Stephen Bush

Which, if your argument is, look, in local elections, people know that they can kick the boss, particularly in large chunks of the north, whereas Jen says they elect in thirds, so it does not matter at all, right?

Your Labour council's not going to change at all.

One of the things they tried to do in lots of their leaflets...

across Greater Manchester was to do a kind of like, hey, remember to keep Andy on the front page, basically like re-elect this guy because the combined authority means and the local authorities really do matter.

It does appear thus far with the important disclaimer that most of the London councils haven't declared yet, that in London, which are all up and where therefore it's not just an expressive vote, you are actually going to change your council.

Labour have done a better job holding off the Greens and the Conservatives have done a better job holding off reform than they both have in places which are demographically similar but are not all up.

So I guess what you could say is this does show that people are less likely to abandon one of the big two parties when it's an actual question of who runs something, which of course will be the thing that Labour will tell itself and it will be different in 29 because that will be about who runs the country rather than kicking Keir Starmer.

I mean, their performance is also pretty disastrous, right?

They have some results in London that the party can talk about to make itself feel better.

But one we should be very clear, in Wandsworth in particular, that really was a coin toss between the Conservatives and Labour.

Neither of them did well.

They both dropped votes on last time.

Labour dropped a little bit more.

But again, really, we are talking about tiny margins.

It's nothing to write home about.

And I would say the broader problem for the Conservatives is essentially...

Thus far, the places they are doing very well in are places where you have high affluence, but also fairly high ethnic and cultural diversity.

And we expect that to continue, right?

We expect them to continue to hold on to Harrow, where there's a large Hindu population.

I would be very surprised if they did not take control of Barnet, which has a large British Jewish population.