The Death of the Conservative Party

Analysis of the local election results underestimates quite how terminal these results are for Kemi Badenoch's party

Kemi Badenoch and her party on the road to nowhere

Most of the coverage of these local election results has focused on how bad they are for the Labour party. And they are. You can’t lose one of your safest parliamentary seats in the country and not expect it to be described as a bad night for your party.

But if these results are bad for Labour, then they are truly catastrophic for the Conservatives.

To put these results into context, before the polling stations closed, Kemi Badenoch’s party held almost two thirds of the seats up for contention.

At a time of global economic uncertainty, with an unpopular Government doing unpopular things, you would normally expect the main opposition party to be absolutely cleaning up.

Yet not only have the Conservatives actually gone backwards in their own heartlands, but they’ve completely reversed off the cliff. According to this analysis by YouGov’s data team, these amount to the worst set of local election results for any political party in British history.

So how did it all go so badly wrong for Kemi Badenoch, and is the media now missing the real story about these elections, which is the coming death of the Conservative party?