Election special: How bad is it for Tories? | The News Agents

The local election and mayoral results flood in.

How bad are they for the Tories? How much of that is Reform? And how well have Labour actually done?

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the news agents was it bad yeah it was pretty awful if you’re a conservative and thinking do we have any chance of winning the next general election yes there were little glimpses of sunlight for conservatives in a few places but do they tell us anything about the coming general election when surely The Narrative after last night is that labor seem well on course toward W Victory we’re going to be taking you through these results and explaining how it can be that while these elections like all the elections we’ve had over the past few years show us that labor do seem to be on course to form the next government that there is a danger that the Tory party not only lose but get wiped out but at the same time it can be that there are just a few little clouds on the horizon for the labor party for political troubles not just for the general election but for the politic of the next Parliament as well welcome to the news agents it’s John it’s leis it’s Emily and once upon a time you would do the aftermath of a local Council election um Friday morning you’d know everything it is now Friday 2:00 in the afternoon and we know some things and there are still a lot more to come uh tomorrow what we do know is that labor if this is a benchmark for how well they’re going to do in a general election have a lot of cause to feel satisfied although though some little clouds in the sky which will come to for the Tories it was pretty dismal and if you’re rishy sunak you just go around saying harow hin harow howchin harow howchin because in harow in Essex conservatives held on and Ben hin uh the mayor of teas Valley also won and won pretty convincingly um but again the question is how much was that down to the conservative party how much was that down to the individual Ben hin who was almost running independent of the conservative party I mean Ben hin actually forgot I mean forgot to wear his blue rosette to the count and when he was asked whether he was trying to come across as a non-conservative he just said oh no I just forgot but I think if you’re one of the Tory pundits commentators MPS doing the rounds today then you are trying to make the focus of the public as narrow as you possibly can so it is just as you say John on what happened in that teas Valley meraly and whenever somebody talks about the councils they’ve lost the seats they’ve lost we don’t know the full tally yet because we’ve only had between a third and half of them through so far but they just want to point to this talismanic win or rather a hold of Ben hin who gained 72% of the vote last time round has gone down this time round but actually still managed to make more than the first time and in a perfect conservative World they just say oh stop talking about everything else just look at Ben he’s done brilliantly just stop talking about all the other stuff and really trying to keep your attention on that one win of the night yeah we should think first maybe about uh the council election because as we were saying earlier in the week before we get to the mariles in many many ways for all sorts of reasons we can discuss the Council election results and indeed the uh byelection results in Blackpool South which I think there is a danger of overlooking um are more indicative probably of where we are heading for the general election which is ultimately why most people are particularly interested in these um election results and what is interesting about these results in particular I think the ones that we have so far sat down at 2:00 on Friday afternoon is that they are definitely at the uh lower end of expectations for the conservative party they’re basically losing on average about 50% of the seats that they’re standing in of the Thousand or so that they were up for in this election cycle and in particular labor are doing very well and this is something that I know from conversations with labor sources they are very pleased about they are doing well in exactly the sort of places that they need to win in a general election just before we came and sat down news came in from Swindon for example absolutely two classic kind of bellweather seats in in Swindon exactly sort of seats you need to win if you’re going to get a majority for either conservatives or labor they’ve now got their biggest majority on that Council since the 1990s they’re doing well overnight they won Reddit Council again similar sort of thing they are their vote is proving to be very efficiently distributed and what they think that where they are putting resources in particular Milton Kean just come in as I’m sat here now they think that when they are where they are putting in resources and they get out the vote operation is proving particularly successful these are absolutely Central questions for a general election outcome and the other thing that I thought was inter thing about overnight on this podcast you may have heard us at times talking about our heroic figures since we launched the podcast who we put on Mount Rushmore you know the sort of Boris Johnson and Liz trust because they’re always so good uh for business what we’ve never talked about on this podcast is Rushmore Council and Rushmore Bar Council which takes in farra and Aldershot in Hampshire also turning labor which is one of those places that you know I kind of my start of my career I worked in Hampshire I mean you’d have never said labor ersh or labor um farra and that that again is showing that they are making gains across the country adding to that Norwich Harley pool yeah thurk all places that they need to make advances in a general