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One of Rishi Sunak’s most influential critics has admitted that had the party and country listened to the then prime minister it could have avoided calamitous defeat at the general election.
Lord Ben Houchen, the Mayor of Teesside and only leading Tory left in power, insists his party “absolutely can win in five years” but warns Conservatives should not try to become a version of Reform to do it.
Lord Houchen, who has yet to publicly support one of the leadership contenders, spoke exclusively to The Independent ahead of the party’s conference this week in Birmingham and after an election where the Tories returned an historically low 121 MPs.
Having backed Boris Johnson to return as prime minister when Liz Truss resigned and then disowned Mr Sunak before the local and regional elections in May – not even wearing a blue rosette when his result was announced – Lord Houchen now believes the former prime minister’s analysis was right “but people had stopped listening”.
But he warned that while Labour are struggling with questions about freebies, the influence of wealthy donors like Lord Alli and anger over policies particularly cancelling winter fuel payments for 10 million pensioners, the Tories “still have a long hard road to recovery”.
He said his party had only itself to blame for a situation where he claimed the voters’ main objective was to kick the Tories out but did not have any desire for a Labour government.
“I’ve been saying this for the last year. There is no love for the Labour Party. They didn’t increase the share of the vote. It is a very broad, very shallow vote that they actually have.
“The biggest problem we have as a country, and it’s going to be a problem over the next five years of misery, and we the Conservative Party are to blame for this is that we lost the election, Labour didn’t win it.
“It is diametrically opposite, actually, to, for example, Tony Blair. In 1997 people actively went out and voted for Tony Blair.”
Part of Lord Houchen’s reasoning for this is that both his party and the country refused to listen to Mr Sunak’s warnings who he now believes “would be considered a very good prime minister in normal times.”
“He’s very competent, he’s got all the right skill sets, but the circumstances in which he walked into he was always doomed to failure, and that wasn’t his fault.
“In hindsight, it’s pretty obvious that irrespective of who was in charge of the Conservative Party going in to the general election, would be never win that election because of our behaviour.”
Lord Houchen now believes he underestimated how Liz Truss’ mini budget and its impact on interest rates mortgages and the cost of living “broke the trust with the British people”.
He says the party should have listened to Mr Sunak’s warnings during the leadership election and then listened to his warnings on Labour.
“I think we will see it over the coming weeks and months ahead, everything he said in the leadership election when he stood against this Truss came true. He was warning party members exactly what would happen and the problems that we faced, and the membership ignored him.
“And then eventually he became prime minister anyway, and then we saw everything he said in the run up to the general election, all of the points he made about the Labour Party, all of the things he warned people about are now starting to come true.
“The problem was that irrespective of what Rishi was saying and how correct or accurate it was, people had stopped listening. People just turned off and they wanted to vote for somebody else, other than a Conservative government.”
But he warns against a simplistic debate over whether the party should mimic Reform or move closer to the Lib Dems. He points to the fact that some voters were trying to decide between Reform and the Lib Dems as an anti Tory vote.
“There are lots of Conservative voters that ended up voting elsewhere, the Lib Dem or Reform, or some went to Labour, but actually the vastness of the vote ended up staying at home.”
On Reform, he suggested that Nigel Farage was actually mimicking Boris Johnson.
“Farage was able to bring together red wall voters that were fed up of the political establishment. Boris Johnson was anti-establishment or certainly framed himself as an anti establishment candidate.”
He said he agreed with Kemi Badenoch that “Reform voters are our voters. That doesn’t necessarily mean that we parrot what Reform are. We’ve got to get back to what we as conservatives do.”
He also agreed with candidates Tom Tugendhat and Robert Jenrick who are suggesting the UK could leave or diminish the influence of the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR).
“I think a conversation about the ECHR is much more mainstream than people think, not around the technical nature of the ECHR itself, but what the contenders are trying to do is encapsulate the broader discussion around it.”
Lord Houchen has not declared support for any of the four leadership candidates to replace Mr Sunak but he is clear what the party has to do.
“Just because Labour are terrible doesn’t mean that the Conservatives do not still have a huge amount of work to do. We’ve got to elect the right leader, we’ve got to put the right policies in place. We’ve got to rebuild that trust with the public. That is going to take a long time, not just days or weeks or months. It’s going to take years into the run up to the next election to get anywhere close to rebuilding.”