Conservative candidates and aides have looked on aghast at the missteps of Rishi Sunak’s campaign over the last fortnight. Anger has been building over Sunak allies being parachuted into safe seats, including the party chair, Richard Holden, the lack of preparation for the snap campaign within Conservative party headquarters (CCHQ) and the avoidable row over Frank Hester’s donations. But nothing has come close to the fury within the party over the prime minister’s decision to skip part of the D-day ceremony in France, leaving the stage clear for Keir Starmer to show leadership and patriotism, as well as for Nigel Farage. Ultimately, the choice was the prime minister’s: to come home for an ITV interview or stay to honour veterans and the fallen. However, many candidates are apoplectic with rage at the strategists who allowed such a misstep to take place, questioning the quality at the heart of the Conservative party campaign. “The spads and clown advisers who are making these decisions will never work on so much as a Tory councillor’s campaign again in their lifetime,” said one irate Conservative source.
Although the campaign is being overseen in Conservative party headquarters by an experienced elections strategist, Isaac Levido, Tory candidates are concerned Sunak’s own advisers and allies appear to be in the ascendancy when it comes to decision-making. Conservative sources described “a rupture that has not healed” between Levido and some Sunak aides after it became public knowledge that the campaign chief had not been in favour of a summer election. Levido has his own team of professional campaigners alongside the team of Sunakites who have now taken up office in CCHQ. Those on Sunak’s team include his chief of staff, Liam Booth-Smith, who was in favour of an early election, Rupert Yorke, who is organising personnel, and Nerissa Chesterfield, the prime minister’s communications chief.
Alongside them is the policy adviser James Nation, who is holding the pen on the Conservative manifesto, and is blamed by some MPs for the surprise nature of the national service announcement with no pitch-rolling. Among staff, there is a feeling that the attack operation, led by the former special adviser Marcus Natale, is failing to land enough blows and that they are being outgunned by Labour, although spinners landed a key win during the head-to-head debate when the prime minister relentlessly pushed the £2,000 Labour taxation line. Though the figures have been debunked and Sunak took heat for misleading the public about the civil service authorising the figures, it is still the key line of attack. Sunak has been left to fight an almost presidential style campaign with so many key politicians having to battle their own seats. Oliver Dowden, the deputy prime minister and former party chair, who along with Sunak pushed for an early election, appears to have spent most of his time on the road rather than in CCHQ. The 80/20 strategy has “morphed into a strategy simply to hang on to a bare minimum of seats”, one Tory insider said. Even in southern constituencies that Sunak allies such as Holden have secured, there are some doubts about how truly safe the seats are because of the low morale of campaigners. Where Holden is standing in Basildon and Billericay, the Conservatives lost control of the council this year. Holden was put to the local association as the only candidate at the last minute. “He’s the poster boy for what could end up being a catastrophic election,” one Conservative source said. “The selections are absolute fire for the party. There’s a strong feeling that they’re putting Rishi’s people in.” Holden claimed earlier this year that he was “bloody loyal to the north-east”, where his previous seat of North West Durham was abolished in boundary changes. The former press officer and special adviser is also being blamed among Tory candidates for poor CCHQ organisation at the start of the campaign and the party machine being caught unawares by the announcement of the election.
Candidate selections have created resentment among the party’s already demoralised grassroots. Two Tory sources familiar with its internal workings said the size of its membership had fallen by tens of thousands since the last leadership contest in 2022, when it stood at approximately 172,000. Insiders described a dire situation with activists and campaigners, compounded by the loss of so many local councillors at the past two elections. At events with Sunak and cabinet ministers, party staff have sometimes been seen having difficulty recruiting enough activists to attend and stand with placards for the cameras with the prime minister. At one stump speech and photocall in Amersham, a prosperous – and currently Lib Dem-held – town just outside London, several of the few dozen activists in the bar of a local rugby club had driven as much as an hour to get there from other places. There is also concern that safe Tory seats have overwhelmingly been handed to male candidates, and that as a result the party’s new intake will be overrepresented by men. The Conservative peer Anne Jenkin has urged women to stand in unwinnable opposition-held seats at this election. She wrote in the Women2Win WhatsApp group for aspiring female Tory MPs on 29 May: “Please put your names in for opposition-held seats if you haven’t fought before or had much experience. I hear on the grapevine that many of these seats are going to men because they are applying and women are not. Which means that % of women candidates overall will be low.” Asked about this, Jenkin said about a third of Conservative-held seats where MPs had retired at this election had female candidates and about a third of the party’s candidates overall were women. There are also concerns about party funding – at least three major donors have told the party they cannot fund the election campaign, according to the FT, and the Conservatives are facing a major backlash over their biggest donor Frank Hester. Sources also said the party had been missing the tin-rattling and networking abilities of the former Tory chair Ben Elliot. The businessman Stephen Massey is notionally the chief executive, his first election inside CCHQ. The Tory insider said he seemed “totally unpolitical which is not ideal”. Sources said there was a belief that donors were not stumping up the sums that HQ believed they had pledged, and the party now had a problem on its hands with associations complaining funds were not being released in time for them to get election material out. Former special advisers who have taken redundancy money had been approached about volunteering for CCHQ during the election campaign, which some have rebuffed, citing the need to look for new jobs before a Labour government. Some have agreed to join the election campaign but only after significant wrangling over pay. Some MPs have made it known to CCHQ that they are focused on their own seats. One junior minister who has been answering pleas to go on broadcast rounds said they were at the point of going on strike. “The final straw for me was the sight of the prime minister leaving the D-day commemorations early,” they said. “If anything says we’ve given up, that’s it.”