Taxi for Kemi! (Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images) Kemi Badenoch has said the results of the English local elections show the Conservative party is “coming back”. After two years in opposition to a historically unpopular Labour government, she has lost, at the time of writing, 300 council seats and control of three councils. That’s a relatively bad result for an opposition that has any hope of forming the next government. So how big is the gap between rhetoric and reality, and what do these results tell us about the state of the Conservative party? The headline is that Reform is crippling them by siphoning off right-wing votes in some old Tory heartlands. In the southern English borough councils – traditional fortresses of “Villa Toryism”, the party’s suburban support, for the past century – they have been all but replaced according to the first declarations on Friday. In Suffolk, the Conservatives lost 40 council seats (Reform came from nothing to win 41).…