May 8, 2023 - 11:15am

Rishi Sunak is lucky. The local election results were so bad for his party that they could have put the skids under his leadership. But the Coronation weekend intervened — and so, instead of angry Tories calling for the Prime Minister’s head, the nation united to watch Penny Mordaunt holding a sword. 

Nevertheless, the Conservatives will soon be waking up with a delayed hangover. They’ll be conscious that something awful happened last week — the loss of over a thousand councillors, in this case — and yet some rather important details could be obscured in the recollection. 

Not least among these is the impressive performance of the Green Party. While the Labour Party did well and the Lib Dems very well, the Greens grew exponentially — doubling their council seats from 240 to 481. 

The party now has its first council majority, Mid-Suffolk District Council, where it holds 24 out of 34 seats. It is the largest party on a further seven councils — and has a substantial presence on many others. This is much better than anything achieved in local government by UKIP at its peak, and the Green accomplishment deserves a lot more media recognition than it has so far received. 

What’s more, most of these gains have been made in the Tory heartlands. The image of the Greens as the natural home of students and geriatric hippies is out of date. The party is now a powerful force in rural areas and market towns across the south of England. 

Back in October 2021, I wrote an article warning the Tories of what was coming. Looking at a hundred council by-elections that year, I pointed out that six were Green victories at Conservative expense. 

Something was clearly up: the Greens had found a way of matching radicalism with some small-c conservative instincts and presenting the package in reassuringly middle-class terms. As a result, they were now “knocking bricks out of the Blue Wall”. Needless to say, there was no sign of Tory HQ taking this threat seriously. 

Now that hundreds of Conservative councillors have lost their seats to a party that’s well to the Left of Labour on many issues, there’s no ignoring the Greens. But what can the Tories actually do?

For a start, they shouldn’t even think about becoming the anti-environmentalist party. UnHerd polling shows that UK voters are decisively in favour of Net Zero and other green policies — and that includes Red Wall and 2019 Tory voters. 

Starting with our green monarch, we are a country, broadly speaking, that cares about the climate, about nature and about the places where we live. To reconnect with the public, the Conservatives need to re-embrace environmentalism — as they did during the “vote blue, go green” phase of David Cameron’s leadership. 

Sunak should reshuffle his ministers at the Environment and Energy departments — neither Thérèse Coffey nor Grant Shapps inspire confidence. Over at the Housing department, Michael Gove must deliver on the work of the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission. Too many new developments are still an eyesore — allowing the Greens and Lib Dems to weaponise Nimbyism. We also need an immediate crackdown on the water companies: no more pumping sewage into British waters. 

Of course, the Conservatives should expose the more extremist elements of the Green Party where they find them — not to mention their ineptitude in local government. But to be effectively anti-Green, the Tories must be credibly pro-green. 


Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.

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