Elections are the measurable effect of uncertain causes, which makes them vulnerable to over-interpretation. That is doubly true of local council ballots. The voters who express no opinion by staying at home outnumber the ones who turn out.
From the results so far counted in yesterday’s local polls, it is safe only to say that the Conservatives are much less popular now than they were in 2019, when Boris Johnson led them to general election victory. But a correction was in order, given the scale of that win—an 80-seat majority in defiance of political gravity, coming as it did after nine years of Tory incumbency.
Gravity is back. But votes are falling away from the Tories (and towards Labour) at different rates in different places, which helps clarify what actually happened in December 2019.
If the shine is coming off Johnson’s brand—and testimony from the doorstep suggests that is a big factor—the relative resilience and weakness of the Tory vote in different places says something about a structural shift in Britain’s electoral geography.
Johnson’s parliamentary majority was delivered by three forces, and it wasn’t clear at the time which was the most important. First, there was the promise to “get Brexit done,” which scooped up the vast majority of Leavers but also appealed to many Remain voters who heard it as a pledge to heal division after years of toxic wrangling and parliamentary paralysis. Second, there was Johnson’s personality—the fabled “Boris effect” that, according to Conservative folklore, had the power to convert lifelong Labour voters. That unique magnetism made a difference in “red wall” seats in northern England and the Midlands—fiercely pro-Brexit but historically allergic to any conventional Tory candidate.
Third, there was the prospect of Jeremy Corbyn becoming prime minister, which appalled voters of all stripes and pushed them towards Johnson as the alternative. The electorally repellent properties of the former Labour leader were a huge factor in the red wall and also fortified support among Tory Remainers in what is now described as the “blue wall.” These are the southern towns and suburbs that were once solidly Conservative but tilted pro-European in 2016 and have seen a demographic shift towards younger, liberally inclined voters migrating from urban centres.
Of those three factors, the Corbyn push was the most undervalued in post-election analysis. Neither major party had a reason to advertise it. For Tories, it made more sense to attribute victory to electoral voodoo practised by their charismatic leader and to a national desire for Brexit. For Labour, there were huge incentives to downplay the Corbyn factor. Given the outgoing leader’s popularity among party members at the time, no potential successor could repudiate him and also win a leadership contest. Keir Starmer won by pledging as much continuity as distance from his predecessor. (His subsequent abandonment of that commitment has not been forgiven by the left.)
The pro-Corbyn faction was able to deflect blame from its hero onto the pro-European position that the party had taken to the country in 2019. The charge was that Blairite Remainer ultras had saddled Labour with a second referendum policy that was toxic in the red wall. That was not the whole truth, but it was true enough. Since no one in the Labour Party wanted to re-litigate Brexit arguments or fight a civil war over Corbynism, the job of disentangling which failing brought the greater portion of defeat was never done.
Now Corbyn is gone and the “Boris” brand has soured. Labour is led by a man who is not radioactively toxic, but not very charismatic either. The Tory leader is recognised even by many of his own MPs to be pathologically dishonest, self-serving; morally and administratively unfit to be prime minister. Also, Britain has left the EU. None of the three 2019 drivers of Tory victory is still operative, although the underlying cultural trends that lay behind them still pertain.
Labour’s seizure of Barnet council is likely to express, to some extent, the recovery of votes in areas with a high Jewish population, where Corbyn was synonymous with indulgence of antisemitism. But Labour has also done well in Tory bastions of longer standing in the capital—Westminster and Wandsworth.
Elsewhere, the Conservative vote looks stickier. Starmer would have liked a rebound in the red wall. Labour has lost some council seats outside the capital. The opposition leader's team insist that their gains, extrapolated to a general election scenario, would turn some totemic battleground areas red again—Hartlepool, Grimsby, Workington, Wolverhampton.
That kind of extrapolation is exactly the sort of over-interpretation that local election results invite but don’t necessarily justify. Labour will be heartened if its overall vote share looks in line with current national opinion polling—roughly 5 points ahead of the Tories. That’s definitely better than losing, but not a commanding margin for mid-term. For Conservatives, there might be some consolation in suffering a standard beating and not a seismic collapse. They take comfort from reports on the ground that ex-Labour voters are not much enamoured of Starmer, even if Johnson has lost his shine.
