Tory Chairman: We Need To Brace For A Challenging Local Election Night
9 min read
Nigel Huddleston, tasked with rebuilding the Tories’ election-winning machine, tells Harriet Symonds about how he plans to get them back in the game.
The new party chairman has the unenviable task of rebuilding what was once a formidable election-winning machine from the wreckage of last year’s drubbing.
Huddleston, a close ally of Kemi Badenoch, has to staunch the flow of party members to Reform UK while restructuring Conservative Campaign Headquarters (CCHQ).
He is, predictably, setting expectations about as low as possible ahead of Badenoch’s first electoral test at next week’s local elections.
“I’m well aware that we need to brace ourselves for a potentially challenging night,” he says.
Following a round of post-election redundancies, the Conservative Campaign Headquarters (CCHQ) is running on skeleton staff at a crucial time in the run up to local elections on 1 May. “We’ve still got a very, very good campaigning force at CCHQ,” Huddleston insists.
“We’ve got a really good team focused on local elections but by definition, they are highly localised, and therefore a lot of the messaging and activity is organised locally. It’s a very different message in one county versus another, and you can’t do all of that from [central office] with one central messaging – it’s very different from a general election.”
Since the general election, some former candidates and party members have been deeply critical of the candidate selection process. In particular, balancing the need for local candidates with the desire for talent. Critics have suggested that centralising selection, much like the Labour Party, could solve a lot of these problems. “Kemi has said quite clearly that she recognises some of the selection processes were challenging and upset some members. So we will be going through a review of the candidate selection process going forward,” says Huddleston.
The recent appointment of Clare Hambro as the party’s new head of candidates is the first step in this task. “We want to have a really good pool of talent from which individual associations can choose, but the key thing is getting that really big pool of talent,” he adds.
He “knows better than to make predictions” about what the party might achieve come 1 May and acknowledges the task of winning back disaffected voters will be “very challenging”.
Hoping to take the fight to the Tories in a swathe of seats is Reform UK. Speculation about a Tory-Reform pact to keep out Labour has been heavily rumoured, but Huddleston insists they are working hard to win every vote possible. “It’s going to be tough and challenging for us, but the key thing is we will be fighting. Our goal is to fight for every single vote in every single seat.”
“They are not Conservatives,” he adds. “Their energy policies recently were more tax, more government intervention – not free markets. Nigel Farage’s admiration for Putin, or their lukewarm stance with Ukraine, again, breaks the principles of sovereignty, democracy and freedom, which we hold dear as Conservatives.”
He says it’s down to “credible policies and having a really good team” that makes the Tories different from Reform. “This is such a differentiator between us,” he insists, hinting at the recent row between Nigel Farage and Rupert Lowe. “Kemi is saying it’s not just about her, it’s about the team.”
But a hugely successful local election result in 2021 puts the party in a precarious position, with 12 out of the 14 councils up for election currently Conservative-controlled. “Don’t risk it by going to anybody else,” pleads Huddleston.
“We’re seeing Reform choose lots of paper candidates that have nothing to do with their local area.
“We’ve largely gone with people who’ve got a solid track record of delivering in their local communities… Reform tends to go for some social media personality,” he says, adding: “They do not have a track record of delivering.”
But with so much energy focused on Reform, there has been a noticeably absent Liberal Democrat strategy from the party.
While the chairman admits that the Liberal Democrats “are a threat in certain areas”, he says their record speaks for itself: “Lib Dems aren’t famous for their consistency and will often say one thing in one area and another thing in another.”
As a party, we need to massively increase our presence online
Tasked with rebuilding the party under Badenoch’s leadership, Huddleston says he is committed to seeing them return to being “proper conservatives”.
“Some people didn’t understand what we stood for anymore,” he admits.
Growing up under Margaret Thatcher, Huddleston wants the Conservatives to be a party of “low taxes, small government, and being proud of your country” again. “People felt that we moved too far away from some of those things over the last few years.”
Defending the party’s record in government, he says: “We had to increase taxes out of necessity because of the pandemic, Labour are increasing taxes out of choice because, in contrast to us, they are big government, big state, high taxes.”
