Daily Express

Sticking with Sunak lets Tory MPs take the fight to Labour

IN THE wake of another Tory MP defecting to Labour, the temptation to conclude that Rishi Sunak’s party is heading for its worst ever landslide defeat is overwhelmi­ng. Especially given that the crossing of the aisle by Dover MP Natalie Elphicke came so soon after the mauling the Conservati­ves received in elections a week ago. And yet, there is a different story also to be told about how things may pan out.

Believe it or not, there is a case for saying the Tories are better off than they might have been. This is not because they fared any better at the elections than was expected – the results were just as disastrous as forecast. But it is because Tory MPs have made a clear decision not to dive into yet another leadership contest and concluded instead that they must now sink or swim with Sunak.

Three weeks ago, I was sitting in a pub with a Tory Cabinet source and he told me the overwhelmi­ng likelihood was that enough letters would go in from MPs in the month of May to trigger a motion of no confidence in Sunak.

He predicted Sunak would win the confidence vote by a ratio of about two to one, but emerge even further weakened. And the parliament­ary party in general would have succeeded only in dragging Tory poll ratings down even further via another protracted bout of navel-gazing and attempted regicide.

BUT this is not what happened following the great drubbing of Thursday May 2. Instead, the parliament­ary Conservati­ve party – Mrs Elphicke excepted – decided to put plotting aside and face the future together.

Tory MPs have conserved energy that was about to be expended fighting each other. It can now be used to fight the Labour party. Only an epic optimist would say that as a result, the Government will be able to project itself as a roaring success. There have been far too many policy betrayals and flops on matters as varied as immigratio­n, taxation, law and order and NHS waiting times.

But Sunak and his team are now clear to present themselves as a serviceabl­e administra­tion, one that is gradually turning round the economy after Covid and the energy price spike and having a determined go at deterring the Channel boats. There are even one or two areas of positive success that they can point to – school standards are significan­tly higher in England than they were a decade ago, while UK exports are doing well post-Brexit in defiance of doom and gloom prediction­s from Remainers.

Just by being a non-shambles and quieting the noises off, the Tories will make space for questions to be raised in the minds of the electorate about Keir Starmer and Labour: do they really want to give the party of Angela Rayner and David Lammy a landslide majority and in effect a blank cheque to rule as it sees fit? Has Labour communicat­ed a vision as to how it would improve the country? Can Starmer himself be trusted to stick to any pledges he does make?

While the Tories were engaged in a rolling civil war that destabilis­ed one leader after another, these questions were redundant. Voters were simply being given no alternativ­e but to put the Tories out of their misery and permit a Labour government to come into being.

NOW the old ditty about the merits of always holding onto nurse for fear of finding something worse may start to crop up as a powerful factor in the calculatio­ns of floating voters.

Last Thursday, around a third of eligible voters cast a ballot.

In a general election we can expect a turnout of at least double that. It stands to reason that the abstainers of last week may be more persuadabl­e than those who turned out to vote against the Tories.

None of this is to say that the mood among Conservati­ve MPs is at all upbeat.

Sunak faced a grilling from them yesterday and will have emerged from it knowing that everyone in the room thinks Labour is on course for a victory.

Almost nobody places any credibilit­y in his own prediction that we are heading for a hung parliament.

And yet for the Tories there is a world of difference between being beaten down to 100 MPs in a Labour mega-landslide on the one hand and on the other, coming back with more than 200, while Labour only holds a double-digit majority. As we have seen, things can go wrong for a governing party in that situation very quickly.

In summary, the Tories are in a deep hole but at least they have stopped digging.

‘Do voters really want to give Keir Starmer a blank cheque?’