U.K. Conservatives Hold Their Breath: How Bad Will Local Elections Be?

When voters in England and Wales go to the polls on Thursday to elect mayors and local council members, the outcome will inevitably be seen as a barometer for Britain’s coming general election. Given the sour public mood and the Conservative Party’s dire poll ratings, the storm clouds are already forming.

The big question is not whether the governing Conservatives will lose seats — that is a foregone conclusion among pollsters — but whether the losses will exceed or fall short of expectations after 18 months in which the Tories have consistently trailed the opposition Labour Party by yawning margins.

“If a party has been 20 points behind the opposition for 18 months, how much worse can it get?” said Tony Travers, a professor of politics at the London School of Economics. “The losses would have to be very, very bad for it to be viewed as a negative result for the Conservatives, and they are unlikely to be good enough for Labour for it to be viewed as a success.”

The magic number, Professor Travers said, is 500 council seats.

If the Conservatives, who are defending 985 seats in England, can hold their losses to below 500 seats, he said, the party faithful will probably accept that as a bruising but bearable setback. If Labour, which is defending 965 seats, and other parties grab more than 500 Tory seats, that could set off a fresh spasm of panic in the governing party’s ranks, even putting Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s job in jeopardy.

Professor Travers conceded that the 500-seat benchmark was arbitrary, a conceit of academics rather than a concrete measure of either party’s standing with the electorate. But in a local election, especially one so soon before a general election, intangible factors like momentum and mood are important.