election and just one other striking thing that I’ve Just Seen is that that you now have a situation that on councils um in the big cities so let’s say Sheffield joins Liverpool and Manchester in having not a single Tory counselor on them at all so they’ve almost become noo zones for the conservative party when we were talking in the week to Luke Trill our pollster from more in common he was saying watch what happens in the East Midlands because this is a brand new meraly in other words it doesn’t have an incumbent it doesn’t have a pattern of voting and he thought this would be a pretty critical place for us to keep an eye on and sure enough in the last few minutes has just been called for labor CLA ward has won that over Ben Bradley and why this is so interesting is a it doesn’t have the big personalities that we were talking about in other mariles the places like the West Midlands with Andy Street or Ben hin in teas Valley we don’t really know what this will look like in a sort of Personality shaped meraly yet but the other reason is that it covers a 12 parliamentary re Ward area in other words there are critical seats in this part of the world that labor will now start feeling pretty upbeat about because it suggests if there is a feeling let’s say a feeling in the water that labor is preferred over the conservatives and they don’t particularly know either candidate as their mayor before now then they will start thinking that this is a good basis on which to start building seats and as you said you know when you’re looking the difference between somewhere like thork and Rushmore somewhere like redit and Richmond you are seeing completely different not just geographically different but sort of demographically different madeup places and I think that’s where labor will take Sucker from tonight yeah and you’re seeing uh exact in that exact way you’re seeing the 2019 Coalition and even the 2021 Coalition where the conservatives did very well when these seats were last formed basically fall away at both ends and and and we as part of that picture we should just talk a little bit about Blackpool South because as I said I think that by the time we get to Saturday you might be listening to this it will be probably forgotten but it ought not to be forgotten not least because I mean it’s a striking result in and of itself was a conservative seat Scott Benson was forced to resign uh because of a corruption Scandal and it was became conservative in 2019 there was a huge 26% swing to labor that is the third biggest swing to labor from the conservatives in history and we’ve become quite accustomed to these big big swings now away from the conservatives but because this Parliament has had tantalizingly in such a fun way so many by elections been great fun for all of us who that’s where we get our kicks as partly as a result of recall petitions if you take the long sweep of those byelections basically from 2021 to 22 you see a pattern that is not abated which is huge swings away from the conservatives under both Boris Johnson and then rishy sunak Liz truss didn’t have any because as we know PR it was only September to October wasn’t really time for any of that but you know initially to the liberal Democrats seats like chesh and amam Northshire oton and honon huge swings of you know 25 30% and then latly to the labor party Salan ay 23% mid beds 20% Tamworth 24% and latly Welling BR and now Blackpool as well there is no sign I mean richy sunak is fond of saying uh you know governments get a kicking in midterm this is mid term in the sense that like late November is to is middle of the year right it’s not this is towards the very end of this Parliament and if there is no sign in these byelections of at least a trend starting to close it’s just catastrophic curtains for the conservative party yeah and what I think is interesting about that is the effect it has in Westminster because look Ben hin has won you know Well Done Ben hin you were more popular as as Emily’s pointed out you know very conspicuous standing on that stage when the labor guy’s got his red rosette on the liberal Democrat has the orange rosette on and Ben hin has no rosette on you know he ran independent of the conservative party just as Andy Street has done in the West Midlands surely Tories don’t come away and say well look we held you know we held teas Valley everything’s fine for the election surely Tes go back to Westminster at the end of this and think it’s every bit as bad as we thought it was it’s such an interesting point that because for the last few months we’ve been holding out this weekend this set of Elections as the moment when if things go really badly those few Rebels might become slightly greater in number and decide that there is still one more chance to depose rishy sunak and I guess if you want that in numbers terms anywhere up to a loss of I guess above 500 seats for the conservative starts to look not just really bad that’s more than half but pretty catastrophic and I’ve been sort of trying to get a sense of MPS who are reading the room a little bit and asking how they are feeling this sort of growing body of rebellion and quite interesting the first thing I was told was that they were you know this is not like it’s all going fine but they said the test for their side is to stay calm and measured rather than go for the nuclear option although some will try and they said that there will probably be a reshuffle in due course and that maybe the police and crime commissioner results will offer more helpful intelligence as they’re a bit more distance but the other person I spoke to told me one thing that I think will be quite critical going forwards which is that the MPS won’t be meeting again until Tuesday and on Tuesday there is only a oneline whip in other words a three line whip is when you have to be