‘We’re stuffed’: have Conservatives given up on winning the next general election?

Hours after Wednesday’s budget, the Conservative party’s great and good assembled under the sweeping stone arches of the medieval Guildhall in London to hear Rishi Sunak address the 50th anniversary dinner for the Centre for Policy Studies thinktank. His party had a clear plan, the prime minister told hundreds of Tory MPs, peers, donors and other assorted luminaries: one centred on higher growth and lower taxes.

Many of those gathered had listened in person as Jeremy Hunt unveiled another 2p cut in national insurance but failed to produce anything approximating the rabbit-from-a-hat announcement that Tory MPs hoped might start shifting the polls. Sunak’s remarks were therefore greeted with scepticism, and some even raised eyebrows and politely shook heads. One attender called the event the “most opulent funeral I’ve ever been to”.

It is by no means uncommon for governments to run out of energy as they approach the end of a long period in office. But the gallows humour on show on Wednesday night was indicative of a mood some Tory insiders say goes further: a sense that many in the party have almost entirely given up.

Perhaps the most obvious metric for this is the running tally of MPs deciding that they do not wish to stand again. Even with the general election potentially still six months or more away, of the 96 standing down so far, 61 are Conservatives.

Related: Theresa May: loyal constituency MP who lost Tory support over Brexit

The 61st to declare their intention was Theresa May, who made her announcement on Friday morning. While it is not necessarily unusual for a 67-year-old former prime minister who has spent 27 years in the Commons to decide enough is enough, there is a general sense of the decks being cleared ahead of a possibly calamitous defeat to Labour.

Another vignette came from one party member who said they had noticed a big upsurge in Conservative special advisers and thinktank staff applying to join the exclusive Carlton Club, primarily in the hope of using it to network for another job.

Hunt’s budget has become the latest of a succession of policy ideas to make no dent in Labour’s polling lead of about 20 points. Some within the Conservatives worry that, among some MPs and advisers, a perhaps inevitable sense of ennui has become a cross between outright defeatism and a willing gallop towards the waiting abyss.

“We’re stuffed,” one Tory MP said, despondently if succinctly, after Sunak’s speech on Wednesday night. A wealthy Tory donor also attending simply pondered how Labour would address his specialist policy area “when” they were in government.

One opposition MP said they had been struck by the atmosphere in the Commons during Hunt’s budget speech. “It was interesting watching the Tory MPs as he built up to the NI cut,” they said. “That’s the part where they’d all be expected to cheer really loudly, but most of them just looked a bit miserable. It was like they don’t care any more.”

Even if, as most assume, Sunak will delay a general election until the autumn, the Conservatives must gear themselves up for local and mayoral elections across England on 2 May – and the signs do not look good.

One of the most high-profile races will be for London mayor, where Labour’s Sadiq Khan seems set for an unprecedented third term against his somewhat lacklustre Conservative opponent, Susan Hall, whose official website has only been updated twice since October. “The Tory campaign is a bit weird,” one Labour source said. “All Hall seems to do is knock on doors in outer suburbs and talk about crime. We’ve barely seen her.”

The council elections could be even more problematic, not least because the Conservatives will be defending seats last fought in 2021 – the 2020 elections were delayed a year due to Covid – when Boris Johnson was still enjoying something of a post-vaccine bounce.

Perhaps even more alarming for Sunak than the prospect of heavy losses is the number of Tory councillors who are quitting before they can be defeated. At one Conservative-run council in the party’s affluent heartlands, all but two sitting councillors are understood to have said they will not stand again, including the leader.

While the picture was mixed across areas, one Conservative source said, overall morale was “pretty bad”, with officials finding it difficult to even raise volunteers to go out canvassing.

“I think it’s partly people going, ‘What’s the point in canvassing? We’re not going to win over any swing voters, so why not just send out some leaflets?’” they said. “It’s also about the reception we get on the doorstep. In 2022, after Partygate, lots of voters really hated us. But now they just expect us to lose. If there’s one thing worse than being hated, it’s being laughed at.”

There is increasing frustration among some Tory MPs and ministers that efforts to trim Labour’s poll lead by focusing on core issues have been repeatedly undermined by controversies or bickering between factions.

“Whenever I speak to constituents, all they want to talk about is the cost of living and the NHS,” one minister lamented. “We should be hammering home the message about the economy and how it is getting better, every day. But we keep fucking up.”

There is a growing sense that some of those rocking the boat are mainly focused on increasing their chances of leading the post-defeat Tories, or even hoping for a calamitous result so that they can reshape a rump party in their ideological image.

“These people are Tory Trotskyists, they just want to bring down the whole system and start again,” the minister said. “You have a group of MPs who know they’ll keep their seats no matter what, so they don’t care how bad the defeat is. Then you get the ones who know they’ll lose their seats, and they also don’t care.”

One party official said there was an increasing dissonance between these types and the Tory MPs who still believed the scale of a loss could be mitigated.

“The problem with some of these people is they have never been in opposition,” the official said. “They think, ‘Well, we’ll lose, but I might be leader.’ But they simply don’t realise how much less attention you get in opposition. They also don’t realise how much less attention you’ll get if you’re leader of a really small group of MPs.

“The assumption is that we’ll lose, but there are still very big differences in how we might lose – and whether that means we’re out of office for five years, or 20.”

There is, however, a little more to it. As well as enthusiasm and volunteers, general elections run on money, and this is one resource the Conservatives still have in abundance, not least after receiving £10m from the healthcare tech entrepreneur Frank Hester.

One Liberal Democrat source said the party, which hopes to seize dozens of Tory-held seats at the election, had noticed a massive upsurge in paid-for leaflets delivered to voters’ doors. “We’re seeing enormous amounts of campaign literature in most of the seats they hold and in almost all our target seats,” they said. “There are also tons of digital ads – they’re spending like there’s no tomorrow.”