The Conservative chair has conceded his party is in “a very tough situation” after a difficult night at the local elections triggered calls for Rishi Sunak to change course.
Richard Holden admitted it had been “a tough set of elections” for his party, which has suffered heavy losses including in the Blackpool South byelection with a 26-point swing to Labour.
In results counted overnight, the Conservatives lost more than 100 councillors. The elections expert John Curtice said the Tories could be on course to lose 500 council seats in “one of the worst, if not the worst” performances by the party in 40 years. Counting will continue into the weekend.
Despite calls for Sunak to heed the message of the elections, Tory rebels have admitted that they lack the support to oust him.
The Tory MP Andrea Jenkyns, who in November declared that she had submitted a letter of no confidence in the prime minister, said she stood by her view but that it was “unlikely” that others would now follow suit.
“My stance always is the same,” she told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme. “But I’m not sure that colleagues are going to be putting the letters in, so we’re working with what we’ve got. I think we shouldn’t have got rid of Boris in the first place but we are where we are and it’s looking unlikely that MPs are going to put the letters in.”
Jenkyns said: “The last 24 hours, I think for Rishi, he’s got a message, he has been told by the electorate: wake up, be Conservative or we lose.”
She called for Sunak to be “decidedly more Conservative” and initiate a “quite radical cabinet reshuffle now to unite all sides of the party”, including the Tory right.
Kwasi Kwarteng, who was chancellor under Liz Truss, told LBC: “We need stability and consolidation and we’re not going to get that by having yet another – what is it, the sixth Tory prime minister? … I’m not one of those people who thinks that that’s the right way to go.”
He added: “But of course a lot of colleagues will be very nervous and some of them might well think we might as well roll the dice with a new leader.”
Holden told the Today programme that his party was “coming off that high watermark from 2021 where we gained seats for the first time for 11 years for a government which was in office”.
A survey of party members published by the ConservativeHome website suggested that 63% did not think Sunak should resign as party leader, regardless of what the final results were.
Conservative MPs are especially concerned about the success of Reform UK, which came within 117 votes of beating the Tories to second place in the Blackpool South byelection.
Touring broadcast studios on Friday morning, Holden appealed to Tory MPs to “wait through the weekend” and insisted that Sunak was “the right man” to lead the party.
Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, told the BBC his party was “confident” going into the general election and that “the country wanted change”.
“This is a clear divide now. We have had 14 years of failure and decline. We have just got chaos and division from the Tories,” he said.