John Curtice

Conservative spokespersons put a brave face on the outcome of the English local elections on Thursday. While acknowledging the party had lost over 500 seats – two in five of those it was defending – they argued the results represented the first shoots of recovery from the severe defeat the party suffered in the 2024 election. Central to the party’s claim was that in the BBC’s projected national share – an estimate of what would have happened if all of Britain had voted in elections on May 7 – the party’s tally of 17 per cent was nine points behind that of Reform – down from 30 points last year. In addition, the party pointed to its success in regaining control of the iconic borough of Westminster – and in holding its own in terms of seats across the capital.

A certain question has been hanging in the air ever since the 2024 general election, when between them the Conservatives and Labour won less than three-fifths of the vote. But following the Greens' success in the Gorton & Denton by-election, it has now become an even more pressing issue. Can the Conservative-Labour duopoly that has dominated British politics during the post-war period survive? Both parties received a drubbing in yesterday's by-election. Labour’s share of the vote was nearly halved from 50.8 per cent in 2024 to 25.4 per cent, leaving the party trailing in third place behind Reform. The Conservatives fared even worse, winning just 1.9 per cent of the vote, the party’s lowest ever share in a by-election.

Since returning to the political front line during the middle of last year’s election campaign, Nigel Farage has enjoyed remarkable success in his stated quest for Reform for replace the Conservatives as the principal party of the right in Britain. The latest British Social Attitudes (BSA) report, published this week, helps explain how and why he is succeeding. Boris Johnson rose to success in 2019 thanks to his ability to appeal to socially conservative Britain. These were the voters that provided the core vote for Leave in 2016 and which now voted to ‘get Brexit done’. However, disenchanted with how Brexit has turned out and deeply distrustful of how the country is being governed, over the last twelve months these voters have been flocking to Reform in ever-growing numbers.

David Cameron’s promise of an EU referendum in 2013 was designed to head off the apparent challenge to his party’s election hopes that was being posed by Nigel Farage’s Ukip. Although Ukip still did well in the 2015 election, the Conservatives won an overall majority. Unfortunately for Mr Cameron, he lost the subsequent referendum, and his party was then tossed into years of turmoil over how the decision to leave should be implemented. Still, in 2019, Boris Johnson’s promise to deliver his ‘oven-ready’ Brexit deal headed off the threat from Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party and paved the way to another overall majority. Brexit was duly delivered and, it seemed, the issue that had given Mr Farage his platform on more than one occasion had finally been put to bed.

Thursday’s local elections almost inevitably produced a cacophony of information. That presented the parties with plenty of opportunity to cherry pick results that appeared to present their performance in a better light – thereby potentially distracting attention from less convincing performances. If Reform had fought these local elections more widely, the picture might have looked even bleaker for the Conservatives As the results gradually flowed in, the Conservatives pursued this strategy with vigour. They trumpeted their successful defence of the Tees Valley mayoralty. And they pointed out that Labour had failed to gain overall control of one of their target councils, Harlow.

Academic conferences – even ones about politics – rarely make the news. This week’s annual conference of UK political scientists at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow talked about many interesting topics, including the link between football and populism in Southern Europe and the role that comedy plays in the formation of Scottish identity. But such presentations rarely trouble the Twittersphere, let alone the front page of the newspapers.

Sixteen months ago Rishi Sunak was installed as Conservative leader and prime minister in the hope that he would be able to turn his party’s fortunes around in the wake of the damage inflicted on the party’s popularity by Liz Truss’ ‘fiscal event’. However, Thursday’s by-elections confirm the message of the polls that Mr Sunak has made little or no progress in bringing that hope to fruition. True, at 21 points the fall in Conservative support in Kingswood since 2019 was less than the drops in the three by-elections the party lost to Labour last year in Mid-Bedfordshire, Selby and Tamworth.

