‘Obsession’ with Reform UK could leave Tories out of power for 20 years, warns Andy Street

Former West Midlands mayor on why his party was defeated, what they can do about it, and his next steps

Andy Street has spent the summer thinking hard about what went wrong – and about the future. It is almost four months since he lost his job as the Conservative mayor of the West Midlands, a post he had held for seven years. “Oh, how we were thwarted,” he groans, recalling the pain of a very narrow defeat at the hands of Labour, and the reasons for it. Two months later the same irresistible anti-Tory tide would, much more decisively, sweep the Conservatives out of government at Westminster.

Helped by a holiday in the US, the ex-boss of John Lewis seems to have come to terms with the double disaster and appears fully re-energised. Street has done his postmortems, diagnosed the reasons for the Tories’ national election defeat and settled on what steps he would like to take next on his own career path. He is adamant that becoming a backbench MP is not one of them.

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