'A Conservative Chernobyl': Tories Begin Their Slow March Back From Election Disaster

It’s just as well Rishi Sunak and his wife are richer than the King, because his next phone bill will be enormous.

The former prime minister spent last weekend phoning round the 175 former Tory MPs who lost their seats at the election.

“He felt it was the right thing to do,” one Sunak ally told HuffPost UK. “He feels a personal responsibility for all those who lost their seats.

“They committed their lives to public service and he wants to make sure they are supported in this difficult moment.”

Sunak made clear his remorse for his party’s worst ever election result when he made his first Commons appearance as leader of the opposition on Tuesday.

“For those of us in my party, let me begin with a message for those who are no longer sitting behind me: I am sorry,” he said.

“We have lost too many diligent, community-spirited representatives whose wisdom and expertise will be missed in the debates and the discussions ahead.”

But the former PM’s warm words have cut little ice with many in the party, who blame him for the disaster which befell them on July 4 as Keir Starmer’s Labour Party secured a 174-seat landslide majority.

Some of his most trenchant critics attended the Popular Conservatism conference in Westminster earlier this week, where the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg and Suella Braverman set out their prognosis of where it all went wrong for their party.

“It was a terrible result,” former Tory MEP David Campbell-Bannerman, told those present. “I call it a ‘Conservative Chernobyl’, a kind of meltdown for the Conservatives.”

Criticism of the former PM is not just confined to those on the Tory right, however.

One former cabinet minister on the party’s moderate wing said Sunak’s decision to call a summer election was a mistake.

“The best time to have it would have been to coincide with the local elections in May,” the MP said. “Tying it in with that campaign would have given us a better chance of saving more MPs and councillors. Calling it when he did made no sense.”

The improving economic picture, confirmed by higher than expected growth figures on Thursday, has led some Conservatives to conclude that Sunak would have been better to wait until the end of the year to go to the country, thereby giving voters more time to feel the benefit in their pockets.

That was disputed by one Sunak adviser, who said the calculation inside No.10 was that, to paraphrase D:Ream’s New Labour anthem, things could only get worse the longer he hung on.

“All the data we were seeing showed that hundreds of thousands of people were coming off their fixed rate mortgages every month and suddenly seeing their bills go up by hundreds of pounds because interest rates are much higher than they were,” they told HuffPost UK.

“Even if the Bank of England knocked half a per cent off the base rate, it would have made no difference to them. The longer we waited, more people were becoming poorer and inevitably blaming the government. That’s why he decided to go for July.”

The Tory Party is now in a state of limbo until a new leader is found, but that may not be until the end of the year as the party picks over the bones of what happened last week.

Sunak has said he will stay on until the mechanism for choosing his successor is decided, which suggests that an interim leader may have to be appointed to mind the shop until a permanent one is elected.

However, some believe Sunak owes it to his party to hang around until his replacement is known.

“After leading us to our worst defeat ever, the least he can day is stay on as leader for a few more months to help steady the ship,” said one MP.

“All he would really need to do is ask six questions a week at PMQs. Surely that’s not too much to ask.”

Sunak faced his remaining MPs at a meeting of the party’s 1922 Committee of Tory backbenchers on Wednesday, urging them to unite to ensure they hold the new Labour government to account.

It was, by all accounts, a relatively harmonious affair, with none of those present taking the opportunity to criticise the former PM to his face for the disastrous election campaign he ran.

Outside the room, however, party grandee Sir Edward Leigh - newly installed as the Father of the House of Commons as its longest-serving male MP - was clear about the direction he believed the party should be heading in.

“We have to be a proper Conservative Party,” he said. “We have to stand for something, otherwise we’re going nowhere. Because all these people who voted for Reform will simply go on voting Reform.

“If the right-wing vote is divided, we will never win again. These people are not going to go away. We need to bring back the people who voted Reform, who want a proper Conservative Party.

“We need to have a proper leadership election now, and whoever becomes leader must articulate this point of view. Unless we bring back those Reform people we are doomed to failure.”

But another Tory MP told HuffPost UK that the party’s problems could not simply be solved by a leap to the right.

“If you look at those who voted Reform, about half of them can never be won over because they’re the ones who used to vote Ukip and the Brexit Party,” he said. “We can never be right-wing enough for them.

“But the rest are traditional Tory voters who just wanted to give us a kicking this time around and are in play next time. We can get them back by being a competent, sensible Conservative Party - not by veering off to the right.”

The fallout from the Chernobyl disaster lasted for decades. The result of the fight for the soul of the Tory Party will determine how long it is before they are ready to govern again.