One way of assessing who has done best at a midterm election is by computing vote shares and measuring swings. If we do politics by calculator, then the local elections were pretty much a dead heat. Both Labour and the Tories enjoyed gains they could trumpet; both suffered losses they’d prefer not to talk about. Like First World War armies, they have fired their shot and shell, only to end up in a trench warfare stalemate. Labour can pray in aid the projections that this result, translated into a general election, would make the party the largest in a hung parliament. Tories can retort that that’s worse than Ed Miliband managed when these council seats were contested in 2014. The projection then had him in Downing Street with a majority. So much for projections.
If you want to know how the parties really feel about how they performed, forget the swings, the shares and the misleading extrapolations. Get out of the psephologists’ playground and use your ears to measure the frequency and quality of the excuses coming out of the spinners and spokespeople. In that regard, Labour has been on the back foot since the polls closed; it is Jeremy Corbyn’s team that talks like the deflated party.
In the early hours of Friday morning, at a time when all but political nerds have put themselves to bed, I watched Dawn Butler, a member of the shadow cabinet, trying to put a brave face on disappointment by saying: “We always knew it was going to be a difficult election.” This is normally the alibi you hear rolled out by a government minister explaining why midterm elections nearly always go badly for whoever is in power at Westminster. You do not anticipate hearing the defensive “always knew it was going to be a difficult election” excuse from a senior spokesperson for the principal party of opposition.
Still less do you expect to hear it from the main challenger to the government, when the incumbents have fouled up so atrociously in the run-up to polling day and have been in office for a long and torrid stretch. The Conservatives are entering their ninth year in power. Economic growth is anaemic and many people are still not seeing real increases in their wages. Public services, especially many local services, have been pinched by the protracted grip of austerity. Mrs May has just lost another cabinet minister, the fourth forced departure from her top table in six months. From the national picture to the local one, from the shameful Windrush scandal to the record number of potholes breaking wheels and bones on the roads, the Tories went into these elections facing strong headwinds. They thought that they’d be the ones having to scrabble around for the excuses on election night. The Tories were on the ropes and flinching before an expected thumping by Labour that didn’t materialise. Some say that Labour has got the rough end of the stick in the post-election assessments because the party was poor at playing “the expectations game”. Anticipation of what could be achieved became overblown, with the consequence that a reasonable result would then be interpreted as failure.
There may be some truth to this when we examine what happened in London. Labour had a result there that confirms its dominance in the capital, but it was not quite powerful enough to knock the Tories out of control in Kensington & Chelsea, Wandsworth or Westminster. You can say that Labour lost the expectations game or you can be a bit less polite and observe that the party’s leadership and its admirers have been guilty of hubris. They went on about seizing the “Tory crown jewels” in the capital because they really thought there was a chance this was going to happen. They have so taken it for granted that Britain is inexorably embracing Corbynism that it has come as a bit of a shock to find that many voters still have the gravest reservations about giving their support to Labour even when the main alternative is Mrs May’s party.
In some places, Labour was punished for specifics. The failure to deal with antisemitism in the party’s ranks clearly hurt the party and badly in Barnet, where it failed to win a part of north London it should have taken. Jeremy Corbyn’s broader problem is the same one he had at the election last year. Under him, the party does extremely well in large urban conurbations. One of Labour’s advances was to deprive the Tories of control in Trafford in Greater Manchester.
Labour also has increased support by historic standards among more affluent professionals. It is one of life’s ironies that Mr Corbyn has made Labour a more middle-class party than Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson managed to do. We also know that Labour is popular among younger generations. It may be that Labour’s performance at the locals was somewhat suppressed compared with a general election because younger voters are less likely to turn out for council elections. Where Labour made insufficient progress at the general election, and continues to struggle, is beyond the big cities and university towns. The party is doing particularly badly among older and less affluent voters in provincial England. It underperformed in areas such as Basildon, Bolton, Derby, Dudley, Nuneaton, Swindon and Walsall. These are places with key parliamentary constituencies where the opposition has to be winning well at this stage of the electoral cycle to look credible as a government-in-waiting.
One Labour alibi for this is to blame the implosion of Ukip, which has become the “Black Death” party in the estimation of its own general secretary. For every three former Ukip voters, two went to the Conservatives and just one to Labour. It seems to me that Labour has been a bit too ready to accept this as inevitable, rather than to ask itself why it can’t appeal to more of these voters. That boosted the Conservatives as they enjoyed the bigger helping from the carrion of Ukip. But this feast contains a poison pill. Because a large chunk of Tory support was provided by Leave voters, the hard Brexiters have been emboldened to clamour for more concessions to their demands. The price of catering to that constituency is that it will further alienate the Tories from the younger and more liberal voters that they will need to attract if they are ever to assemble a decent parliamentary majority.
Forward-thinking Tories will also be worried that the Lib Dems are flickering back to life. The gains made by Vince Cable’s party will lift morale and encourage them to think they can rebuild the traditional base in local government that was devastated during the coalition years. As importantly, the evisceration of Ukip re-establishes the Lib Dems as the third party in England, which ought to give a boost to their presence in the media. They will be helped by voters being reminded of their existence more regularly. Experience suggests that a Lib-Dem revival will hurt the Conservatives in parliamentary contests more than it damages Labour. That is for the future. Theresa May, a prime minister who measures success by whether she gets to the end of the week, is simply glad that she avoided a Tory meltdown. For her, survival is a kind of triumph.
Local elections are a highly imperfect guide to general election success or failure, the more so when the next national contest could be as much as four years away. That said, we should not make the opposite mistake of pronouncing that they are entirely meaningless. The voters are always telling us something about the present and a bit about the future when they cast a ballot. On these results, there is no clear path to a parliamentary majority for either of the big parties. The Labour MP Jess Phillips got it right when she drolly observed: “I see everyone is claiming failure as victory.”
Failure is always relative in politics. Stalemate is a result that a government at midterm can live with. Tories have been left feeling more cheerful than they deserve to be and more optimistic about their prospects than they have been for a while. A draw is not good enough for the main opposition party. “We should have romped home,” remarks one senior Labour MP. More of them would be saying that publicly if they did not feel intimidated into silence. Against a shambolic and divided government presiding over a weak economy, Labour has not put in the level of performance necessary to make it look like an opposition party striding confidently towards national victory.
Deep down, at least some of Labour’s leadership know this. Just listen to the excuses.
• Andrew Rawnsley is an Observer columnist