Jim Pickard

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.

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.