A lot has happened in the last fortnight of Scottish politics, most notably the arrest of Nicola Sturgeon. This development has not passed voters by. Though support for Scottish independence remains steady, the reputation of former First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has taken a substantial knock. Meanwhile, the threat posed by Labour to the SNP’s dominance of the country’s politics may now be even greater. These are the key messages from two new polls that provide us with the first glimpse of the public mood north of the border in the wake of Sturgeon’s arrest.  One poll, from Savanta, started its polling a few days before the former First Minister was taken into police custody, but two-thirds of its interviews were conducted after Sturgeon was released without charge.

The last twelve months have been traumatic for the Conservative Party. It has elected and deposed two party leaders. It has found itself caught in a financial crisis of its own making. And most recently it has faced a still largely unresolved ‘winter of discontent’ from a public sector workforce that, like much of those who are reliant on them, is unhappy about the state of public services.  The opinion polls have long since registered their estimate of the damage this sequence of dramas has inflicted on the party’s popularity. But the local elections last week provided us with the first firm evidence from across the country of actual choices in real ballot boxes.  The results make uncomfortable reading for the Conservatives.

It's easy to spot when a party thinks it is going to get the thumbs down from voters in the annual round of local elections each May. It tries to up everyone's expectations of just how badly it will do. It does so in the hope that the results themselves are not actually as bad as ‘forecast', so that the party can say it is, therefore, in a better position than everyone thought after all. For this year's elections taking place on Thursday, the Conservatives have adopted this stance. Its spokespeople have been happy to repeat an academic analysis of a couple of months ago. This suggested that, given where it stood in the opinion polls at that point, the Conservatives were likely to lose a thousand council seats.

New party leaders usually deliver their party a boost in the polls. One of the first signs that voters were not comfortable with Liz Truss as their Prime Minister was the absence of any rise in Conservative fortunes following her success last September in securing the keys to 10 Downing St. Those doubts were then simply strongly amplified when the financial markets reacted adversely to her ‘fiscal event’ in which she and her chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, proposed to fund tax cuts via borrowing.  Even if Yes voters’ faith in independence continues to be undiminished, their support for the SNP no longer appears unconditional.

Voting for the next SNP leader has begun. But who will emerge as the winner is far from clear. Nearly all of the polling to date has been of the general public. Among them, Kate Forbes, Scotland’s finance secretary – whose candidacy got into hot water when she revealed she would have voted against the introduction of gay marriage if she had been an MSP in 2014 – is clearly ahead. In four polls conducted over the last week, including two after a rancorous televised debate, she has on average secured 30 per cent support when voters were asked who they would like as their next First Minister.

Nicola Sturgeon’s shock resignation has left Labour feeling hopeful. Might this be their chance to make significant gains north of the border at the next general election? Even before the First Minister’s unexpected announcement, the Scottish Labour party was already running at 29 per cent in polls of Westminster vote intentions, 10 points up on its tally in 2019. Instead of being in third place (and 26 points behind the SNP), it now occupied second place – ahead of the Conservatives and only 14 points behind the SNP. True, at that level of support the party might still gain no more than half a dozen seats at the expense of the SNP. However, any further significant narrowing of the nationalists’ lead would start to reap a richer reward.

Liz Truss is not quite the shortest-serving prime minister in history. George Cunning has that prize because he died while he was in office. But for somebody who is still alive, at least, this is the shortest running term. If MPs can whittle the number of candidates down to two by, let's say, Tuesday the question that some of the party officials are currently trying to work out is whether the Conservative party has the ability to run an effective online ballot within a couple of days. That’s pretty much the only way of doing it. That obviously raises the question that there will be some members who don’t necessarily have access to the internet or at least are not very familiar with it – it is a relatively older section of the population.

I thought I would take as my starting points what seems to be the internal debate inside the Labour party as to why it ended up where it did in the election. Thesis number one: it was Brexit wot did it. Thesis number two: it was being too left-wing wot did it. I'm going to suggest that neither analysis, on its own, is adequate. Let's start with Brexit. There is no doubt that Brexit played an important role in explaining the change in party support between 2017 and 2019 (and indeed going back to 2015 as well). Those who voted leave were much more likely to vote for the Conservatives or the Brexit Party than they were to vote for the Conservatives or UKIP back in 2017.