Next month’s local elections will be the last significant encounter with voters before a general election, likely later this year. So far, the talk is that heavy losses for the Tories are ‘priced in’ – with the party expected to lose about half of the Tories up for re-election. As I previously reported, senior conservatives are talking up the fate of the two metro mayors – Andy Street in the West Midlands and Ben Houchen in Tees Valley – as what will decide if it goes from being a bad night to a terrible one. As one former cabinet minister puts it: ‘Andy losing the Midlands is very difficult. Ben losing would be nuclear’.

A new Redfield and Wilton poll suggests Street is at risk to do just that. The Conservative mayor of the West Midlands is 14 points behind his Labour rival – polling at 28 per cent, compared to 42 per cent for his Labour rival Richard Parker. In a sign of the threat Reform poses, its candidate Elaine Williams is in third, at 13 per cent. Street – a former John Lewis boss – first won the mayoralty in 2017, along with Houchen. At the time, Street’s victory and his longevity in the role has been taken as an indicator that the Tories had won Middle England. The region is a mix of red wall and blue wall and urban and rural.

The question is whether Street and Houchen can use their local standing to survive despite the dismal Tory voting intention in general polling. Street memorably clashed with Sunak at Tory party conference over HS2. He was on the brink of resignation but decided to stay in the end after concluding quitting the Conservatives would not help him deliver for the people of the West Midlands. However, it has been widely noted that his re-election campaign is keeping its distance from Conservative Campaign Headquarters. There is little in the way of Tory branding on his campaign literature. Instead, Street is pitching himself as an independent champion for the area.

Sunak’s critics are trying to argue against the idea that the party’s standing rests on the fate of the two metro mayors as they are ‘running hyper-local campaigns – eschewing mentions of Rishi and the national government’. That may be the case. But the flip side is that if even this is not enough to avoid elimination concern in the Tory party will grow even louder.