Conservatives: What does dire Prestatyn election result mean?

It was a "disastrous result", according to one Conservative.

Before May's local elections, Hugh Irving was one of seven Tory councillors in Prestatyn.

Now he's the only one left - and by the smallest possible margin after a majority of just one vote saved his seat on Denbighshire council.

Were it not for the rapport he's built with the local electorate during 30 years in local politics, his party might have been wiped out in this seaside resort.

"They were saying 'yes Hugh, we've always supported you, we know what you've done, but we're not happy'," he said.

"I think, probably you've got to be blunt about this.

"As far as they were concerned - not necessarily me - they weren't happy about a lot of the news and reports of what I would call misdemeanours being carried out in Westminster."

Those "misdemeanours" - the parties in Downing Street that broke the Covid rules - cost Welsh Tories dearly.

In the south they lost seats in Vale of Glamorgan and lost control of Monmouthshire, the party's only Welsh council.

In Denbighshire, they slumped from first to fourth.

Prestatyn and nearby Rhyl are in the Vale of Clwyd constituency. The Conservatives won the Senedd and Westminster seats from Labour in the past two elections.

It's a bit of a stretch to say Sir Keir Starmer won't get to Downing Street if he can't win the seat back, but this is a key battleground.

Which is why, a week before his party's drubbing, Mr Johnson was serving ice cream on a campaign visit to a caravan park in Rhyl.

Clearly Partygate blunted the appeal of such stunts. Here, as elsewhere, people were not impressed by what they heard in the news.

Allison Ward, who works in The Deli on the Hill on Prestatyn High Street, said: "Somebody comes in to buy some cheese and you have these conversations and they are angry. They are disappointed.

"And also people like to feel that they are not stupid. We are not idiots in the big wide world. We don't forget these things."

Mr Irving hopes voters have got their frustrations out of their system, allowing the Conservatives enough time to recover before the next electoral test.

Tory high command must surely hope he's right.

Certainly, one woman on the high street told me she felt the media had made far too much fuss about the rule breaking.

But Labour thinks this result was a pivotal moment in a long campaign to win back territory in north-east Wales that has been ceded to Mr Johnson's Conservatives.

One of Prestatyn's new Labour councillors, Jason McLellan, now leads Denbighshire council after the former Independent-Conservative alliance was ousted.

He was Labour's candidate for the Senedd in Vale of Clwyd last year, losing to the Conservatives by 300 votes.

Rather than rely on Partygate to explain the turnaround in Labour's fortunes, he prefers to credit their local manifesto and a "positive message" which they promoted on the doorsteps and on Facebook.

But just like the prime minister's conduct, Welsh Labour's record has been under scrutiny.

Betsi Cadwaladr, the area's health board, has been mired in problems.

Gill German, another Prestatyn councillor now on the local authority's cabinet, said: "Because we went out and had those conversations - and some of them were robust - and we answered, people put their trust in us to carry out what they had seen Mark Drakeford doing at Welsh government level."

Labour aren't the only ones who want to talk about Mr Drakeford.

They're convinced the first minister is an electoral asset, but the Tories' opposition leader in the Senedd says his party must do more to pin the blame on him for failures in the NHS.

Andrew RT Davies said voters needed reminding that the politicians ultimately responsible for well-documented problems at Denbighshire's hospital were not in London.

"What we need to be doing is far more aggressively making the case to people that when you can't get a service at Ysbyty Glan Clwyd that's not because of the Conservative government in Westminster," he said.

"That's because of the Labour government here in Cardiff Bay."

The local election losses have revived a debate about whether the Welsh Tories are Welsh enough.

Mr Davies says they need to "build on a strong Welsh brand".

But he dismisses a recent report in the Daily Telegraph suggesting someone in senior Welsh Conservative ranks wants to douse the party in clear blue water.

Clear red water was the phrase deployed by former First Minister Rhodri Morgan - and coined by his then-advisor Mr Drakeford - to distinguish Welsh Labour from Tony Blair.

But Mr Davies said Welsh Tories already had the freedom they needed to offer unique policies.

Last month, for example, he put himself at odds with the UK government when he said it should cough up a fair share of HS2 funding for Wales.

As for Labour accusing the UK government of undermining the Senedd, Mr Davies said two Wales Acts - laws that transferred more power to Cardiff Bay - showed "we have put the turbo on devolution".

There's probably only so much the Welsh Conservatives can do to shield themselves from the political headwinds blowing in from Westminster.

Mr Davies said the prime minister has his full support, but the UK government must now get on and deliver its 2019 manifesto.

To do that, Conservative MPs have decided to keep Boris Johnson in Number 10, albeit in a vote that has wounded him as a leader.

Veteran councillor Mr Irving sums up the predicament like this: "I'm content with that for the moment.

"But I think he's on probation. No doubt about that."