The recriminations began early. Before the exit poll had even been announced Rishi Sunak took the extraordinary step of publishing his dissolution honours list. As hundreds of Tory candidates braced themselves to lose their seats and their livelihoods, Sunak announced that he was rewarding two of his closest allies.
Liam Booth-Smith, his chief of staff, was given a peerage and Oliver Dowden, Sunak’s deputy prime minister, got a knighthood. Inside CCHQ, where staff had gathered to await the results, there was unsuppressed fury.
“It was an absolute disgrace,” one senior member of the campaign team said. “There was rage in the building. People just could not understand how Liam had waltzed off with a peerage when so many good MPs were losing their jobs because of the mistakes he made.”
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Another said that Booth-Smith had “disappeared” after the polls closed and did not join other members of Sunak’s team to clap the prime minister out of Downing Street. In fact, he was with Sunak in his office helping him to prepare his speech before he left No 10 for the last time, and hugged him at the bottom of the stairs on the way out.
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Dowden’s knighthood also drew ire. Senior campaign sources said that he had been pivotal in the push for an early election, and had in fact wanted to go even sooner. “He wanted to go on the same day as the locals [May 5],” they said. “He was incredibly bolshy about it.”
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Sources close to Dowden have denied that he pressed for an early election, but others are categorical that he did. The early date, which was intended to shoot Nigel Farage’s fox and catch him off balance, is now seen as the single biggest mistake in a campaign beset by errors.
“Everything we did in the first few days of the campaign was built around squeezing the Reform vote while not giving them too much publicity,” a campaign source said. “And there were small signs it was working and showing through in the polls. But Farage coming back made that much, much more difficult.”
Others were more scathing. “We tried to ignore Reform for far too long,” a senior party source said. “People were saying ‘just ignore them and they will go away’. They woke up far too late.”
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In the latter days of the campaign, when the Tories’ manifesto launch failed to move the dial and after the debacles over election betting and the D-Day commemorations, a glum fatalism crept into the campaign. “We knew that we’d lost. Rishi knew that he’d lost,” one aide said. “It was just about minimising the scale of the defeat.”
Sunak himself was making practical preparations for the days before the polls closed. He and his team began writing his Downing Street concession speech this week, and there was even a discussion about whether he should, unlike when he called the election, have an umbrella if it rained. “We weren’t going to make that mistake again,” one former aide said. “The idea was for Akshata [Murty, Sunak’s wife] to hold it but thankfully it didn’t prove necessary.”
Sunak made the call to Starmer to concede shortly before 4am and then flew down from Yorkshire to tender his resignation to the King. His first stop, just before 8am, was at Conservative headquarters, where he thanked campaign staff for their work over the previous six weeks, saying that they had helped to prevent what might have been an even more catastrophic defeat.
“He pointed out that the polls had us down to less than 70 MPs but he said that every day of fighting had clawed that back and helped us win more and more seats,” one person who was in the room said later. He also told them that, despite the result, they shouldn’t be despondent and there was “everything” for his successor as Tory leader to fight for.
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“He was actually pretty chipper — and made the point that the volatility at this election showed how much things could change in five years,” the source said. “He said he took responsibility for the defeat but there was everything for us to fight for.”
Sunak then went to Downing Street where, in the Pillared Room, he addressed the civil service officials who had worked for him for two years — a ritual carried on from many of his predecessors. “It took him ten minutes to come down the stairs afterwards because there were so many people to thank,” a source said. “It was quite emotional.”
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Like Sunak, some in Tory HQ are trying to find hope despite the scale of the defeat. The first argument they make is that it might have been much worse. The Tories might have been reduced to double figures. “Fundamentally the party survives,” one senior Tory said. “We were looking at 50 or 60 seats in some of the MRPs [large-scale polls].”
They pointed to the fact that many seats were “incredibly tight” and the decisive factor was Reform. There are now 252 seats with majorities below 5,000, compared with 136 in the last parliament. Reform was second in 98 seats as it tore into the Conservative Party’s vote.
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The second reason for hope was a message that Sunak himself communicated to CCHQ — that their work was not wasted. The pressure the Tories applied to Labour, particularly over tax, would hold them in good stead for the future. Sunak has said that he will stay in post for as long as the party needs him to ensure an orderly transition.
Staying on until the next Tory leader was in place would be gruelling and humiliating for Sunak, requiring him to make appearances at the King’s Speech and prime minister’s questions in the Commons. Even now, however, the Tories are preparing for another bout of internecine warfare, and some are insisting that Sunak must go as soon as the contest has started to ensure that contenders will not pull punches.
There have also been suggestions that a grandee such as the former leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith should take the reins until the new leader is in place in September. There is also, however, disagreement about how long the campaign should last. Some believe that a longer campaign is necessary to get the right leader, but others think the last thing the public needs to see is the Tories ripping chunks out of each other for months.
The Tories may have lost their majority but their appetite for psychodrama, at least for now, appears undiminished.
