Never let it be said that The Spectator doesn’t provide invaluable time saving services. I’m here to help save hours of your life tomorrow, when the results of today’s local elections – 1,641 seats across 14 county councils, five regional and one city mayoralties as well as the Runcorn and Helsby by-election – will emerge. Here’s my election hack: ignore everything said by all of the parties contesting the elections. Literally everything, because all of it is meaningless.
It’s clear that you can fit almost any claim to any result – and the parties will do just that
More specifically, after four decades of watching and analysing elections, it’s clear that you can fit almost any claim to any result – and the parties will do just that.
As the polling guru Sir John Curtice pointed out this week, we are now in an era of five party politics: Reform, Labour, Conservative, Lib Dem and Greens. We’ll start with the Greens. In the latest YouGov poll, which was conducted on Monday, the Greens scored 9 per cent.
Today’s elections aren’t an opinion poll and they’re in a limited number of areas, so the results will be very different to national polls. But to make my point, let’s assume that each of the parties get a result much like that YouGov poll. I can tell you now what they’ll get if they manage nine per cent in the local elections, because they’ll make this claim whatever they manage to get: “This result shows that the Greens are the real progressive opposition to Labour”, followed by more blather about them being the coming force, getting stronger all the time, etc. They will say this if they get five per cent or if they get twenty per cent. It’s what they always say. And, unlike a stopped clock, they won’t always be right at least once.
The Lib Dems are on 15 per cent in the YouGov poll. That’s 3 per cent more than they managed in the last general election. But it doesn’t matter whether they do better or worse than then or in the last local elections, Ed Davey will be pictured tomorrow proclaiming another triumph on the road to a Lib Dem surge. My prediction is he will be standing at Beechers’ Brook on Aintree racecourse, saying the Lib Dems are now over the final obstacle to success. As I say, it makes no difference how they actually do: it will be a triumph.
The same goes for Labour. It’s been widely pointed out that the Tories are having to defend seats won in the 2021 local elections on the back of Boris Johnson’s ‘vaccine bounce’, so it’s going to be a dismal night for them. That gives Labour the excuse to ignore what is likely to be a barely less dismal night in terms of voting share – according to YouGov they are on 23 per cent nationally, compared to 33 per cent when they won in 2024.
As I’ve said, these are very different elections so you can’t compare the percentages. But it’s pointless getting prissy about this, because the Labour line will be the same whatever the result: “No governing party ever does well after taking tough decisions and this government has had to take thanks to the £20 billion black hole left by the Tories blah blah blah”.
The Tory analysis will be the same if it’s a disaster or a wipe out – no one expects anything better – which is that they were defending from such a high base in 2021 and that Kemi Badenoch is still rebuilding the party after its 2024 defeat. It’s a catch all line, the latter part of which has been used for months and will continue to be used until the party starts to do better – or rather, if it does.
Reform is the only party with high expectations today. But one of the paradoxes of Reform riding so high in the polls is that it’s now the only party which can’t brazenly say whatever it wants no matter how well or badly it does. If it doesn’t win Runcorn or some mayoralties, let alone a swathe of councils, it will be seen as having done badly. The paradox is that Nigel Farage is so good at pushing a line that, even if there is an unlikely bad set of results, he will still say that Reform is on the road to victory in the 2029 election.
In other words, my theory that no matter what the actual result, the parties will shoehorn them into proving whatever they want to take from today’s elections still holds. Even when it doesn’t.
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