Against a backdrop of plunging donations and plunging morale, Kemi Badenoch is ready to wield the axe again at Conservative headquarters, where a round of compulsory redundancies is planned.
A month after job losses across the campaign, voter insight and finance and operations teams, plans are reportedly afoot to reduce the headcount at Conservative campaign headquarters (CCHQ) by a further 12.5 percent.
According to a report in the Times, the cuts come hard on the heels of a voluntary redundancy scheme that has already seen 32 staff exit.
Combined with three resignations, those departures are understood to have reduced staff numbers from 188 to 153.
And despite a £250,000 donation from Lord Ashcroft, a former Conservative deputy chairman who has come to the party’s rescue on several occasions in the past, staff numbers are now expected to fall to 134.
The move will be keenly felt among several teams already deeply impacted by cutbacks.
While it seems the party chairman’s team will survive unscathed, the number of campaign staff working in Westminster and regionally, already diminished following 11 voluntary redundancies, is expected to lose a further five members, bringing the total down to 32.
The insight and voter communications team, which has lost six members in the space of a month, is now expected to lose a further four people, bringing the total to 18.
Despite reported plans to make further job cuts at CCHQ, Tory leader Kemi Badenoch, seen here on the BBC show Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, says the party’s finances are healthy
Lord Ashcroft, a former Conservative deputy chairman who recently donated £250,000 to the party, is seen posing with a collection of Victoria Crosses at the Imperial War Museum in 2010
Against a backdrop of plunging donations, resignations and redundancies, morale is increasingly low at Conservative campaign headquarters
And in finance and operations, a headcount that previously stood at 41 is now anticipated to contract further, from 34 staff to 29.
The Tories’ latest attempt to shore up finances is unlikely to do much for morale at a time when esprit de corps is already at a premium.
While Lord Ashcroft’s attempt to bolster the coffers bucks a wider trend of dwindling donor funding, Reform UK is snapping at the Conservatives’ heels.
Insiders have suggested there is a lack of confidence that Badenoch will be in situ for the long haul, prompting donors to heed advice that they should hang fire until a new leader emerges.
Behind-the-scenes demands from Badenoch that staff do better or consider their positions have done little to help, and the mood if one of anger among some Conservative MPs.
‘CCHQ is hardly flush with cash if we’re having to make all these cutbacks,’ one senior figure told the Times. ‘It’s a joke and no one could justifiably say: “We’re all in this together.’”
The cull of staff at CCHQ is expected to be a prelude to a wholesale remodelling of the organisation.
But while Badenoch has insisted that reports of dwindling donations are ‘far from the truth’, ministers paint a different picture, with one complaining: ‘We’re chronically understaffed.’
The Conservative party had not responded to a request for comment at the time of writing.
