Starmageddon

Last week’s local election results were disappointing for the Tories but a nightmare for the government. Although Labour’s candidates will have assured voters that the polls were not about the government’s record but local flower displays and road surfaces, the electorate begged to differ. As Labour councillors return to townhalls with fewer colleagues but more Green and Reform councillors to oppose them, Labour MPs look nervously toward the next election and angrily at their party leader to whom they angrily attribute the blame. The next general election they are bound to lose…or maybe not.

Labour lost 956 councillors, while Reform gained 1451 (including a great many from the Conservatives) while the Greens gained 441. Back in 1995, Tony Blair’s new Labour won 1,800 seats, which set the scene for the Labour landslide in 1997. The hundreds of local victories anticipated that gigantic victory when 18 years of Tory rule at Westminster ended. Yet William Hague, the subsequent Conservative leader, won a similar local landslide in 1999 gaining 1,348 councillors while Mr Blair went on to win the next two general elections (2001 and 2005). So was last Thursday a 1995 moment or a 1999 moment? For the knife-wielding Labour backbenchers and ambitious ministers, it makes little difference: Starmer is a lame duck prime minister and has to go. What a contrast with the General Election only two years before when he commanded a massive majority in the Commons and vowed to further emasculate the Lords: at this rate, he may not even survive the month. Power, like wealth, is but sand slipping through our fingers.

And he changeth the times and the seasons: he removeth kings, and setteth up kings: he giveth wisdom unto the wise, and knowledge to them that know understanding: Daniel 2:21

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