Lessons from the English local elections

We are all familiar with the diary clash. We have an event in our diary, it’s been there for a long time, and it is something quite important that we definitely want to do. And then someone invites us to something altogether bigger, better and more important right across the top of it.

In most cases this is unfortunate but just one of those things. Sometimes though we wonder why the person making the second invitation could not have thought a bit more about their timing. Especially if our prior engagement was known to them.

Coming very much into this category was a diary clash on a national scale earlier this month. For reasons known only to the Palace, it was decided that King Charles’s coronation should take place just 36 hours after the polls had closed in England’s local authority elections – an event which had been in the national calendar for 4 years – and less than a day after the results had been declared. As a result, the weekend papers, which would normally have been poring over the election results and probing politicians’ reactions, were in full monarchical overdrive and the political aftermath of the poll was decidedly muted.

I suspect the truth is that the Palace was largely indifferent to the clash, if not in fact wholly ignorant of it – though whether it should have been so unaware of the potential issues is another question. But so convenient for the government was this superimposition of pomp and ceremony on what had been an awful day for the Conservative party, rescuing them from a round of excruciating post-mortems, that more than one commentator was heard to wonder if the timing had not been deliberate. If you are going to need a distraction to enable you to bury bad news, a coronation is probably about as good as it gets!

Actually, we can probably all be quite grateful for thus being largely spared an examination of the local election entrails. It is seldom that productive an exercise, and most attempts to draw any meaningful conclusions about the state of national politics and the mood of the electorate from a set of polls which are contested by a range of different parties and groups some of which have no national presence, cover a wide range of issues local as well as national, attract a turnout of around 35% only and anyway only take place in less than half the country are doomed to be either simplistic or wrong – or often both.

But if one cannot deduce much about the mood of the electorate from local elections, one can often derive insights into the mood of the various parties, for even if most of the public are largely indifferent to these polls, politicians are not. And from the brief comments that surfaced before we were all engulfed in royal ritual, I think three or four things did emerge.

Firstly, and most clearly, even after what was for them a good day the Labour party is sticking to the mantra that there is still a long way to, that the next general election is all to play for and that they are not taking anything for granted. Given Sir Keir Starmer’s approach so far to all questions about the next election and his chances of forming a government, this was hardly a surprise. But he should avoid relying on this approach too much – at some point he will have to do more than present his party as “not the Tories” and at some point the electorate is going to want to know what their policies are, as well as who they are not.

On the other hand Sir Ed Davey, the leader of the Liberal Democrats (who also had a good day) was much more forthright. He too claimed that a hung parliament was likely (he would say that though, as his party needs a hung parliament to have any traction at the national level), but he went out of his way to rule out completely any thought of a coalition with the Conservatives.

It is a rare politician who reduces their options quite so firmly as this, especially if he or she is under no pressure to do so. Again though, this was hardly a surprise: the scars from the 2010-15 coalition, and more importantly the Lib Dems’ crushing defeat at the end of it, are still obviously very raw for the party. And Davey knows very well that neither his party membership nor, probably, the wider electorate would have any tolerance for any move to help the Tories stay in power.

But it was the reactions from the Conservatives that was most revealing. The party leadership knew they were in for a poor result, and tried hard to manage expectations by saying that they “expected to lose up to 1,000 seats”. When politicians say this, the truth is that they expect to lose a lot less than that, say 600 or so, but want to be able to claim when the 600 or even 700 seat loss duly emerges that they “have done much better than expected”. It is a standard ploy, and despite being completely transparent it does sometimes work – except, that is, when the actual result not only blows away your private expectations of a 600 seat loss but also your public “worst case” forecast of 1,000 losses.

So when the losses comfortably topped 1,000 and kept rising, the first thing we learnt is that the Tory leadership has very little understanding of quite how unpopular their party really is.

The second thing we learnt is that the ERG, the right wing of the party has learnt almost nothing from the debacle of 2022 when first Johnson and then Truss were unceremoniously ousted as prime minister.

The ERG has tried to put all the blame for the losses on the current prime minister, Rishi Sunak, and even claimed that “If only we offered proper Tory policies, people would return to us”. This approach – doubling down on failed policies – is eerily reminiscent of the Communist Party in the old Soviet Union. For the communists, the solution to the Soviet Union’s many failures was to demand “more communism, purer communism”; for the Tory right wing, the solution to our woes is “more tax cuts, harder Brexit”. Nothing could persuade the communists they were wrong, even as they watched their party and the state collapse. And the ERG are exactly the same.

The degree of self-delusion in such comments is breath-taking. The vote was not a vote against Tory local councillors (many of whom are hard working and effective), or even I would suggest against Sunak and the current Tory leadership, but a vote against the Conservatives en masse, and in particular against their rank and file party membership, the guardians of those “proper Tory policies” that the ERG are so wedded to.

It is the party membership who have been the driving force behind Brexit, the xenophobic immigration policies and much else that has damaged the country in the last 8 years – not forgetting of course their role in forcing Johnson and Truss on the rest of us, and the resulting lies, breakdown of ethics in public life and carcrash economics. And my sense is that the electorate no longer accepts or is prepared to tolerate the influence this self-selected and unrepresentative body wields in their party and thus our national life.

That for me is why people are voting against the Tories. And it means that there is nothing their leaders can do about it – they are stuck with their members, and will go down at the next election because of them.

The result is that the election results seem to have convinced every party, whether they did very well, quite well or catastrophically badly, that they are on the right track, and need only to redouble their efforts to make us, the ill-informed electorate, appreciate the correctness of their approach for success to be theirs. Even aiming off for the fact that politicians are not short of self-regard and the view that they (and they alone) have the gift of wisdom, this is unusual.

And so the real lesson one draws from the recent local elections is that we have in fact learnt very little, the politicians even less, and that not one of the three major parties is going to change its stance. Which was probably the predictable outcome right from the start, and the lack of acres of newsprint after the election therefore a minor blessing.

Perhaps we could arrange to have a coronation after every local election in future!