The polls and the pundits are broadly agreed on the outcome of today’s elections – the only issue in doubt is exactly how great the earthquake will be.
If we map the Richter scale onto our domestic politics, a rating of around five would be expected to “cause some damage to well-designed structures” and a number higher than eight to lead to “total destruction in communities near the epicentre”. Applying such descriptions to the established political parties (as opposed to the voters themselves), I am firmly in the camp that we will be rather closer to eight than to five.
Looking first at the English local elections, the Conservatives and Labour could find themselves battling it out for the wooden spoon, with one of the grand old parties finishing fourth and the other fifth in terms of council seats won.
Reform will comfortably win the day both in terms of NEV (the national equivalent vote share, which maps the results onto a putative General Election) and in terms of councillors. With regard to the latter, the party is currently defending just 78 of the approximately 5,000 seats up for grabs and will likely emerge with more than 1,500. You might still just find odds of 1/50 on Farage’s teal army taking first place if you fancy a 2% return on investment over just a few days.
The scale of the apocalypse facing Labour is almost unimaginable. Last year the party lost two thirds of the seats it was defending and it may fare even worse this time. In absolute rather than relative terms, the position is bleaker still. In 2025, it had fewer than 300 councillors up for re-election as the areas voting were largely the Tory shires. This time, over 2,000 seats start in the Labour column and it could be reduced to 600 or even fewer. Swathes of the party’s campaigning infrastructure will be overwhelmed as a turquoise tsunami engulfs the Red Wall. Outside London it may struggle to maintain majority control in any area at all with ‘all out’ elections – although it has sufficiently impregnable majorities to remain in power in a good number of places which elect in ‘thirds’.
You can still just about get 1/2 on the betting exchanges that Starmer will be replaced as Labour leader this year, and I believe that represents good value – as does the 5/2 that a new leader will be in position at some point between July and September. (I see the biggest danger to this latter bet being that the thus-far-hapless coup leaders get their act together and somehow manage to manufacture a coronation before the end of next month.)...<<<Read More>>>...