Rishi Sunak has been warned by leading One Nation group Conservatives it would be “politically disastrous” to veer further to the right after two heavy byelection losses to Labour.
The prime minister faces a dilemma over his future strategy as the byelection defeats in Kingswood and Wellingborough showed his party lost votes to a victorious Labour on the left and insurgent Reform UK on the right.
After the results he faced calls from Jacob Rees-Mogg and the New Conservatives’ Danny Kruger and Miriam Cates to “reunite the right” and win back Reform voters, as well as those who stayed at home, to “the Tory family”. Cates and Kruger called for tax cuts, more curbs on immigration and welfare and a willingness to withdraw from the European convention on human rights, as the Reform party took 10-13% of the vote in the two seats.
But Damian Green, the leader of the One Nation caucus of more than 100 Conservative MPs, said it was wrong to believe the Reform and Tory vote could be added together, and called for the party to unite around current policies.
“If we attempt to become the Reform party, we will get the Reform party’s level of support,” he told the Guardian. “It seems politically disastrous to me.
“The only thing in a general election year is to unite. Whatever else we need to change, we absolutely need not to be arguing about policies at this stage of the cycle. Colleagues who say we need a different policy approach, those who want the Conservative party to be like the Reform party, will continue to do so but there’s no evidence you can add the Reform vote to the Tory vote and say here’s a new coalition.”
Another leading One Nation Conservative said there would be a battle ahead to stop the right of the party pushing to neutralise Reform when “elections are only ever won on the centre ground”.
Speaking on Friday morning, the prime minister signalled more tax cuts would be on the way and downplayed the significance of the Reform vote, saying the “actual choice at the general election [is] between me and [Starmer], between the Conservatives and Labour”.
Sunak has been facing the threat of a plot from unknown MPs and donors on the right of the party, who funded polling fronted by the Tory peer David Frost predicting he would lead the party to a Labour landslide.
But on Friday only one Conservative MP – Andrea Jenkyns – repeated calls for the prime minister to resign. But he came under immediate pressure from Rees-Mogg to try to “reunite the right” by appealing to Reform voters to turn back to the Tories.
Conservative MPs also revealed Boris Johnson had been messaging them to ask their views, in a sign the former prime minister may not have given up hope of a political comeback. Two Tory MPs said they had received occasional messages from Johnson over the past months asking for their thoughts on political developments. Both MPs said they last heard from him a month or so ago.
Johnson’s continued communication with Conservative MPs is a sign he remains engaged in politics. It will give hope to those who want to see him take an active role in the next Tory election campaign.
“It’s things like ‘how are things?’,” one of the MPs said of Johnson’s messages. “People obviously reach out to him as well. It’s classic Boris – he’s not actually saying anything apart from ‘what do you think?’”
Johnson’s spokesperson said he could not comment on private conversations.
The main criticisms of Sunak came on Friday from Kruger and Cates, the co-chairs of the New Conservatives group of right-leaning Tory MPs, who were among those calling on Sunak to “change course”, urging him to “adapt to the reality that the byelections reveal: our target voters want a different and a better offer”.
“The results of yesterday’s byelections are unequivocal,” they said. “Labour are winning because many of the people who backed us in 2019 are staying at home or voting for Reform. Voters are not flocking to Labour. They want a genuine alternative to the consensus politics of the last two decades.”
They called on Sunak to reduce legal migration, cut income tax and declare the UK was willing to pull out of the European convention on human rights.
Another leading Conservative MP, Paul Scully, told GB News that more vision was needed alongside tax cuts to help with the cost of living crisis. “I think tax cuts is a single measure in the budget that won’t necessarily bed in unless you’ve got a vision around it,” he said. “Any tax cuts that do get put in place, I think they’ve got to affect a wide amount of people. That fiscal drag, tackling tax thresholds, these kinds of things are affecting hundreds of thousands of people, nurses and public sector workers that wouldn’t necessarily be expected to be suddenly paying a high rate. That’s what we’ve got to look at now.
“But we’ve also got to set out a vision on housing. What are we going to do for young people? What are we going to do about migration in a sensible way that’s achievable? Politics is the art of the possible.”
The double defeat was the source of a sour mood among Tory MPs. One described the results as a “blow to the stomach”, while another described them as “really appalling but not unexpectedly appalling”. Some MPs and grassroots members are convinced that a Johnson comeback is their greatest hope of turning around their political fortunes.
The former chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng said this month that Sunak should “swallow some pride” and bring Johnson back to frontline politics. “Something has to change, for us to have a chance of winning,” he told GB News.
Sunak told ITV this month he still occasionally speaks to Johnson and refused to rule out bringing him back into his top team. “I’m proud of the work that we did together,” he said. “And we worked well together for a long time. In the end there are, you know, well-documented differences.”
