Although the results won’t be revealed until Saturday – and may, in any case, prove to be a poor guide to voting at the general election expected later in the year – the contests for the mayoralties of the West Midland and Tees Valley will attract huge attention.
Defended by Tory incumbents Andy Street and Ben Houchen respectively, these are the two major municipal prizes in contention, and the signs are that both will be close, especially in the West Midlands. For Labour, winning either or both would add confidence and momentum to the “long” general election effort; and for the Conservatives, the loss of these flagships would be an embarrassing blow, and a deeply damaging and dangerous one for Rishi Sunak.
Although, for a variety of practical reasons, the chances are that Mr Sunak will survive as leader and take his party into the general election, there is a significant chance that dramatic failure in this set of elections could end his political career, and lead to the installation of a new leader and prime minister – the fourth in five years. At the very least, there will be some existential rumblings in Mr Sunak’s party.
Such a scenario is far from far-fetched. Indeed, Lord Houchen himself, as he is now styled, has warned that if he is defeated, having previously won 73 per cent of the vote in 2021, it will be a “wake-up call” for Tory MPs concerned about the loss of the “red wall”, being those traditionally Labour seats that Boris Johnson took in 2019.
As Lord Houchen explains: “There are lots of people who will come up to me and say that they’re going to vote for me, but they probably won’t be voting for the Conservative Party in the general election. That tends to split down generally into two groups of people. One who is saying they’re going to vote Reform in the general election, and another group who’s saying they’re just not going to vote.”
His analysis is both candid and sound, and accords with all the available polling evidence about how unpopular the government is. This has led to a notable paradox. Both Lord Houchen and Mr Street have done everything they can to distance themselves from Mr Sunak, for fear of contagion; but Mr Sunak continues to cite them as prime examples of how his plan is working and why he’s going to win the next general election.
Rather shamelessly, given their reluctance to be associated with him, he did so once again at Prime Minister’s Questions. Should either man or both survive, Mr Sunak will seize upon their victories to deflect from a much worse, wider picture, and to see off his enemies who would wish him gone and replaced by Penny Mordaunt, Kemi Badenoch or Priti Patel, if the gossip is to be believed.
The fact, however, is that “Conservative” success in Tees Valley and the West Midlands will have nothing to do with the government, and will be in spite of Mr Sunak and not because of him.
Both mayors are clear on this. So keen is he to run a non-Conservative campaign, Mr Street has adopted green as the colour for his literature, and has banned the PM and other ministers from “helping”.
As with his colleague in Tees Valley, Mr Street is commendably frank about this. He told The Guardian earlier this month: “It is utterly deliberate to position it as an individual ‘brand Andy’ campaign. Because that’s what it is. That’s always how it has been, right back to 2017 – the branding was green, and it was all about ‘brand Andy’. This is a different type of political role, and the country is getting used to this, because historically, it’s all been about Westminster. People are sick and tired of that.”
As if to underline the point, and snub Mr Sunak, both mayors have been much happier to receive the backing of former prime minister Mr Johnson, rather than the present besieged occupant of No 10. Mr Johnson has put out a characteristically bullish video endorsement of Lord Houchen, and an open letter to Birmingham and the Black Country that signally fails to mention Mr Sunak, and instead urges the electors to “forget about the government, forget about Westminster. This election is about the next four years in the West Midlands, and who you want in charge. If it were my vote, I’d want the person with a record of getting stuff done. And that’s Andy Street.”
The voters nationally are indeed tired of the government, as the polls show, and, whatever else happens, Mr Street and Lord Houchen have been polling notably better than their party in their respective regions. By way of contrast, and to make the point that the big mayoralties are about big personalities as much as party allegiance, it is striking that Sadiq Khan badly underperforms his own party in London. This dissonance was always the intention when the system of directly elected regional mayors was introduced by the Blair administration, and in that at least, it has been successful. Mr Street in particular has been fiercely independent in outlook, as witnessed when he threatened to quit his post when Mr Sunak cancelled the HS2 link from Birmingham to Manchester last year.
It would be therefore completely fraudulent for Mr Sunak to try and expropriate a strongly personal vote for “his” mayors as an endorsement of him. And, by the same token, it would also be highly misleading to suppose that Sir Keir Starmer and Labour are somehow stumbling. When all the figures are sifted, chipped and analysed by the psephologists, they will conform the broad political picture as we know it to be, and it will be little comfort to Mr Sunak. The prime minister may even find that Labour wins the new North Yorkshire mayoralty, in his own “backyard”, which, until recently, would have been an unthinkable catastrophe.
By this time next week, Mr Sunak will still be in all sorts of trouble – but he should be wary of inviting any sharp rebukes from Mr Street and Lord Houchen if he tries to steal their thunder.
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