Those seats are up this May

Yesterday I attended, online. what was one of the annual political events before the pandemic – the briefing on the coming May elections by the Tory peer, Lord Hayward. There were no elections last year and in England and Wales there have not been any local by-elections.

So in large parts of Britain in the first week in May we’ll have the first chance to test the political climate based on real votes being cast rather than just opinion polls.

The above slide prepared by Lord Hayward and Savanta sets out the different elections that will be taking place and there are a lot. For not only do we have those that were due on the normal schedule to take place this May but also the ones that could not be held last year. The biggest of these is, of course, for the London Assembly and Mayoralty.

One thing to note is that there will be almost no results coming out on the night. Counting will start on the Friday and because of the complexity of some of the elections could spill over into the weekend and maybe the following week.

Another thing to note has been the constraints on campaigning which has really only got under way in the last few days.

One particular quirk which Lord Hayward reminded me of was what happened in 2017 when TMay called GE2017 for the June only a couple of weeks before the local election polling day in the first week of May. At the time the Tories were riding very high in the polls with leads of upto 25% which led to one of the party’s most successful set of locals in decades.

Those seats will be up this year which mean that the Tories have a lot of defences going on – something we should factor in when analysing what happened.

Another factor has been the constraints of campaigning which has probably hit the LDs the most.

I’ll be doing a follow up post with some of the detail that came out in yesterday’s presentation.