HEALTH ALERT: Election Fever spreading fast!

You won’t be able to get away from it for the next few weeks… There are elections coming in some form or another somewhere near you no matter where you are…

Now, I know you are all very excited about the General Election and speculation is rife… Rishi is keeping us all on tenterhooks and teasing us with surprise announcements outside No 10 where he then had nothing to say and he has been spotted having late night meetings with the 1922 Committee etc. but the reality is, no single Tory MP knows when the General Election is going to be and I am starting to think that Rishi doesn’t know when it is going to be either.

The Budget last week was also a bit of a damp squib… A lot of hype and then it underperformed spectacularly and didn’t improve the Tories’ electoral prospects at all.

Rishi, if you are reading this, your dithering is not doing the Tories any favours (quite the contrary), it is not doing the economy any favours and it is not doing the country any favours. So, JUST GET ON WITH IT! Go for a cuppa with the King and ask him to dissolve Parliament.

But on to the elections we know are coming. On 2 May, there are 2,592 council seats up for election, 10 directly elected mayors and 39 Police and Crime Commissioners.

The Conservatives are no doubt going to have an even more challenging election than the past two cycles (2023 and 2022) and places to watch will be Dorset where the whole Council is up and will in all likelihood go No Overall Control (NOC) and probably a similar picture in Solihull. There are also a number of smaller District Councils (and we’ll examine them closer over the next few weeks) where there could be changes in the control of the Councils. Mostly Conservatives that will lose control and some where there already is NOC, and Labour, LibDems and Greens will take some of those.

The directly elected mayors are very interesting too. Andy Street who has held on in the West Midlands is on a knife edge and I suspect Labour will take that off him. There are also three now directly elected Mayors in the North East, Yorkshire and the Humber and East Midlands (Claire Ward the former Labour MP for Watford is standing and is almost certain to win). Labour will also in all likelihood pick up the other two.

Then there are the Police and Crime Commissioners – Generally natural territory for the Tories. But again, I suspect Labour and in particular the LibDems will take a lot of those off the Tories. 

Now, If I was Rishi Sunak I would go for a General Election on 2 May… The foot soldiers are out campaigning for their own seats. The election will see lots of Tory losses again that will deplete numbers and deflate morale. At a General Election later in the year, he will struggle to find foot soldiers to do the hard graft.

So, Rishi, be brave, go see the King!

Until next week,

Henry