there you have to be in the Commons you have to be in Westminster a on line whip means essentially uh you can stay at home if you want so I think in sort of like in covid terms riet the prime minister is actually slightly saying hands face space you know stay at home save the PM the last thing we want is all the MPS gathering in one place to talk to each other it’s a bit what we saw for the Rwanda vote just before Easter but they basically want to keep people far away for a bit longer to stop any sense of a rebellion fermenting yeah I just think that the idea of keep calm and carry on is such an interesting one because of course it sounds stoical it just says we mustn’t lose our heads when all around are losing theirs etc etc etc yet surely the rational response is to lose your head given you know it’s you’re saying you know it’s November and people saying that’s the middle of the year no it it’s two minutes to Doomsday it’s two minutes to Doomsday and just to keep calm and say no everything is going fine we’re just to 25 points behind in the polls everything is going exactly to plan looks like it’s complacent but equally to defenestrate another conservative party leader also looks like it’s total lunacy well maybe let’s listen to Rishi sunak um who obviously had to respond today to what has been you know a deeply disappointing at night in terms of counselors at least this is what he said obviously it’s disappointing to lose good hardworking conservative counselors and I’m grateful to them for all their service in local government keeping council tax low and delivering services for for local people but we’ve still got lots of results to come as well just for ex and there are also things that I would point to if we’re thinking about sunak position we’ve been saying all year basically that these local elections were a point of Maximum political Peril for him that if there were to be a challenge surely it would come around now what is striking despite the fact and these two things are true at once despite the fact that these results are bad for the conservative party they are objectively very bad and they support all of the rest of the evidence that we’ve had from all the other elections that we’ve had that the conservative party there’s been a substantial swing to labor since 2019 and labor one way or another at the very least on their way to be the biggest party despite all of that sunak asingan looks safer now than we might have thought that he would it looks like that challenge which Rebels have been trying to orchestrate is disappearing and the reason for that is we’re often we we’ve often said in the show and I think there’s some truth to it that rishy sunak and number 10 are bad at politics you know what to give some credit about this they’ve played the politics around expectation management for these elections in a blinding fashion like beautifully because what they’ve done is they’ve channeled it all towards these merties they say if we we win these this is fine just look at that and to be honest most of the media has accepted it and so we’re in a position now where partly as well because I think most to MPS do recognize to get rid of him again without anyone having a particularly alternative prospectus would be a bad move but they’ve played it pretty well I think that slightly flatters um number 10 I think it’s partly that the rebel don’t really as you say have any focal figure to sort of rebel around but I think if you listen to the MPS on the sort of doing the rounds this morning the conservatives the the message that seems to be coming through is give us time give us time you know we are turning things around we are just starting we have just got the legislation through you are going to feel inflation coming down rwanda’s going to take off the underlying messages give us time so if anything I would expect that election to be pushed back till I’m going to say December at this point because I think if they can try and convince people that the winds are there that nobody’s in love with labor that you know it’s not that labor have won your hearts it’s just that you’re a bit cross with us give us time will be the phrase and it might push the election back another six months there’s one other factor which is buttressing or will butress sunak and make him slightly safer than he might we might have thought he could have been and that is again going back to Blackpool which is reform reform came within 100 votes or so of knocking the conservative party into third place it’s only 100 votes what does it matter psychologically in politics things matters if they’d overcome that it would have had an extra effect and there’s a lot of talk particularly on Twitter or that’s over into Friday morning about how well reform are doing in some of these Council results particularly in places like sundland and there’s been a bit of that the truth is what we can see from these results so far is reformar generally scoring about six to 7% of the vote versus the sort of 15% of the vote they’re getting in the polls so on one level that’s bad for the conservatives because it could call it would even if they get six to 7% of the vote the general election it could cost them a slew of seats in conservative seats with narrow majorities they have against labor but at the same time the fact they’ve not done substantially better kind of ukip type performance that you might have seen in the mid-2010s at least allays some of the problems around soona because if they done spectac well in these elections and it’s hard for them to break through and first pass the post but if they’ done better still it would have enhanced those voices on the right of the conservative party saying we need a substantial move to the right well let’s listen now to uh Richard Ty the leader of the Reform Party what’s rapidly becoming