Jim Pickard

She is outperforming her own party in

in the polls.

Conservatives are really unpopular when you look at the polling.

Kenneth Badenoch is actually one of the more popular political leaders, at least in terms of net polling.

But I think the main factor we're seeing here is that usually the Conservative Party is quite regicidal.

They went through killing off leaders quite a lot in the last five years.

It didn't go very well.

And right now, their own travails, their own

weakness and the shedding of hundreds of seats is not on the same scale as the Labour Party.

They are being eclipsed in their uselessness and that means that all the pressure is on Starmer and not on Badenoch.

And I think one of the subplots, which is going to be lost in the tsunami of news over a couple of days, is that the Conservatives in the Welsh Senate, in the last Parliament there, had 13 out of 60 seats.

They were actually level pegging with Plaid Cymru, who only had 13 seats.

And yet we're going to see Plaid more than double their presence and the Conservatives almost vaporised, which is fascinating.

Now, yes, there has been plotting by Lib Dem MPs against Sir Ed Davey.

We heard relayed some supposedly secret chats at a specific pub in Westminster only a few weeks ago.

And we saved the blushes of those particular MPs.

planning to oust their leader.

But I think the case that Sarah Davies got is that in a world where centrism is no longer cool, if it ever was cool, and in fact the electorate are moving further to the left and further to the right, and the idea of a sort of technocratic centrist government is massively out of favour.

The Lib Dems are a very centrist party, and therefore to have increased their local government presence eight years in a row is actually going against the trend.

So I think the idea that