Jim Pickard

And then the second glimmer of hope is that if the result lands in that area, it would be very similar to 1999.

We're going to hear that 1999 repeated over and over, which is when Tony Blair, two years into his first premiership, lost 1100 seats and then went on to win the 2001 general election.

I think it isn't the figure that Labour's currently losing about 70% of the seats that they held, whereas I think in 1999 that figure of 1,100 was only about 23%.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, I think Nigel Farage has every right to sound and feel triumphalist right now, because who wouldn't be impressed by a party that's gone from basically nothing to being ahead in the polls, taking a couple of thousand council seats.

We haven't got the Welsh results yet, but they'll probably become first or second in Wales.

They're probably going to displace Labour in Scotland.

Let's not forget those votes are happening as well.

And so, of course, he has every right to be feeling extremely happy about

The big but, as Stephen alluded to earlier, is that people vote differently in local elections to how they vote in national elections.

And the fracturing of the old duopoly, the Labour and Conservatives, is definitely something we can see happening right in front of our eyes.

But we've also seen reform was polling at 31% last September.

They're now polling at, I think, 26% if you look at the aggregate of all the polls.

Now, that happens to be enough right now to basically win with a pretty clear sweep when the other parties are even more unpopular than you.

But if the party can lose six percentage points in half a year, the polls can keep moving and people's intentions and how they vote can keep moving.

I think it's also worth pointing out that Wandsworth was under Conservative control from 1974 through to, I think, 2022.

And therefore, to claw back a no overall control where you're the biggest party by one councillor is not really the sort of successful gaining ground that Kemi Beidner would like to be seeing right now.

I don't think it's really in Kemi Badenoch's nature to be overthinking her own weaknesses, deliberating where she might have gone wrong here or there.

I don't think that's really in her makeup.

I think what I would say is that when conservative people in grey suits who have done a lot of plotting in the past look at Kemi Badenoch, they're totally aware that their party is doing really badly, but they are also aware that they are possibly less popular than Kemi Badenoch.