clear is basically as more people hear us about reform we’re becoming the real opposition to the labor party in the North in the Midlands in Wales we’re on the way up and it’s quite clear that the Tores are on the way down well if you say you’re becoming the real opposition to the labor party in some areas isn’t the Electoral truth that if people vote reform they take votes away from the conservatives and they get labor so vote reform get labor the more people who vote reform then the more reform we’ve got the opportunity to get there’s no difference between the main two parties their variance of socialism the highest taxes for 70 years the highest government spending for seven years 70 years the worst public sector outcomes the lowest growth per decade for 70 years and the longest perers recession we’re currently in it’s 2 years long that’s the longest perers recession for for 70 years this is an economic catastrophe and labor party’s plans will not achieve any economic growth whatsoever we hear nothing on that we’ve got a bold plan to make work pay we’ve got an ambitious plan to get to zero waiting lists on health care which is absolutely essential so there’s so many areas of British life that frankly need fundamental reform and that’s what we stand for Richard TI there for reform and I think there is a rather old-fashioned assumption here that reform doesn’t want to damage the conservatives it only wants to damage labor that is ridiculous because if you look at who reform is comprised of it’s people who have quite frankly left the conservative party or left the conservative party behind characters like Lee Anderson who got thrown out who have if anything a sort of a personal vital towards the party that’s kicked them out they’re delighted if their vote hurts the conservatives but I think the real question actually for re form is when the broadcasters and the interviewers start asking them questions not just about who’s going to stand not just about who’s going to lead their party but actually what their policies are because we know very very little about what their actual policies are and come the general election I think we do need to interrogate that slightly more firmly yeah and the other thing to say about reform and maybe not having done as well as kind of perhaps they had hoped is that the the game changer would be of course or potentially would be if Nigel farage says I’m in I’m going to lead the party hinting at once again which is’s hinting again but it’s an endless tantalize isn’t it it’s an endless kind of means of getting publicity without actually necessarily getting your hands dirty in the process but we have talked about already on this PO podcast how you have got Mayors in various places around the country that are much more popular than their parties and you just wonder whether actually farage re-entering the fry in a central role might do it for reform we’ll be back after after the break right so we have covered in a way what went really well for labor overnight and as as we’ve said you should we should underscore that lots of things did go well there were some problems though and we’ve referred to a couple of them already which is the maral contest obviously they’ve lost T Valley um Ben howchin resounding sort of personal victory for him winning an absolute majority 53% um of the vote I mean I’ve been speaking to labor sources in the West Midlands all morning who are pretty pessimistic about uh the West Midlands Merl contest Andy Street and Richard Parker we can get into some of the reasons for that and there are individual councils across the country places like alen Blackburn Etc and some of the big cities as well where you can start to see a significant attrition of the labor vote in particular in areas with large Muslim populations and indeed as this Birmingham labor source put it to me if we lose in the West Midlands it is largely going to be well part is is going to be of streets personal popularity but a key key factor will be around the Gaza war and labor and in particular ki’s initial reaction to the Gaza War which is suppressing the Muslim vote in seats and areas which have large Muslim populations yeah and that is something that you know we talked about that after the Rochdale byelection when uh George Galloway uh won his sort of famous Victory and kind of you know was on the Rampage it seemed about how labor had let the Muslim population down in this country the question I guess is how much does that translate into a general election how many parliamentary seats are vulnerable for labor because of that sizable uh Muslim population I mean I can think of probably half a dozen a dozen um and so I don’t know whether how much of a problem or how much that should concern uh Kama um I mean it will concern him a bit and the situation in Gaza is not doing him anything at all whereas it doesn’t seem to be hurting uh the conservative party at all well there are there are several key Shadow cabinet ministers you know Shaban mmud is one West streeting as and other there are others as well who have constituencies with big Muslim populations and there is doubtless concern within the Labour party about the effect that the Gaza war is having in terms of an attrition on the labor vote and not just for this general election but in the future as well I mean you’re right John there aren’t that many seats where it could be absolutely crucial in the general election and the fact of the matter is as well right now the size of the labor lead overall is so massive that it doesn’t matter that much because you’re basically getting compensating factors from other bits of the population but there are those around gear starm and there are those within the labor party were saying you know in a sort of postgenal election situation if we haven’t done something to try