It’s easy to spot when a party thinks it is going to get the thumbs down from voters in the annual round of local elections each May. It tries to up everyone’s expectations of just how badly it will do. It does so in the hope that the results themselves are not actually as bad as ‘forecast’, so that the party can say it is, therefore, in a better position than everyone thought after all.
For this year’s elections taking place on Thursday, the Conservatives have adopted this stance. Its spokespeople have been happy to repeat an academic analysis of a couple of months ago. This suggested that, given where it stood in the opinion polls at that point, the Conservatives were likely to lose a thousand council seats. Doubtless its repeat of that claim means the party is hoping its losses prove not to be as heavy as that – and so, the party will be able to argue, when the results are declared on Thursday night and Friday, that it is making ‘progress’. Of course, it may be hoped that by the time all the results are known, the country’s attention will anyway have turned to Saturday’s coronation.
Sir Ed Davey’s party may well not take many Tory scalps next Thursday
The risk of such expectation management is that, if it succeeds, it can create an unwarranted sense of complacency. The party comes to believe its own narrative, and so fails to appreciate fully the difficult message that has in fact emerged from the local ballot boxes. That risk is very clear for the Conservatives this year.
Ninety per cent of the seats up for grabs were last contested in May 2019. This, of course, is when Theresa May was still prime minister, struggling and ultimately failing to get her Brexit deal through the Commons. Nigel Farage had just launched the Brexit Party, which was already registering as much as 19 per cent in the polls, not that far behind the Conservatives on 26 per cent.
The party’s performance in the local elections was lamentable. Its net loss of seats totalled 1,300, and of councils controlled, it lost nearly 50 – bigger defeats than the party had suffered in any round of local elections for nearly a quarter-of-a-century. If the Conservatives were to find themselves with a thousand fewer councillors on Friday than they managed to win four years ago it would be bad news indeed.
True, some losses seem inevitable, even if the results prove not to be as bad as might be anticipated given Labour’s 15-point lead in the national polls. For if the Conservatives performed badly in May 2019, Labour did not fare very well either. Divided as the party was over Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, antisemitism and Brexit, its own standing in the national polls was only 32 per cent. Despite the Conservatives’ difficulties, Labour suffered a net loss of 86 seats and five councils.
According to the BBC’s analysis of the 2019 local elections, Labour’s performance was the equivalent of it winning just 28 per cent of the vote in a Britain-wide election – no better than the equivalent figure for the Conservatives. Given that it now enjoys a 15-point national poll lead rather than just a six-point one, Labour should make gains where it is competitive locally. Yet even if the party’s performance matches its standing in the polls that could still result in gains that are well below the one thousand or so that Conservatives have emphasised.
It has to be remembered that no less than 5,000 of the 8,000 seats are for places on relatively small district councils in those parts of England that still have both a county and a district council. These are predominantly more rural parts of England, where Labour are often uncompetitive locally. If the Conservatives do face a challenge, it typically comes from the Liberal Democrats rather than Labour.
And Sir Ed Davey’s party may well not take many Tory scalps next Thursday. It faces the difficulty that, in 2019, it registered one of its best local election performances since entering into coalition with the Conservatives in 2010 – the equivalent of winning 19 per cent of the Britain-wide vote. True, the Liberal Democrats always do better in local elections than in the national polls; however, given that the party’s standing in the national polls (9 per cent) is much as it was in 2019, the party will have to outperform that rating by as much as it did four years ago just simply to stand still.
If that is what the Liberal Democrats do – and the Conservatives at least match their performance of four years ago – then the Conservatives should be able to fend off many a Liberal Democrat challenge. But come a general election, it will be the Conservatives’ ability to stem a Labour tide, not a Liberal Democrat one, on which the party’s fortunes will primarily rest.
In short, losing ‘just’ a few hundred seats could flatter to deceive so far as the Conservatives are concerned. They need to avoid being taken in by their own spin.
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