Downing Street Braces for Tough Local London Elections

Anyone who has ever worked in No. 10 knows that no matter how much you try to mop MP brows and trill that local election results are just mid-term blues, when lawmakers figure out what the voting would mean for them if replicated in a general election, they hit the panic button (alongside telling No. 10 they are “clueless and out of touch and know nothing about the trials of decent hard-working local MPs”... I can remember the wrath of frustrated backbenchers even five years on). The worry for Keir Starmer is that the bad results expected for Labour this Thursday will see the herd begin to move.

Unhappy voters now have four or five political options to choose from, as this excellent primer shows: “The Conservative-Labour duopoly that governed British politics for the past century appears locked in terminal decline,” our team writes.