Tory co-chair braces party for big losses as Kemi Badenoch launches local elections campaign
Good morning. For Keir Starmer, it is a military day. This morning Downing Street has released video footage and pictures of Starmer meeting the crew of a nuclear-armed submarine earlier this week as it returned to Faslane in Scotland. Later this morning he is in Barrow, where he is going to “lay the keel to the first boat of the next generation nuclear armed submarines, knowns as the Dreadnought class”, No 10 says. He is also announcing that “the king has agreed to confer the ‘Royal’ title to the Port of Barrow in recognition of the town’s unique and critical contribution to national security as home of nuclear submarine building in the UK”. And this afternoon, in the south of England, he is going to attend a meeting of military chiefs and planners from the 30-odd countries that are part of the “coalition of the willing” offering to help protect Ukraine in the event of a ceasefire.
I will cover some of that here, but Jakub Krupa will lead the Ukraine-focused coverage on his Europe live blog.
For Kemi Badenoch, a different type of battle planning is on the agenda. She is launching the Conservative party’s local election campaign at an event in Buckinghamshire.
It is going to be a low-key launch, we’re told. Yesterday CCHQ officials were doing their best to persuade lobby journalists that it would not be worth the effort attending. And the overnight words released from Badenoch are story-free. Badenoch says:
The Conservatives are the only party that stands up for families, for rural communities, and for local businesses. Labour pander to the unions, the Lib Dems waste your taxes, and Reform have no experience running anything.
The Conservatives will be your voice in your local community, delivering value for money, lower taxes and better services – so vote Conservative on 1 May.
But Nigel Huddleston, the Conservative party co-chair, gave a clue as to what is really going on in an interview on Sky News this morning. It is not unusual for parties to downplay expectations ahead of local elections, but Huddlestone went overboard, implying that the party is expecting serious losses. He said:
This is us having an election after losing the general election last year, [defending the] high-water mark of the 2021 local elections, where we got an incredible 65% of all seats. That’s about 30% higher than we normally get in local elections. This is following on from the vaccines roll-out. We won the Hartlepool byelection on the same day. So 2021 was a really high-water mark, and that’s what we’re facing against now.
Now, we are fighting for every single vote in every single seat, but it will be difficult.
Are the Tories right to be worried? Probably. Earlier this month Electoral Calculus published some MRP polling for the local elections and the results suggest the Conservatives are on course to lose hundreds of seats.
Electoral Calculus says:
Our prediction is that the Conservatives will lose a large amount of support and councillors to the Reform UK party. The Liberal Democrats are also expected to make some gains, while Labour might lose ground a little. The Green party and independent candidates are more difficult to predict accurately, so their predictions are subject to a greater amount of uncertainty.
What might help the Conservatives is the fact that in some of the council areas where elections should be taking place, voting is being delayed for at least a year because of the local government reorganisations. The predicted election results in the table above are projected figures including places where voting is happening in May, and places where voting is delayed. As this table shows, when they separated the results, Electoral Calculus found that Reform UK were on course to do even better in the places where polling is not happening this year.
Of course, this is only a poll. They are not always accurate. But politicians study them very closely, and CCHQ will have seen figures like this. They explain why Badenoch is no making a fuss of her local elections campaign launch, and why Huddleston is preparing his party for big losses.
Here is the agenda for the day.
9.30am: Steve Reed, environment secretary, takes questions in the Commons.
9.30am: The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government publishes council tax figures for England for 2025-26.
10.30am: Lucy Powell, the leader of the Commons, makes a statement to MPs on next week’s business.
10.40am: Kemi Badenoch launches the Conservatives’ local election campaign at an event in Buckinghamshire.
Morning: Keir Starmer is in Barrow to lay the keel for the first of the next-generation Dreadnought nuclear-armed submarines that are being built.
11.30am: Downing Street holds a lobby briefing.
About 11.30am: David Lammy, the foreign secretary, makes a statement to MPs about Gaza.
Noon: John Swinney, Scotland’s first minister, takes questions at Holyrood.
12.30pm: Darren Jones, chief secretary to the Treasury, gives a speech at the Institute for Government.
2.30pm: Lammy gives at speech at the British Chambers of Commerce conference.
Afternoon: Starmer attends a military planning meeting for countries from the “coalition of the willing” offering to help protect Ukraine in the event of a ceasefire.
If you want to contact me, please post a message below the line or message me on social media. I can’t read all the messages BTL, but if you put “Andrew” in a message aimed at me, I am more likely to see it because I search for posts containing that word.
If you want to flag something up urgently, it is best to use social media. You can reach me on Bluesky at @andrewsparrowgdn. The Guardian has given up posting from its official accounts on X but individual Guardian journalists are there, I still have my account, and if you message me there at @AndrewSparrow, I will see it and respond if necessary.
I find it very helpful when readers point out mistakes, even minor typos. No error is too small to correct. And I find your questions very interesting too. I can’t promise to reply to them all, but I will try to reply to as many as I can, either BTL or sometimes in the blog.
