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Tory MPs will hold meetings this week to discuss how to remove leader Kemi Badenoch as panic grows over the future of the party following Reform’s success in the local elections.
Two senior backbenchers have confirmed to The Independent that they are calling meetings with fellow parliamentarians to discuss ousting the Conservative Party leader.
“We cannot continue as we are and she [Ms Badenoch] is just not up to the task,” one of the MPs said.
The moves come after the Tories lost 15 councils and 674 seats last week in devastating results which puts the future of the party at risk. At the same time Nigel Farage declared his party has now taken the place of the Conservatives as the main opposition to Labour as his party won 676 seats and overall control of 10 councils.
One Conservative MP said: “These results were actually worse than last year’s general election. We have somehow gone backwards.”
It is understood that a number of Tories have also contacted Mr Jenrick to stand again for the leadership just six months after he failed in his first attempt.
Meanwhile, there are claims that former foreign secretary Sir James Cleverly is also positioning himself for a potential leadership contest as a centrist alternative to the rightwing Mr Jenrick.
Over the weekend, Sir James told GB News that Ms Badenoch “knows she has my full support” but said he could “rule nothing out and nothing in” regarding a potential leadership bid should there be a vacancy.
Critics of Ms Badenoch in the parliamentary party have spoken of their frustration over a lack of a strategy to deal with Reform.
In particular an attempt to get her support for a Reform attack unit, with the help of former allies of Nigel Farage from Ukip and the Brexit Party who have joined the Tories, fell on deaf ears despite support from grandee Brexiteer Sir Bill Cash.
One senior backbencher said: “I feel like I have been banging my head against a brick wall trying to find out what the strategy is to take on Farage and Reform. There has been nothing.”
Mr Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, noticeably posted on X how all the Tory council candidates in his Newark seat had won on a day which saw hundreds of Tory councillors lose their seats.
He spent the weekend doing party fundraisers in different parts of the country.
Pollster Luke Tryl from More in Common suggested that the Tories have 12 months to turn things around.
But one MP said: “If we give Kemi another year it could be curtains for us. There are no policies, no ideas, no strategy and she has no charisma.”
There are also complaints about her choice of senior staff, especially ex-MPs like Rachel McLean and Therese Coffey.
“They just don’t seem to understand the trouble we are in,” another MP said.
However, Tory MPs also are concerned that the updated rules meaning a third of them (currently 41 MPs) are needed to trigger a vote of confidence with letters to the 1922 Committee chairman Bob Blackman. It cannot happen until she has been in office for a year, meaning their options for a rapid leadership change may be limited.
While MPs are not putting their names on the record calling for Ms Badenoch to go yet, other Conservatives have.
Jason Smithers, the former Tory leader of North Northamptonshire Council, called for Ms Badenoch to go following the results, saying: “I can’t see how a leader of a party can stay on with such terrible results across the country.”
Phillip Blond, director of the ResPublica think tank and a former adviser to David Cameron, has called for Ms Badenoch to go.
He posted on X (Twitter): “Our leadership post the GE has been astoundingly poor. All Badenoch has offered is inertia and inaction. She has allowed Reform to establish bulwarks on her flank that now look unbreachable,” adding, “Regrettably we do need a new leader, and this surely can only be Robert Jenrick. Reform can be challenged, but not under Badenoch. The alternative is doing nothing and becoming nothing.”
But Ms Badenoch has made it clear she intends to go nowhere.
Ms Badenoch told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg that changing leaders leads to success is wrong, arguing that her party’s current predicament isn’t “going to be fixed after six months.” She added: “This is not about winning elections; this is about fixing our country.”
However, Ms Badenoch’s BBC interview appears to have made MPs more anxious.
One senior MP said: “She is talking as though we have lots of time to turn things around. We do not. It may even be too late already.
“She has left a huge space for Nigel Farage to fill.”
Shadow cabinet members are trying to calm nerves, telling Tory MPs not to try to move against her arguing she “needs time”.
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