As he helps to forge a new vision for the party, would he embrace former Reform MP Rupert Lowe? “We welcome any former Reform voter who may realise that the Conservative Party is actually a Conservative Party, and if you believe in conservative values and principles, then welcome back to the Conservatives”, he says.
Many have made comparisons with Canada’s Conservatives’ struggle to recover from their election wipeout in 1993 as the Tory Party considers how to rebuild and fight off the threat of Reform. But there are also lessons to be learnt from Donald Trump’s victory in the United States. “The air war matters,” says Huddleston.
“As a party, we need to massively increase our presence online,” he says, taking inspiration from Trump and Farage by pointing to podcasts as a great tool for Badenoch to connect with voters. “When it’s a 20-second clip, it’s not necessarily the best way of getting introduced to the public.”
The ground war is important too, though some Tory MPs have been privately complaining that their new leader hasn’t been doing nearly enough local events compared to Farage, who has travelled the length and breadth of the country almost every day in April. “No, she’s up, she’s out and about, all over the place. She’s been travelling extensively across the country,” says Huddleston, rejecting the criticism from his colleagues.
“Farage has been around British politics for 20 years, really dominating. He is a known quantity. Kemi is still a relatively new leader,” he adds.
A YouGov poll last month revealed only 18 per cent of Brits have a favourable view of Badenoch, trailing behind both Keir Starmer and Farage who ranked 32 per cent and 27 per cent respectively.
Ever the loyal ally, Huddleston insists Badenoch is “doing very, very well” as the party’s new leader six months into the job.
“This is a marathon, not a sprint. She’s not going around giving easy answers for the easy approach of hoovering up lots of votes, telling everybody what they want to hear. Actually, her messaging is very disciplined and people respect that because we want to project ourselves as an alternative government, and that means being taken very, very seriously and making sure that our policies are credible and that we’ve got a way to actually implement things,” says Huddleston.
The party has adopted David Cameron-style commissions to develop new policy. However, so far, the only major policy announcements have been dropping net-zero and tightening immigration rules.
“Each of the shadow teams are taking the lead, coordinated by Kemi and supported by me and the team at CCHQ.”
On the timescale for producing more policy, Huddleston explains: “It won’t be two minutes before the next election and all of a sudden the manifesto comes out and nobody’s heard anything before. It’s a process over the next few years.”
In addition to developing new policy, the party has been working to woo back donors after a number of high profile names fled last year. Names include billionaire John Caudwell, who left to back Labour at the last election, property developer Nick Candy who went to Reform, and more recently businessman Richard Harpin who had given the Conservative Party more than £3.5m since 2010.
People get quite excited about Kemi’s sincerity
Harpin’s decision to pause donations leaves a question mark over the future of the party’s northern HQ in Leeds. CCHQ has not shut down speculation and party insiders say they are surprised it’s stayed open this long.
The Tories raised more than any other party in the last quarter of 2024, but some would-be backers have been reluctant to commit new funding over doubts about Badenoch’s performance and the rise of Reform.
The party’s fundraising dinners have been “going well”, insists Huddleston, adding: “People get quite excited about Kemi’s sincerity.
“I’ve been at quite a few with her, and especially if people don’t really know her and are not familiar with her, they leave very excited and enthused because she’s got a very clear personal story and a very clear vision for the future of this country.”
Co-party chairman Lord Dominic Johnson was assigned to find new donors but has faced some internal criticism since taking on the role. “I will also be trying to reach out to donors, because we cannot build some of the capabilities that we want to invest in and do these things without donations,” Huddleston says.
However, he won’t say if he would accept a donation from Elon Musk, who previously flirted with donating to Farage’s Reform party.
With the party sitting in third place in some opinion polls, hovering in the early-to-mid twenties, how long will it take for the Conservatives to eclipse 30 per cent again?
“It will take time, we have to show and acknowledge, as Kemi has done, and actually all of us, that we understand why we lost the last election, that we understand why it is that many people felt like they could not vote for us, and we need to give them reasons to vote for us again.”
