella Braverman was fired as home secretary and David Cameron exhumed to become foreign secretary. Those moves were seen by some as abandoning the post-Brexit coalition and scrabbling for a safety zone that hasn’t existed since the Cameron era. ‘Since I’ve left, I think the polls speak for themselves,’ Braverman told me recently. ‘We’re doing quite badly. Reform has had a resurgence and a very fast rise, and you can trace it back to November.’

To move things along, the rebels have published an alternative policy agenda to get the ‘managerialist barnacles off the boat’. This includes ending the junior doctor strikes (‘Unless they have a 20 per cent pay rise to offer, it won’t happen,’ says a No. 10 aide), cutting legal migration, boosting defence spending to 3 per cent of GDP by 2027, bringing in tougher prison sentences and slashing benefits further. There is one key thing they are still lacking, however: a plausible candidate. The hope is that someone will volunteer in the face of devastating results. ‘This is the culmination of six months’ work,’ says one member of the rebel alliance. ‘MPs might not go for it but we’ll give it a last push.’

Sunak’s counter-offensive has already started. We have seen a rush of red-meat pledges in the past few days, most notably the promise to lift defence spending to 2.5 per cent by 2030. The 4p cut in National Insurance came into effect last month – No. 10 says this is worth £900 a year to the average earner. To flag this up, a clip was released of Sunak pouring milk into a cup of coffee with ‘£900’ written on it: a stunt aimed at his Twitter-obsessed backbenchers rather than at the general public.

No. 10 believes it is ahead of the rebels on welfare reform thanks to its recent announcement of a big overhaul. Hunt and Sunak view this as a key dividing line with Labour for the election: the Tories will get tough on welfare while Labour struggles to spell out what it would do. Combine that with a possible further National Insurance cut in an autumn pre-election fiscal event and it might just add to up to a coherent message: that the Conservatives make work pay. The No. 10 team hope to keep up that momentum by unveiling new investment in the UK as well as pointing to falling legal migration figures, as the limits on student spousal visas take effect. ‘He’s suddenly showing some fight,’ says one Tory grandee. ‘I just wish he’d done it a bit sooner.’

‘The point of doing this stuff pre-locals is to get these debates running,’ says a senior government figure. ‘We know we will have a tough couple of days with these results but we need to keep pressing these bruises.’

Top of that list is the recently passed Rwanda plan, which the rebel alliance sees as Sunak’s real weakness. They believe it will be tangled up in bureaucracy and operational logistics and quickly become a laughing stock – for instance, because of reports this week that fewer than half of the 5,700 people identified for removal can be located.

Why has the PM set himself up for a potential summer fall? The answer is that at the very least, the deportation bill helps him through the next ten days – and if after that he makes it to the end of May, he’ll make it to the election. Even the most ardent rebels admit that the window of opportunity will have passed by the summer.

The Rwanda bill was timed so it became law a week before the votes. One asylum seeker has already been deported, admittedly voluntarily. Plus, as one minister puts it, Sunak won one of those ‘money–can’t-buy-them’ comments when the Irish Deputy Prime Minister admitted that the Rwanda policy is already pushing migrants to head for Ireland from the UK. Government figures can barely conceal their amusement. ‘There’s a poetic justice in all the times they have refused to talk to us about borders,’ says one government figure. ‘Now they are having to declare us a safe country, just as we did Rwanda.’

Sunak wants to show that the UK is not an outlier in this. In the European elections, Ursula von der Leyen’s European People’s party is now supporting a similar plan to process migrants using third countries. I understand that No. 10 is working on a statement of intent for exploring alternative and untested schemes for deterrent effect with like-minded countries in Europe, including Italy and Albania.

France will not be on that list. Emmanuel Macron has a moral objection to the scheme. So does Keir Starmer’s Labour – which the Conservatives believe has the potential to become their best attack line in an election campaign. ‘Once the scheme is operational, imagine the TV debate when Starmer is asked whether he is really going to disband it and send everyone in Kigali back to the UK,’ says one Sunak ally. Notably, one Labour aide has already said the party could not junk the Rwanda policy until another scheme is in place.

The point that Sunak and his team are making is, in the words of their election strategist, that they have a plan and it’s working, even if it might not seem that way yet.

Sunak’s most likely challengers appear to have reined themselves in in recent days. Penny Mordaunt, whose allies had been in talks (official title ‘contingency planning’) with the plotters about a possible confidence vote on Sunak, was out in the media at the weekend appealing against ‘further Westminster gymnastic and navel-gazing’. And the Defence Secretary, Grant Shapps, who has been having lunches and drinks with various disaffected Tory MPs, was also sent out at the weekend to say that it is ‘not the time’ to change leader. ‘They’re smoking out the likely suspects,’ says a party old hand. ‘So if they do go for it, they will look as ridiculous as possible.’

Yet even the best-laid political plans can go agley. The cabinet fear is that the results will be bad enough to send the party into a spin even if Sunak faces the rebels down. ‘It could just add to the death spiral,’ says a minister. ‘I do expect someone to challenge Rishi,’ says one recently departed cabinet member. ‘I expect he’ll win, but he’ll be wounded. It doesn’t make sense but there’s a lot of ruin left in the Conservative party.’ Or as one former minister puts it: ‘There are a lot of morons out there.’

The Prime Minister wants his party to know that he will not go without a fight. ‘He’s not going to resign,’ says a close ally. ‘It’s not good for the country and not good for the party. He’s in it for the long haul.’ So Sunak’s mission next week is to remain in No. 10 long enough to let the voters decide.