By any sane person’s reckoning, the Conservative party had a night to forget in Thursday’s local, mayoral and devolved elections. It lost about 500 councillors in England and ceded control of three local authorities to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK – losing to the rightwing upstarts in England, Wales and Scotland. Why then is Kemi Badenoch hailing these results as proof that “the Conservatives are coming back” – and why do many Tory MPs appear to agree with her?

The Conservative leader was vocal on Friday about the eye-catching gains her party made in politically atypical London, where the Tories won back the totemic council of Westminster, took the most seats in Wandsworth council and saw off the threat from Reform in Bexley and Bromley.

But it was hard to ignore the damage in her own back yard of Essex, where Badenoch and five other shadow cabinet ministers are MPs. Reform ended the party’s 25-year reign at the local authority, as well as taking the Tory-held Newcastle-under-Lyme and Suffolk, and making inroads in East and West Sussex.

In parts of southern England, including Surrey, the party suffered losses at the hands of the Liberal Democrats. In Wales it took just 11% of votes, its lowest ever vote share in the Senedd. In Scotland its vote share dropped by 10.1 percentage points, compared with the -2.4 suffered by Labour.

Twenty-four hours on from her exuberant comeback messaging, Badenoch softened her tone, using a sober opinion piece in the Telegraph to talk more gently of “green shoots” – and perhaps conscious of the hundreds of Conservative councillors moodily reading her words.

“Despite the setbacks, I am encouraged by our results this week,” she wrote. “The Conservative party is rebuilding steadily, seriously and with purpose. We are not asking people to forget the past but to judge us by what we do next.”

Over the weekend, repeated Conservative talking heads pointed to Sky News’s vote share projections (which takes each party’s vote share in England council elections and projects them into a nationwide vote) that had Reform leading on 27% of the vote, with the Conservatives in second on 20%. Under the same tracker last year the party was 15 points behind Reform. (They tend not to mention the BBC analysis, which put Reform first with 26% of the vote, the Greens second on 18%, the Conservatives and Labour on 17%, and the Liberal Democrats on 16%.)

The optimism is genuine, said the Tory election expert Robert Hayward. The Conservative peer, who first identified the phenomenon of “shy Tories” before the 1992 election, pointed to successes in London – which always governs Westminster’s mood to an extent – the increase in the vote share and Badenoch’s favourability rating as to why the party faithful were feeling surprisingly buoyant.

“There’s a sense that Kemi has been laying the foundations for the last few months, and despite the huge level of losses in Essex, Norfolk, Suffolk, it could have been worse,” he said. After a disastrous set of results in 2025, many party members were simply feeling a sense of relief, he added.

“The Tory party can’t kid itself that there are not challenges. We’re in a bad position in Scotland. We’re in a bad position in Wales. There’s a whole string of councils where there are no conservative councillors, but there is this huge sigh of relief that they’ve almost got themselves off the floor and are still breathing.”

Badenoch’s (relative) popularity is repeatedly raised by Tory MPs. Last month the thinktank More in Common found she was the most popular party leader, on -9 net favourability. The latest YouGov tracker found 29% of Britons viewed her favourably, her highest score to date, and “part of a steady trend of improvement in attitudes … since the middle of last year”.

People like Badenoch on the doorstep, says her neighbour Richard Holden, the MP for Basildon and Billericay. “Even at the count I had a Reform candidate saying they were really impressed by Kemi,” he said. Asked if he thought he would keep hold of his seat, which he won by just 20 votes in the 2024 general election, he said: “There’s a shedload of work to do, but I’m more confident after these election results than I was before them.”

While a slowing down in the loss of Conservative support meant Badenoch was less likely to face a leadership challenge, her position had also been shored up by Robert Jenrick jumping ship to Reform, said the political commentator Henry Hill.

“There’s no challenger,” he said. “The party is also quite determined to find a silver lining, because it doesn’t really have an alternative at the moment.”

But while the Conservatives were no longer on life support, the party remained extremely sick, and was still polling lower nationally than after the 2024 general election, he added. “If you measure it in terms of, ‘Is the Conservative party going to die?’, then its demise seems less likely than it did a year ago,” he said. “But if you have any ambitions beyond that, it’s not obvious that the party really is on the road to recovery.”