Partying at No 10 as Queen grieved alone ‘difficult for Tories to get past’

The controversy around the Queen grieving alone at her husband’s funeral while there was “partying” at Number 10 was “very difficult” for the Tories to get past at the general election, a shadow cabinet minister has said.

Mel Stride, the shadow work and pensions secretary, told an event at the Conservative Party Conference that perceptions around competence and trust and the way the election campaign played out all contributed to the party’s election defeat in July.

He told the Centre for Policy Studies’ election post-mortem event that some issues in the years before the election harmed the Tories’ chances but were out of the party’s control, but there were also “three things that we definitely got wrong all by ourselves”.

Among them was “trust”, Mr Stride said, with incidents like the scandals around Owen Paterson and Chris Pincher, and partygate.

He told the fringe event: “Most of us can probably see that picture of the late Queen sitting in St George’s Chapel in Windsor, grieving for her husband at the same time as the story was around partying in Number 10.

“I think those are very difficult things to get beyond in terms of the destructive effect that that had on the values that people saw us as having, or rather not having.”

He also highlighted “competence”, with the party making “strong statements about what we were going to do when it came to net migration and we completely lost control”.

On the promise to stop small boat crossings, “we made the salience of that far too strong in terms of it being one of our five pledges, and clearly we failed to deliver on that”.

He also said there was a missed opportunity to “fundamentally reform the NHS in a way that would have made it more productive”.

The third issue he pinpointed was the election campaign itself.

“At the end of the day we certainly managed to not just surprise the Labour Party but we actually surprised our own party,” he told the event.

“There was also all the blunders, the missteps,” he added, pointing to incidents such as the election betting controversy.

“I think if you add all those things up, you get to a very confused picture of what being a Conservative is all about, and people in the end just didn’t know what we stood for,” he told the event.

Issues that harmed the party’s prospects but were out of its control included the Covid pandemic and the inflationary pressures that came with the war in Ukraine, Mr Stride told the event.

He stood as a candidate in the Conservative leadership election but was knocked out earlier this month in the second round of voting.