Labour and the Tories have tried to manage expectations ahead of local elections next week that will see Rishi Sunak face his first major electoral test since becoming prime minister.
Local elections results are often open to interpretation – and politicians often spend the run-up trying to set themselves a low bar they can clear on the night, while talking up the prospects of their opponents.
A Tory cabinet minister took to the airwaves on Sunday to claim his party could lose more than 1,000 council seats across England, while Labour leader Keir Starmer said Rishi Sunak should really be expecting to make gains.
“The baseline for them is on the floor”, Sir Keir Starmer told Sky News’s Sophie Ride on Sunday programme, branding the governing party’s own predictions “astonishing”.
He argued that the Tories had seen their second-worst set of results ever in 2019, when the seats up for election were last contested – and that it would be “quite hard” for Labour to do better this cycle.
“They should be making gains and if they can’t make gains on that awful set of results then I think there are serious questions as to whether Rishi Sunak is going backwards in fact in terms of their electoral prospects,” Sir Keir told the programme.
“So it’s a difficult cycle because of that baseline but I think really the question will be why aren’t the Conservatives making significant gains.”
Conservative transport secretary Mark Harper told the same programme that the war in Ukraine, inflation, and recovery from the Covid pandemic meant the Tories had a hard task to win votes.
“If you look at the independent commentators, the independent experts in this case, all the very respected ones, they are forecasting… that they think we might lose 1,000 seats,” he said.
Pushed on whether he was managing expectations, he said: “We are not commentators. We are participants in this process.
“We are going out, making our arguments very strongly, we are going out knocking on doors, fighting for every vote.
“All I am saying is if you want to judge where expectations are, if you look at what the independent experts are saying, they suggest we are going to lose 1,000 seats because it is tough at the moment.”
Writing for the Independent elections expert Sir John Curtice said polls suggested the Tories were “heading for a drubbing”.
“Although the gap has narrowed somewhat in recent weeks, his party is still 15 points behind Labour in the polls. That deficit would seemingly indicate that the Conservatives are heading for a drubbing, and leave Conservative MPs wondering whether Mr Sunak can win a general election next year,” he wrote.
He added that Labour might make around “400 net gains from the Conservatives that would make it the biggest party in local government across Britain as a whole”, though this would only amount to the Tories losing control of “a dozen or so councils, but perhaps not much more than that”.
The public expectations are that Mr Sunak will lose seats: some 55 per cent of people told Ipsos UK that they thought the Tories would make a net loss, while just 9 per cent think the party will make gains.
Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey said on Sunday that he hoped that many Conservative voters would turn to his party in the local election.
“Voters are sick to their back teeth with this Conservative Government’s terrible record. They have failed the nation on the cost of living, local health services and sewage dumping,” he said ahead of a final campaign tour in advance of polling day.
“People feel it’s time for a change and that Liberal Democrats are best placed to deliver that.
“With the Government desperate to avoid any more by-elections and shock defeats, this election is set to be the final real test before the general election.
“We are seeing former Conservative voters in open revolt against this Government with more and more turning to the Liberal Democrats in former true blue heartlands.”
Meanwhile Green Party deputy leader Zack Polanski told Sky News his party could take overall control of a council for the first time.
“We could have an outright majority on Mid Suffolk council and just to be clear that would be the first time in the northern hemisphere that the Green Party would have an outright majority on the council, so that would be a really big night for us,” he said.
Other targets for the party include Brighton and Hove and Lancaster and while the party is “looking to extend control in places where we are already in administration”, Mr Polanski said.
