(Bloomberg) -- Between sips of coffee in Banqo Café in the center of Darlington, Catalin Cirimpei lauds the improvement the northeastern town has seen in recent years. Investment has poured in, police response times have sped up and he approves of Tees Valley Mayor Ben Houchen’s rescue of the regional airport.

Houchen, is “doing the right thing for Darlington,” said Cirimpei, 42, who owns Banqo and another local café. “He’s very good.” The businessman says he didn’t vote for Houchen — a Conservative — at the last mayoral election in 2021, but is likely to this week.

It’s just one race in a set of local elections across England on Thursday that will see thousands of politicians vie for more than 2,500 council seats, 25 places in the London Assembly, and 10 regional mayoralties. While Rishi Sunak’s poll-trailing Conservative Party is predicted to lose hundreds of councilors and fail to unseat Labour’s London Mayor, Sadiq Khan, party morale — and potentially the prime minister’s job — appear to hinge on the fate of just two Tory candidates: Houchen, and West Midlands Mayor Andy Street.

If they lose, “all bets are off in terms of what happens in a post-election scenario and in terms of where the Conservatives go,” said Eoin Sheehan, an analyst at the polling company Redfield & Wilton Strategies. It would “feed into a broader narrative about the toxicity of the Conservative brand.”

Westminster for months has been rife with rumors about right-wing Tories plotting Sunak’s ouster ahead of a general election the prime minister must hold within nine months. With the local vote looming as the last major flash-point they could leverage to install a new leader — Penny Mordaunt is their preferred candidate — one Sunak aide described a flurry of policy activity in April as “Operation Save Rishi.”

Sunak on Monday urged Tory faithful to take part in “the greatest comeback in political history” — a tacit admission of the long odds he faces in both the local and general elections.

Tory prospects on Thursday aren’t good in a set of seats where in 2021 the party — then led by Boris Johnson — benefited from a bounce due to the roll-out of the Covid-19 vaccine. Tory peer Robert Hayward — a local elections expert — predicts his party would lose “on the upside of 400” of the 900-odd council seats they’re defending. The academics Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher said the Conservatives stand to lose up to 500 seats. The results will come in over Friday and Saturday.

“If Andy Street and Ben Houchen lose their seats” and the Tories “do really badly in the local elections, it will be very very difficult indeed” for Sunak to stay in post, one of his biggest Tory detractors, the former Member of Parliament Nadine Dorries, told GB News last month.

Street acknowledges he’s in a fight for survival, telling Bloomberg over a cup of tea in Birmingham’s newly redeveloped Centenary Square that “it’s on a knife-edge” and “could fall either way.” He’s dialed down his Conservative affiliation — which he says “of course” weighs on his campaign, and is emphasizing “Brand Andy.”

A former managing director of John Lewis Plc, Street says he’s secured £10 billion ($12.5 billion) of government investment and stood up to Sunak when the premier canceled a planned high-speed rail link from Birmingham to Manchester. He says he’s “confident” because “extremely bluntly, do I think I’ve done a good job? Yes.” 

Some voters agree. Helen, a woman in her fifties told Bloomberg she’s annoyed at having to vote Tory because of the mess the governing party has made of the country, but that Street had done a good job. A man of a similar age said although he was abandoning the Tories after voting for them all his life, he’d make an exception for the “impressive” Street.

Street’s Labour opponent, Richard Parker, disagrees. 

“For all the self-promotion of Street, this region has gone backward not forwards,” Parker said in an interview in West Bromwich, five miles northwest of Birmingham. The town has a vibrant south Asian community and a colorful high street lined with food stalls, but is also undeniably run-down, in contrast to the shiny center of Birmingham. 

A report last year by the think-tank Demos and accountancy firm PwC ranked the West Midlands second-from-bottom out of 16 regions in a “good growth” index. Tees Valley came last.

Parker is promising investment, jobs creation, housebuilding and better local transport links. A complicating factor is that the Labour-run Birmingham city council is bankrupt, with a judge-led inquiry investigating. “Everyone knows mistakes were made,” said Parker.

Street beat Labour by 54%-46% in 2021, but polling suggests he has his work cut out. Redfield & Wilton last week had him losing by six points, while YouGov sees a two-point win — within the margin of error. YouGov had Houchen beating his Labour rival, Chris McEwan, by seven points.

It’s a mark of the personal standing of the two men — both in office since 2017 — that they’re in with a shout. The Tories trail Labour in some national polls by over 20 points, and neither candidate serves an area that could be described as a Conservative heartland. 

Houchen’s fiefdom is traditionally Labour, while the swathe of central England presided by Street straddles a broadly equal number of Tory and Labour parliamentary constituencies. The mayors are relying on their personal vote to cling on, despite their party.

Houchen is seen as the poster-child of “leveling up” — Johnson’s pledge to spread economic opportunity nationwide that helped the Tories win a swathe of traditional Labour seats known as the red wall in the 2019 general election. As mayor, Houchen has taken Teesside airport into public ownership, attracted a Treasury office and freeport to the area and begun regenerating the site of a shuttered steelworks. 

Chris, an IT consultant in Darlington who requested Bloomberg didn’t use his surname because of fears of losing business, is a case in point. He said the Tories would never get his vote again. But in the same breath, he indicated he would probably vote for Houchen, pointing to the investment he’s attracted.

Houchen’s efforts aren’t universally appreciated. Downriver from Darlington, in Middlesbrough, “welcome to hell” is scrawled on a mural of the Tees Transporter Bridge – a symbol of Teesside’s proud industrial heritage: the Sydney Harbor Bridge was built by a local company. These days, the region contains some of the country’s most deprived neighborhoods. 

Sitting under under the neon lights of her beauty clinic in a Middlesbrough shopping center, Ashleigh Paige, 30, blames local politicians for a row of empty units. When she voted for Houchen in 2021, she ran two shops and employed four staff. Those numbers have halved, and for the first time, she says she won’t vote Conservative.

“Whilst we need a focus on big services and infrastructure, which is positive to a certain extent, if we don’t get the basics right, what’s the point?” Labour’s McEwan said. He plans to bring back free parking to increase shopping footfall, and address crime by installing more closed-circuit television. 

Houchen’s drive to develop the Teesworks site has also drawn allegations of corruption from Labour, with questions arising about whether private developers gained at the expense of taxpayers. Houchen denies wrongdoing, and a government-commissioned review in January found “no evidence to support allegations of corruption or illegality,” while flagging “issues of governance and transparency.” 

The incident has put off voters including Keven Shevels, 69 — who opted for Houchen in 2021 but says he won’t this time because of Teesworks. “He’s done a lot of good, but at what price?,” he said.

In both the West Midlands and Tees Valley, the majority of people Bloomberg spoke with didn’t plan to vote at all — a degree of apathy that’s common in local elections. House of Commons Library data puts the percentage turnout in recent local votes in the low-to-mid-thirties. 

“They promise us the world yet they don’t deliver,” Mohammed Zubak, a 34-year-old Uber driver, said of politicians in general.

The trick for the competing parties will be getting out the vote. Street says he’s “optimistic” of victory, and the Houchen camp privately predicts a victory. They could be the only glimmer of good news in an otherwise grim picture for the Conservatives. But even if they do win, Redfield & Wilton data suggests Sunak shouldn’t take too much solace. Just 58% of people who back Houchen, and 71% of Street backers would also vote Tory in a general election.

A West Midlands win is “very much an Andy Street vote as opposed to a vote for the Conservatives,” said Sheehan. “Even a Houchen win would not translate into the Conservatives doing particularly well” in a national vote. 

--With assistance from Alex Wickham and Joe Mayes.

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