The Conservative on-the-ground election campaign is descending into “disarray” amid a chronic lack of volunteers and strategy and an increasing sense of panic in formerly ultra-safe seats, insiders and opponents have told the Guardian. Some areas have struggled to muster people to knock on doors and deliver leaflets due to a combination of a shrinking and ageing membership, a calamitous fall in the number of Conservative councillors and disillusionment with the election campaign. Instead the party has become heavily reliant on using paid-for delivery to send out large numbers of election leaflets that are often nationally focused and less relevant to local issues. “In our seat, the local MP is a minister, and if he goes out door-knocking during the day he’s lucky to have three people with him,” said one Tory official in a seat the party currently holds. “Sometimes it’s just him and one other person. On weekends there are people who might deliver leaflets, but they don’t want to knock on doors.” Opposition parties fighting in previously safe Tory seats say they have noticed a stark difference even from the last election. “In 2019 it was definitely different,” one Liberal Democrat candidate said. “I think voters are noticing this time that their Tory communication comes with the pizza leaflets.”
Some public events have also seemed poorly attended. The official photo for the campaign launch in Winchester for Flick Drummond, formerly the MP for the now-abolished seat of Meon Valley, showed fewer than two dozen people – one of whom was another former MP, Desmond Swayne – plus a cardboard cutout of Margaret Thatcher. In part this is a long-term problem, with the Conservatives’ membership, which is not made public, understood to have fallen by tens of thousands since 2022, when it was about 172,000. A particularly big factor has been a huge reduction in councillors, who are routinely used as ground troops, often with their families and friends joining them. In the last three sets of local elections, the Conservatives have lost nearly 1,900 councillors in England, more than a quarter of the total.
One Lib Dem candidate standing in a home counties seat said the local Conservative party had gone from running the local council in 2019 to having no councillors now, with a notable effect on morale and available volunteers.
“Their team in 2019 wasn’t huge, but it was viable,” they said. “But so far in this campaign all we’ve seen is leaflets delivered by Royal Mail, and even those were slow to get going. It’s almost like they were caught on the hop by the election – we were moving more quickly than them.” Initially the Conservatives were officially basing their campaign plans on a so-called 80:20 election strategy – defending their 80 most marginal seats and trying to win 20 target seats from the opposition. One Tory official said this was long gone: “The 80:20 plan no longer exists, if it ever did. We are diverting resources to safer and safer seats. People in seats which have been Conservative forever are basically shitting themselves. There is no strategy – it’s pretty much disarray.” One factor that might save some Tory MPs is the fact that in constituencies Labour and the Lib Dems had previously assumed were unwinnable, people who want to vote tactically are unsure who is the main contender. In some areas the Conservatives are trying to frame this to their advantage, putting out leaflets, for example, saying Labour is their primary opponent when it is the Lib Dems who have the better chance of unseating them.
Much of the Tory campaigning, however, feels less than focused, particularly in traditionally ultra-safe areas. “The MP here has never had to work very hard to win votes and it shows,” one Lib Dem candidate in a prosperous English heartland constituency said. “I was in a village last week and two carloads of Conservatives arrived, including my opponent. They stormed around for about 15 minutes, delivered some leaflets and knocked on a few doors and then left again. “We’ve seen them do that before. When we canvass we do it for a few hours, have proper conversations with people. It’s like the seat has been so safe for so long that they have forgotten how to campaign.”