Local elections 2024: Tories trying to shrug off 'doom of Westminster' to get re-elected in the West Midlands

The first thing that catches my eye as I enter Patrick Harley’s office is a big painting of famous mafia characters from films and TV shows. Don Vito Corleone and Tony Soprano stare down as I take a seat opposite the Conservative leader for Dudley Council, which is up for election on 2 May. On the walls are signed photos of boxing greats, Muhammed Ali, Henry Cooper and Marvin Hagler.

While Harley is preparing for a bout with the Labour Party, with myself he’s affable, open and engaging. And despite the gloomy national picture for Conservatives, he’s fairly bullish about his chances of retaining control of Dudley Council and the chances of his colleague Andy Street who is going for a third term as West Midlands mayor.

“I think locally we always do better than what the national picture is,” he tells me. “We’re active every week from August through to polling day … it has the effect of bringing those Conservatives to perhaps forget the doom and gloom of the Westminster bubble, and actually come out and support hard-working council candidates.”

Harley appears to be trying to distance himself from the chaos in Downing Street, with three Prime Ministers in two years while plotters try to bring down Rishi Sunak and instate a fourth before the general election. “The good thing for us is people are differentiating between the Westminster bubble, which isn’t great at the moment for ourselves,” Harley says. 

“They’re differentiating between their Parliamentarians and local councillors, and our track record here and Mayor Street’s track record. He’s got his own brand, they like him and see him as almost independent from any political party. Clearly he’s a Conservative candidate, but they view him as almost a non-political political candidate - and that goes down well on the doorstep.” 

A fairly astonishing comment from a Conservative council leader, but he’s certainly right about Andy Street. If you go on his Twitter profile, it makes no mention of him being a Conservative candidate - and he’s been known to use green-coloured leaflets instead of the Tory blue.

This doesn’t appear to bother Harley though: “In a small way or major way, Andy Street has delivered. That's why people like him. So whether he has a shade of green on his literature, whether he doesn't bang the drum that he’s a Conservative candidate - he doesn't need to.  How many politicians are known by their name rather than their party labelling? And that's why I think he’ll win a third term.”

I ask him if the Dudley Conservatives are going to follow the Andy Street playbook and play down that they’re Tories? “Where we are following Andy is actually leaving the Westminster bubble to the Westminster politicians,” he says “Leave them to it. What we're concentrating on like Andy Street, is our record locally. Andy Street’s got a fantastic record to sell to the electorate and they’re buying it in abundance. Equally in Dudley we've got a good record to sell.”

‘There’s a feeling that Dudley gets overshadowed’

Dudley, known as the “capital of the Black Country”, was one of the birthplaces of the Industrial Revolution. It was the first place in the UK to produce iron commercially using coke instead of charcoal, and as such had huge population growth during the 19th century. 

In 1851, it was named the most unhealthy place to live in the country in the midst of an iron, coal and limestone boom. It suffered during deindustrialisation, and is now mainly known for the Black Country Living Museum which is where Peaky Blinders is filmed.

“Dudley suffers a lot from not having a Premier League football team, not having city status and there’s a feeling that it gets overshadowed,” my colleague Mark Andrews, political reporter for NationalWorld’s sister site the Express and Star, tells me. We’re sitting in the Midlands News Association’s offices overlooking the city of Wolverhampton on a grey and damp spring day.

“A lot of the money goes into Birmingham in this region, and then a lot of it goes into Wolverhampton, a similar-sized town [as Dudley], but it has city status and has a Premier League football team,” he explains. Dudley’s the biggest town in England without a professional football team, and also doesn’t have a railway station in the centre. 

Building work is ongoing to extend the Metro through Dudley to Brierley Hill, however this is likely to take several more years. Currently CityMapper slightly cruelly offers you transport options of “The Future: Midlands Metro Extension”. 

‘There’s still quite a bit of resistance to change’

Dudley, and the West Midlands as a whole, have become political bellwethers, and will make up some of the key seats in the general election later this year. Sir Keir Starmer launched Labour’s local elections campaign in Dudley several weeks ago, and the year before Rishi Sunak did the same. 

“Dudley North is a seat which has always been a very marginal seat,” Mark tells me. “It was marginal Labour up until the last election, when Marco Longhi won it by quite a sizeable majority. Will he hold onto that seat or will Labour retake that? If Labour’s going to form the next government, you’d expect they’d be looking to take that seat.”