and recover you know Muslim vote is a big part of the the the labor Coalition it’s not just Muslims as well we should say it’s other people who are concerned about the Gaza war and are unhappy with the labor party’s reaction to it you can see the kind of the kind of seeds being swn for a politics of discontempt with a labor government that could become a problem if not now for the general election because the overall poll lead is so big then in the future yeah there was real push back actually from one labor source who was reported to say if we lose the West Midlands it will be the Middle East not the West Midlands and that was deemed to be you know sort of a racist assumption that everyone living around the Burham area was more interested in Gaza than what was happening on their streets but I think when you actually look at the breakdown and the places where there are highest Muslim populations you are seeing that labor vote her it is down 16% the greens are picking up 14% which suggests that maybe people are going to the greens this time round in those sorts of places for a protest vote you know simply because they don’t like what is happening within the labor party on that one issue now the Curious Thing is that Labor’s not really fighting this they’re saying yeah we know we have to win back trust amongst our left essentially and that is I suppose what’s really interesting about K st’s whole philosophy over the last six months maybe year it’s all been about wrapping yourself in the flag talking about patriotism not scaring the horses not talking about spending money too much not going really hard on big green issues maybe he has forgot his Left Flank and that is going to be more evident in the months ahead and I think what’s interesting is that you now hear the sort of you know the labor pundit coming out and saying just to remind you we did vote for a ceasefire just to remind you and they will give you the entire wording of that ceasefire motion that was in the Commons last month because they think that they have gone as far as they could go they think they’ve gone pretty much to where George Galloway would go but nobody’s heard it nobody has actually heard that change and so they’re kind of thinking is this a comms problem or is it just people kind of like Galloway trying to make political Capital after the fact that they were a bit but then again in terms of the kind of split between Mayors who are being reelected and those who haven’t I mean as we s sat here we find out that labor has won North Yorks the north North the new North Yorkshire meraly which includes quite literally whose constituency I believe it is an occupant of number 10 Downing Street John and and you know at the start of this campaign I think a lot of people would have thought that would be a long shot for the labor party and this is one of the really interesting things about these mariles right is as we’ve touched on already with the East Midlands is that it looks like and maybe we can touch on London at the end because there are some pretty feted rumors going on around London but it looks like probably that every incumbent mayor who was standing for re-election is going to get reelected that they will win again in places where there are no incumbents you’re seeing the pattern being more typical to the to the National Po and there is something I think about the kind of institutions of these the institution of these meriles that’s interesting that they become so synonymous with their areas they do become Mr or Mrs you know like North Yorkshire or Manchester or Liverpool or London or wherever it happens to be West Midlands they become so synonymous with the politics and just kind of regional identity of their area that they do as George Osborne wanted to do when he created them they kind of end up transcending party lines and they do get a big big incumbency factor in a way that other politicians particularly MPS simply don’t it’ll be really interesting to see when we get all the results tomorrow if every incumbent mayor has won their race and that you’ve got no change whatsoever and yet you’ve got this feal atmosphere in politics in Britain across Europe where no government can win re-election like the US actually we’re starting to develop that split ticket type voting that we never really had before we’ve never had that before in British politics but you love your mayor he seems to be a good guy he blames on the government banging the drum for you and it’s great for charismatic political figures to be out there doing their stuff and you can see that the the incumbency factor is really strong whereas in general elections you could have the most fantastic constituency MP but if the tide is running against your party it’s not going to save you not enough people know there and also I mean you could put one slightly less charitable interpretation as well is that you could say as well like actually these Mayors particularly outside London at the moment they’ve got a lot of authority they’ve got a lot of influence they’ve got a lot of profile they don’t actually have that much power they can’t actually be directly blamed for that much right in a way that the council can MP to some extent certainly the government they want more power by the way so it’s not like they’re happy with this but it does mean that they kind of get a lot of the benefits of the notoriety without some of the traditional drawbacks of incumbency I suppose the one thing we haven’t spoken about that much yet on this podcast is the liberal Democrats and normally on kind of local Council election nights you talk endlessly about the liberal Democrats because of the sweeping gains that they’ve made in all these councils normally Ed Davey would have turned up somewhere sming a massive blue wall down with a comedy Mallet exactly and that hasn’t