These aren’t midterms. The next time a Tory MP looks you in the eye and says ‘midterm local elections are always difficult for governing parties’ you should feel free to laugh in their face. We have six months, at best, before a general election. This isn’t voters playing hard to get, it’s voters telling the Conservative Party to get out. On the basis of the results so far, Keir Starmer is on course to win a majority of more than 150 seats.
There are more results to come, of course, because in yet another symbol of Britain’s decline from the top tier of countries, we apparently can’t be bothered to count votes overnight anymore. It is possible that Andy Street will hang on in the West Midlands, and probable that Ben Houchen will win again in Teesside (he got nearly 80% of the vote last time round) but these headline successes cannot conceal the scale of the Conservative collapse.
In Blackpool, which Scot Benton represented in between doing his day job as a not very good lobbyist for fictional gambling companies, the swing to Labour was the fourth biggest in history. Add together the strong Reform showing and the Tory vote, and you still get a Labour MP there. This isn’t just voters flirting with third parties, it’s voters going anywhere but Conservative.