The government has bowed to the inevitable and announced that May’s local and Mayoral elections have been postponed. With the Chief Scientific Advisor saying that the coronavirus peak is 10 to 14 weeks away, it was hard to see how you could have had an election campaign within that period.
As I said in the Sun last Saturday, Whitehall has been braced for a delay to these elections for a while now. They will now not take place until 2021, meaning that there’ll be no immediate electoral test for the new Labour leader.
These elections won’t be the last event to be postponed. The current thinking among those leading the government’s response to the virus is that a government bar on big public gatherings is, probably, about a month away.
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