happened and I wonder whether that is an underperformance on the liberal of the liberal Democrats or whether it’s just that the places where the liberal Democrats are going to do really well haven’t declared yet I think it is that well I should just say that we’re recording this at 2:30 this afternoon it’s always hard to try and find the right sort of Zone where you’re not too late and you’re not too early because this is as I think we said a three-day Affair at least it’s basically like a big fancy royal wedding and at any one point in time you can find a very different narrative but I think we are going to hear more from the greens and more from the lib Ms the later it gets this afternoon greens have had generally very good local election results over multiple Cycles now and and you can see them they’re going to do the same this time and the lib Dems look they think if you talk to them internally they think that again where it matters come the general election when you’ve got efficient tactical voting that they’ll be able to score you know 20 30 seats I mean who knows there is a general concern for lib Dems and this is more for the general election than than the locals probably the damage the post office Scandal did with Ed Dy and the fact he ended up being associated with it at that time fairly or unfairly or whatever but there is a sort of I was talking to a labor person not long ago about this they they were saying they thought that the libdems would be a bigger factor in their calculations right now than they might have been and they don’t feel they are maybe that’ll change between now and the general election but they’ve sort of slightly gone into the background the other thing we haven’t spoken about yet is a result which comes tomorrow Saturday which is the result of who is going to be mayor of London and of course that is the most powerful directly elected person in Britain because actually sadik Khan does have some biggest mandate in Europe biggest mandate yeah and and sadik Khan does have real powers and I think that there was an assumption in London that sadik Khan was going to cruise this Susan Hall was a kind of you know kind of pretty cranky kind of odd candidate to have for the conservatives and yet last night I was picking up all sorts of people in a state of some Panic on the labor side thinking we may not have this we don’t know and a real fear and Terror going around that sadique Khan could lose it would be astounding if if if KH lost I mean I was talking to a conservative London person today and they didn’t think it was going to happen they did think that did point out which is true it is actually quite hard to poll London for different reasons it’s such a complex diverse place and so big and so electorally complicated that you can the waiting have to be really precise and so on but it would basically if if she won Susan Hall won despite the fact that her campaign was pretty threadbear threadbear got very little support from cchq um it would represent one of the biggest polling eras in British political history um and um there will be I think you know this person was also saying which I think is true is that it is true to say that for all sorts of reasons Khal was a frail candidate I mean he was you know third he was looking for a third term hasn’t happened before there was ules you can say it’s politically courageous whatever but it was clearly very unpopular in out of London uh burs there is the gazer issue maybe a little bit less pronounced because he’s Sid KH and it would be in the Midlands but that’s there there as well so if they had run a better candidate and it’s closer the Tories that is and it is closer than people assumed there will be a bit of an inquest within cchq saying we could have won this and imagine how much it would shake the labor party if they had beaten sadik Khan well if sadik Khan does lose and Susan Hall is the next mayor of London I think we three will be together again uh tomorrow for an unscheduled podcast cost such will be the political upheaval of that uh electoral move we love to keep you guessing because we know there’s nothing genuinely that you appreciate more than an emergency podcast as indeed we all do um and talking about emergencies one of the strangest exchanges of I’m going to say the night but it was in fact the morning was between Joe cin of the BBC and Andrea Leedom over that Tory success of Ben hin and I’m going to say something I wasn’t expecting to which is that the Tories senior Tories are starting to sound just genuinely hurt by the electorate I mean hurt in a very emotional sort of time to go to bedway just listen to Andrea unable to take Joe who is just literally giving her the results at her word this win is down to his personal popularity Andrea that must be wor I think that whole little bit of discussion is is absolutely pathetic from the BBC this is a superb all you and Vicky but is pathetic he’s W all you’re saying is he’s had this big swing away from I’m sorry I am IND is taking away from Ben har just tried to suggest he’s had a three billion bung from the treasury he this is all credit to a mayor who’s done an absolutely brilliant job under key part of the leveling up agenda for this government absolute Testament conserv agenda that have backed Ben and it is absolute Testament to him as a good conservative his focus on his area his support for his communities in negotiating to win to apply for the funding that is available You’ made your speech you’ve made your speech but actually we can show exactly why it’s not down necessarily to the conservative government if you can’t lose your sh on Election night when can you for God’s sake and let’s be honest we’ve all done it we may or may not be back tomorrow bye-bye bye-bye bye for now the news agents this is a global player original podcast [Music]