One Conservative staff member said they had spent much of the night crying after Sunak’s announcement.
Ed Costello, chair of the campaign group Grassroots Conservatives, said he had fewer party activists to rally voters and fewer people to raise funds.
He said morale was the lowest he had known in five decades of being involved in local politics. “The spark has gone. There is a lot of tiredness. People are just fed up.”
It does not bode well for a party that has been in power for 14 years. The Conservatives have consistently run about 20 percentage points behind the opposition Labour Party since July last year.
What Sunak describes as the country turning a corner will do little to fire up voters, several MPs said, describing an electorate fed up with the scandals and drama that have so often been associated with Conservative governments over the past decade. Pollster Ipsos found in 2023 that only 9% of the British public said they trusted politicians to tell the truth, the lowest level since the first wave of the survey in 1983.
More than 65 Conservative MPs have announced they will step down at the election, including some of the party’s best-known politicians, such as former prime minister Theresa May. It is an exodus almost on a par with the one the party suffered before its landslide election defeat in 1997.
Several of those running this time say they will make their campaigns very personal affairs, distancing themselves from the party and their leader, Sunak. “I am going to focus on local issues, and only those,” said one, with a wry smile.
Reuters