After yet another disaster of a week for Rishi Sunak and the Tory party, disillusioned Conservative MPs returned to all corners of the UK last Thursday and Friday to hear the verdicts of voters. Days of internal chaos and division over the government’s Rwanda deportations legislation had left the impression of a party in irreversible decline. The sense in the House of Commons had been one of fast advancing and predictable decay bordering at times on farce. But was there still some residual hope for Conservatives, to be found out there, in the country?
Martin Vickers, the veteran Tory MP for Cleethorpes, spent much of last Friday morning, after the bruising events in the Commons, chatting to his constituents in a supermarket in Barton-upon-Humber, most of whom he judged to be still “instinctively Conservative voters”. Vickers, a grandee who sits on the executive of the 1922 Committee of backbenchers, is by nature an optimist, and a loyalist. “I would say all is not completely lost,” was his assessment afterwards.
