Sunak has to ‘stop the boats or lose’ as Tory civil war erupts over by-elections

John Curtice says by-election losses ‘bad news’ for Tories

Symbolically, it could not have been much worse.

As voters prepared to go to the polls in Tamworth and Mid Bedfordshire in two crucial by-elections, Downing Street leaked that the Prime Minister had surrendered to the woke, quasi-socialist wing of the Conservative Party.

It emerged that Rishi Sunak now intends to put a ban on conversion therapy of gay people into the King’s speech because he was afraid of some ministerial resignations – this will ban things like electric shock treatment which are already illegal but also ban praying or family or medical professionals offering advice.

In the great scheme of things, banning conversion therapy may not be the biggest issue and certainly ranks far below the cost of living crisis, but as a signal to Conservative voters who think the party has lost its way and is no longer conservative, it could not have been worse.

Not for the first time, in what is becoming a bitter civil war, Sunak had sided with the socially liberal woke leftists in his party, probably because they were the ones who installed him as leader and were behind the coups to remove Boris Johnson and Liz Truss.

Sure enough, Tory voters stayed at home in Tamworth and Mid Bedfordshire – and Sunak was humiliated.

READ MORE: Rishi Sunak suffers double by-election blow as Tories lose key seats

Let us put aside the laughable claims that these terrible defeats had anything to do with Nadine Dorries or Chris Pincher – the straws senior Tory MPs were desperately clutching at last night.

A telling briefing note shared by one angry Conservative backbencher, and supported by many others, showed exactly what is wrong with Sunak’s strategy and how the by-election defeats illustrate that it is conservative not woke policies which will save him and his party.

Statistically, the MP shared a party summary which made three points:

1. Turnout was so low that nearly two-thirds of voters didn’t come out to vote at all – meaning lots of undecideds/disgruntled Conservatives to win back and motivate to vote still;

2. Labour only added 800 votes onto their vote share that they secured in 2019 in Tamworth, and went backwards on their 2019 vote share in Mid Bedfordshire;

3. In Tamworth, nine percent of the votes went between Reform, Ukip, and For Britain, with Reform responsible for nearly six percent of that alone.

The briefing noted that this “shows migration and in particular stopping the boats is vital in old and current Red Wall seats like Tamworth and failure to deliver means people voting Reform will get Labour”.

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But the MP, who is on the right of the party, added: “I think what we can see we as Conservatives need to do is as follows:

“First, stop the boats is massive, but also clamping down on legal migration numbers – Reform vote share did the damage in both by-election seats – particularly in Tamworth.

“Second, ditch rumoured policies like conversion therapy ban that will cause public splits in the party and instead do stuff to help small and medium-sized businesses grow with targeted tax cuts and reduce the tax burden on families and their households which doesn’t have to mean just doing income tax cuts (see New Conservatives Tax Plan launched at Party Conference).”

As Rishi Sunak prepares to mark a year since he was installed after the coup to remove Truss, those sentences from the MP more than anything go to the nub of the civil war engulfing the parliamentary party.

But they also underline why, as revealed again this week in the Techne UK tracker poll, more than half of the 2019 Tory vote have abandoned the party with most staying at home.

If there is any hope of victory next year – and let’s be frank, optimism is in very short supply – then Sunak needs to stop wasting time on woke policies, stop the boats and cut taxes.

It is not a difficult formula, but the left of his party is preventing him from doing this.

The right of the party, which supports things like free speech and religious freedom, are, of course, up in arms about conversion therapy.

But they were already raging about another issue which almost certainly did affect the abysmal outcomes in Tamworth and Mid Bedfordshire – the small boats.

We saw a warning shot in PMQs this week that patience has run out on this issue when Hartlepool MP Jill Mortimer got up and told the Prime Minister “enough is enough” demanding he removed so-called asylum seekers from her town.

The cheers she received from fellow MPs was telling.

The problem is that in the fight to decide the soul and future direction of the party, the same woke liberal wing is preventing the Prime Minister from doing what needs to be done to stop the boats.

One minister on the liberal wing told me the right are “stupid” another woke Tory MP suggested they are “racist and homophobic”.

Of course, both were Remainers and probably had the same view of the majority of actual Conservative voters.

The only solution to the small boats crisis is, as Home Secretary Suella Braverman has stated, to leave the outdated and politicised Refugee Convention and European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR).

The right knows this is true but the liberal wing of Tory MPs is resisting even putting that in the next manifesto.

Then we have the whole business of tax cuts.

Apparently, Sunak wants them but somehow cannot persuade his Chancellor Jeremy Hunt from pursuing an obsessively high tax regime, again with the support of the same wing which wants conversion therapy.

As one former cabinet minister recently said: “We cannot hope to defeat the socialists in Labour until we stop pushing forward socialist-light policies.”

The figure in Tamworth was particularly interesting – a seat where the migrant crisis is playing large.

Labour’s vote went up just 800 but almost 20,000 Tory voters from the 2019 election stayed at home – the reduction in turnout was almost exactly the same as the reduction in the Conservative vote.

The reality is that Conservative voters do not see any reason to vote for the Conservative Party, enough will go to Richard Tice’s Reform UK to split the vote in many seats, but the vast majority are effectively politically homeless and on strike.

Until Sunak starts listening to the right of his party they won’t be coming back any time soon.

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