The Long Goodbye

Five things we learnt from the local elections

Well that was fun. As much as I like overnight counts, three days of election results was like a festival for nerds. Albeit with more John Curtice than you’d get at Glastonbury.

The headline is that the results were even worse for the Tories than expected, and they were expected to be terrible. But beneath that there is a lot of fascinating detail that gives us clues to the general election and how politics will play out beyond a Labour victory.

Before we get into the analysis, though, a quick look back at my predictions from last week and how they fared.

I thought the national equivalent vote share would be:

Lab 36%

Con 24%

Libs 20%

Others 20%

It was in fact:

Lab 34%

Con 25%

Libs 17%

Others 24%

Not bad but independents and Greens did better, particularly against Labour, than I expected, and the Lib Dems slightly underperformed on their vote share versus last year. Though they still ended up with more councillors than the Conservatives due to their effective targeting, something they last achieved in 1996.

I thought that the number of councils won by each party would be:

Lab 52

Con 3

Libs 13

Others/NOC 39

It was:

Lab 51

Con 6

Libs 12

Others/NOC 38

I’m happy with this. Only one of my projections was a big miss (Fareham stayed Tory). If 27 people had voted differently in Harlow my Labour number would have been spot on and the Tories would have been on 5. They only just held Epping Forest too.

I also said the Tories would lose 450-500 seats and they lost 473.

On the mayors I got them all right, except I didn’t really make a prediction for the West Midlands because it was so close. And it was indeed very close. Labour’s Richard Parker won by just 1,508 votes.

I said Labour would gain 8 police and crime commissioners. They actually gained 10.

As ever with my political predictions it’s all heavily reliant on polling. And these results suggest the national polls are basically right. (Plus the pollsters have got better at doing mayoral polls).  

On to the analysis…. What lessons can be learnt from what we’ve seen over the past few days?