However Mark doesn’t think it’s a done deal that the seat will flip. In the Dudley Council elections last year, when a third of councillors were up, the wards were evenly split between Labour and the Tories, despite Starmer’s party being 20 points ahead in the polls. This year, all councillors are facing the ballot box due to boundary changes. 

“Dudley’s always been an interesting area in the sense it’s quite a socially conservative area,” he explains. “It had a huge Brexit vote and the results of last year’s local elections suggest there’s still quite a bit of resistance to change in that respect. I think Labour would be very pleased if they could take that seat, but it’s still all to play for.”

The other big election in the West Midlands on 2 May is for the Mayor, with Conservative Andy Street going for a third term against Labour’s Richard Parker. It’s been rumoured in Westminster that if Street and fellow Tory mayor Ben Houchen in Teesside fail to get reelected, the plotters could look to remove Rishi Sunak from No10. No pressure then.

“It's obviously going to be difficult - the headwinds are against him,” Mark tells me. “But he’s always been someone who has managed to cut across political divides, political lines. He gots a lot of criticism from his opponents by using green leaflets, they say he under plays his role as a Conservative and that he positions himself as an independent. 

“In his own words, he describes himself not as a ‘Conservative Mayor’, but as ‘a mayor who is a Conservative’. I think he will be hopeful that he can differentiate himself from some of the problems the party is having nationally.” 

Labour would ‘look after every penny, every pound’

Along the corridor in the Dudley Council House, I sit down with Labour leader Pete Lowe. With the Black Country flag draped behind him, he tells me his party is “confident but not complacent” of victory on 2 May. “We recognise fully that we've got a job to do to win over the people that the newly transformed Labour party is a party that they can trust to govern,” he says. 

“Obviously, we've got the impact of 14 years of Conservative Party rule, and many years now of Conservative Party leadership locally. So we've got a tale to tell about how we would do things drastically differently to where we are at the moment. 

“Over the next three or four weeks, it's our role to knock on as many doors as possible, and have as many conversations with as many people as we can, and hopefully convert them to give their confidence and their vote to the Labour Party.”

Lowe says the Tories have taken Dudley Council to the brink of bankruptcy, something which Harley denies. Earlier in the year, the council was told it would need to make further cuts to avoid declaring a section 114 order, which effectively means going bankrupt.

“We’ve got to look at the decisions that local administration took,” Lowe says, “for example, while many people are working hard in Dudley to put food on the table and pay their mortgage, we had nine senior officials disappear to the south of France on a junket to Cannes costing the people of this borough £300,000.” Lowe says that under his administration the council would open up its books and “make sure we look after every penny, every pound and direct that back to our people”.

Johnson promised to ‘double down on levelling up’ in Dudley

In his so-called “New Deal” speech from Dudley in 2020, Boris Johnson promised to “double down on levelling up”. However, four years on, while a lot of money has been pledged to the capital of the Black Country, residents are still waiting for action.

Even Harley admits that “levelling up has not been delivered”. “The funding certainly has been delivered,” he says. The whole local authority has been granted £80million to revolutionise Dudley the surrounding areas. “The problem with these grand announcements and schemes is the money is great but then it can take a long time to sort out the nitty gritty of what we have to do,” he adds.

Labour leader Lowe is unsurprisingly less diplomatic. “We had Boris Johnson, literally a mile from where I live, come in by helicopter and then jumped on an eco-friendly bike to show his credentials,” he tells me. “He [Johnson] promised the world to the people of Dudley and he has not delivered a single penny.”

Despite this claim, my colleagues at the Express and Star tell me Johnson is very popular in the Black Country. Mark Andrews says: “He could go into a pub or a brewery in Dudley and just be chatting to locals, he’d fit in well. I think both Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak are seen as a bit London-centric, slightly aloof, that might be unfair but I think that’s the perception.”

Harley says Johnson has no one to blame but himself: “Boris is still very popular in the West Midlands, but it was always going to be short lived. I think if he'd have shown more discipline, and fired a few people for having parties or drinks or misbehaving during the pandemic then I think he’d still be Prime Minister and probably cruising to another general election win. 

“But he didn't have the discipline to sort out the people who were misbehaving. If you look at what he did, he didn't misbehave, but he was the guy in charge and he didn't reprimand and discipline those that were - that's a weakness.”

Ralph Blackburn is NationalWorld’s politics editor based in Westminster, where he gets special access to Parliament, MPs and government briefings. If you liked this article you can follow Ralph on X (Twitter) here and sign up to his free weekly newsletter Politics Uncovered, which brings you the latest analysis and gossip from Westminster every Sunday morning.