Peter Walker

This is something the Conservatives found interesting.

when they kept on losing in council elections year after year.

It's just bad for morale in the party.

I'm going to be slightly wary of reading too many lessons into it.

There are some lessons you can take, but I think they're ones we already know, which is the fact that the old political consensus has gone.

Labour are doing very badly.

Reform are currently doing extremely well.

The Conservatives are still in big trouble.

There's opportunities for insurgents or minor parties, you know, on the national level.

I think what's going to be interesting to see is how much within this tactical voting plays a role.

So you have a position that for English councils, people will often be voting, not so much for the party they support, but to keep out the party they dislike the most.

And it'll be interesting to see if reform's gains are slightly tempered by that.

But I think the thing to bear in mind with this, which is why I'm wary of drawing too many lessons, is that people can probably live with a reform council.

They might not notice a difference.

But the idea of Nigel Farage becoming the prime minister, I mean, the polling shows about...

50% of people really, really do not want that.

And you could foresee a situation when the next general election comes, when it's less a national election, but 650 individual polls, and one pollster put it very well, they said,

that we no longer have a two-party state but we're going to have 650 different two-party battles yeah and it's fascinating that when you talk to councillors and mps who go out on the doorsteps they say you know i have people who go well i'm a conservative voter but i hate reform so much i would vote green if i thought they were likely to keep them out and vice versa and finally if the green surge proves to be real in london and potentially beyond what does that mean for them as a party in their future

It means that Zach Palance's tactics are paying off.

There were some people in the Greens, some more established people, who worried about if his more explicitly kind of urban populist talk more about wealth taxes than fields, if that would actually potentially split up the coalition that they carefully built up.