Kemi Badenoch spent the day “doom scrolling” following her party’s humiliating election loss, insiders have said.
The Tory leader refused to talk to the media on Friday after losing 674 council seats in the local elections last week, instead opting to dispatch Robert Jenrick, her potential successor.
According to The Times, Badenoch told aides she will “learn lessons” from the defeat but Conservative donors, MPs, and former party aides are discussing whether to make a bid to remove her as leader.
“If this half-hearted experiment is allowed to go on for another 18 months the situation could become irrecoverable. Ditching a leader of the opposition with no track record of success is not the same as ditching a PM. She is not going to change. MPs need to ask themselves if they can seriously see her leading a successful general election campaign where the workload and scrutiny is multiplied enormously,” one former No 10 aide told the newspaper.
Another plotter added: “The Conservative Party basically is its councillors. They’re the ones that organise everything. If next year were to be a result as bad as this year, in which we were wiped out in key councils like Staffordshire and Kent, it will cease to be a functioning party.”
Badenoch is set to focus on amending the data bill to ban under 16s from accessing social media. Additionally, she is close to making a “big play” on pulling the UK out of the European Convention on Human Rights and will soon reveal details of a Conservative policy commission on the ECHR and other “lawfare” issues, including the Climate Change Act and the Human Rights Act.
The Tories lost overall control of all 18 councils they had been in charge of that were up for election. There were 23 councils in the race in total.
Labour also suffered losses of 187 seats, with Sir Keir Starmer saying the results show “we must deliver that change ever more quickly, we must go even further”.
However, Reform UK and the Liberal Democrats made gains, winning another 677 and 163 seats respectively since elections were last held in 2021. Nigel Farage’s party won the Runcorn and Helsby by-election by just 6 votes to Labour – the closest ever election result since World War Two.
Addressing the Conservatives’ abysmal results, Kemi Badenoch said: “Other parties may be winning now, but we are going to show that we can deliver and that we are on course and recovering.”
“But [the public] are still not yet ready to trust us,” she added. “We have a big job to do to rebuild trust with the public.
“That’s the job that the Conservative Party has given me, and I’m going to make sure that we get ourselves back to the place where we are seen as being a credible alternative to Labour.”