Local elections: Scottish Tories hopeful
The local election results are still coming in but the votes counted so far suggest the national opinion polls are not wildly out.
Instead of the usual chest-beating victorious soundbites you expect on these occasions, the Tories are downplaying their success – a sure sign that they think the General Election victory is now banked, but they don’t want supporters getting complacent and failing to deliver a monster majority.
Scottish Tories are reporting that they could be on a bit of a surge. They think their equivalent share of the vote in Scotland could end up with a number that starts with 3.
I’ve been told of one area of not particularly prosperous housing in Aberdeenshire where their ward vote may have gone from 300 to 2200.
There’s talk that the Tories will have a councillor in Glasgow Shettleston, which would be quite a moment. Not so long ago, they used to come close to losing their deposits in Westminster and Holyrood elections in that part of the city.
No. 10 will study the share of the vote in Scotland that the SNP gets and hope for a decline from the last few outings. They will hope that any decline points to a falling-off in support for independence.
But the SNP gains in Glasgow and elsewhere will not have the air of a defeat or a slide.
In earlier results, Labour was outpolled in Stevenage, which might not have happened since 1977.
In Harlow, once a weather vane, the Tories took every single seat. The numbers so far suggest a 17-point lead for the Tories, not far off the national opinion poll numbers which have left so many people slack-jawed.
Ukip has vaporised, made purposeless by the Brexit vote and its backers welcomed to the Tory hearth by Theresa May’s strident and carefully targeted rhetoric.
We will know later on whether ex-Labour voters who switched to Ukip are moving to the Tories with the same zeal as ex Tory voters who voted Ukip in the past. But the signs are that Ukip has proved to be a gateway drug for Class A Tory voting.
The other big story is the non-appearance of the Lib Dem revival in areas where it had been predicted.
Cardiff and the West of England are not yet looking ready to come home to the Lib Dems.
Senior Lib Dems still think that their knights hoping to return – in Bermondsey, Surbiton and Twickenham – are standing in seats not tested yesterday and are in promising shape.