Published by The i Paper (18th May, 2026)
Kenneth Baker’s response to the local election results in 1990 was a masterclass in political spin. The Conservatives were routed across the country, losing 222 council seats as their vote share crashed to 33 per cent amid anger over a new poll tax. Yet the Tory chairman brazenly declared they had won a great victory in their “flagship” boroughs of Wandsworth and Westminster, which they held using fiscal chicanery to lower the loathed new tax. Champagne flowed in Central Office to reinforce his message. And much of the media meekly fell into line with his fake claim of triumph.
Have we just witnessed a repeat of Baker’s slick trickery, albeit without the bubbly? Tory leader Kemi Badenoch, surrounded by smiling activists, quickly pointed to their regaining of Westminster at this month’s local elections as evidence of their “great results” showing the “green shoots of recovery”. Her party put out a press release to reinforce this message, boasting about “strong” results.
And now Badenoch is being hailed by her supine media cheerleaders, who claim the Conservatives are on the path back to power despite trailing both Reform UK and the Greens, winning just 17 per cent of the vote nationwide and losing another 563 council seats. To put this in perspective, they fully control barely half as many councils as the Liberal Democrats.
Her stance helps stoke the heat on a collapsing government. And yes, the results were even more disastrous for Labour as the five million pound man Nigel Farage romped to victory, sending the ruling party into a panic and speeding up moves to jettison their leader. Never mind the size of their parliamentary majority, secured less than two years ago with promises to restore stability to government. Nor that Sir Keir Starmer’s dire poll ratings reflect wider issues for Western democracies in this era of populism and social media – and are actually significantly better than either the French or German leaders. It seems his days in Downing Street are numbered.
Yet for all Badenoch’s mockery, let alone talk of a Conservative revival based on a few punchy performances in the House of Commons, her party is still sliding into irrelevance under her dismal leadership. Badenoch said she saw “signs of renewal everywhere that we are standing”, but her party lost almost half the seats it was defending. It came fourth in Wales, fifth in Scotland – both places where it had been second – and lost all six of its county councils. It was shredded in Essex, once seen as the symbolic home of their most devout followers. As Farage delighted in pointing out, she would lose her own seat in North West Essex – a Tory stronghold for more than a century – along with four shadow cabinet colleagues in this single county alone if those results were replicated at a general election.
Green shoots are hard to detect. In reality, the Tories are still struggling badly two years after suffering their worst defeat in parliamentary history, even if the focus is currently on Labour’s chaos. They are shrivelling as an electoral force, outflanked by Reform on the right and the Liberal Democrats crumbling the blue wall to their left. As YouGov’s Dylan Difford stated in a damning social media thread, Badenoch has overseen the two worst results for the main opposition party in living memory – and by a hefty margin. “This is just not normal for an opposition,” he said. “On average, first-term oppositions expand their councillor base by about 50 per cent, not see them halve further. No matter how much the party wants to try and ignore electoral reality, these results were dreadful and the Tories are in a very bad place.”
For all the distracting spin, for all the bravura efforts of Comical Kemi, the best she can really claim is that she has slowed down her decaying party’s decline. Even in Westminster – a party stronghold they lost to Labour for the first time four years ago as citizens recoiled from Boris Johnson’s Partygate scandal – the Tory vote share fell, but they won since the left shattered amid a Green surge. Similar patterns can be seen in the other more affluent areas where they managed to fend off Reform, clinging on to those hesitant conservatives in their shrinking heartlands who are too genteel or well-educated to fall for the snake-oil populism sold by Farage.
The irony is that Labour’s disintegration and infighting creates an opportunity to pick up support from all those moderates and pragmatists who yearn so desperately for competent government; the sort of people who want to see social justice alongside a sound economy and strong borders while being alarmed by the rise of populists at both extremes. But Badenoch repels them with her arrogance, bumbling displays outside the Westminster bubble and crass lack of compassion as she boasts about shifting her party firmly to the right and adopts an agenda dictated by Farage.
Absurdly, she claims the party that gave us austerity, Brexit, the catastrophe of Liz Truss and the hostile environment for migrants was too left-wing in office. She refuses to atone for its ineptitude, let alone accept that Britain was weakened by our foolish departure from the European Union or see the political stupidity of following Farage’s footsteps.
When Ruth Davidson, the popular former Scottish Tory leader, and Andy Street, twice-elected West Midlands mayor, launched a group to bring alienated centrists back into the fold, she insisted they accept her hard-right positioning. Then her naivety was exposed by Donald Trump’s Iran debacle, when she initially suggested Britain aid his misadventure. Her personal ratings may have improved a bit, provoking hysterical applause from her fans, but she fails to understand the need to embrace an election-winning coalition. And anything is possible in this febrile age of political fragmentation with our anachronistic electoral system.
But Badenoch should reflect on one other lesson of Baker’s masterclass in spin: that it failed to stop Margaret Thatcher from being ousted six months later. It is hard to fool the voters for long.