Straws, not life rafts

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There was some mystery a few days ago as to whether and where the PM voted in Thursday’s elections. Given that he splits his time between his constituency and London, he is legally entitled to register to vote in both places (although given his party’s dogged pursuit of Angela Rayner for possibly registering in the wrong one of her two addresses many years ago, it’s reasonable to suppose that they’re not over-keen on admitting to that fact).  And he’s even entitled to vote in both places, as long as it’s not a parliamentary election, although he probably wouldn’t be exactly enthusiastic about owning up to doing that either.

Given the choice of admitting that he voted for the London mayoral candidate, who’s known mostly for her tweets praising Enoch Powell and displaying a not-exactly-subtle thread of anti-Islamic feeling, or admitting that he voted for the North Yorkshire candidate, who was a News Editor at the Daily Star when it compared his immediate predecessor to a lettuce, I can understand his wish to avoid telling us that he voted for either, let alone both. Even Sunak can work out that there’s no right answer to the question, ‘Which did you vote for – the alleged racist or the lettuce-lover?’. To the extent that one can trust the veracity of anything broadcast by GB News (spoiler: not a lot), it has subsequently claimed that he voted by post for the lettuce-lover. It was obviously one of those ‘tough decisions’ that politicians are always telling us need to be made.

No party is immune to the possibility of putting forward ‘eccentric’ candidates at election time, and vetting candidates is a particularly difficult issue at local government level where the number of candidates involved is so high. Mayoral candidates are, however, much fewer in number – there were only 11 up for election on Thursday – and they are much higher in profile. Selecting two out of 11 for which the party leader might be embarrassed to admit having voted is quite an achievement, even for a party in terminal decline.

But we can’t simply ignore the local election candidates just because vetting them is so difficult. Apparently, one of the bright spots for the Tories last week, according to them, was retaining control of Harlow council by the narrowest margin of a single seat. It was achieved, though, by including a councillor under investigation for anti-Islamic remarks. His exact status is currently unclear, but it appears that he was suspended whilst being investigated and somehow unsuspended in order to stand as a Tory candidate even though the investigation had not concluded. Whether he will even be eligible for membership of his party’s group on the council is as clear as mud. Depending on an individual in that position to portray the result as a ‘bright spot’ has a certain whiff of desperation about it.

Their biggest bright spot of the night was, of course, retaining the mayoralty in Teesside. They also came surprisingly close to doing the same in the West Midlands. The common factor between both of those results was that the Tory candidates did everything they could to distance themselves from their party and its leader, preferring not to mention either unless they really had no choice. As a result, some of the less dim Tory MPs may well conclude that their best chance of being re-elected is to pretend they’re not Tories, so it’s a tactic we will probably see repeated later this year at the Westminster elections. It might, though, turn out to be an extrapolation too far. More of a straw at which to clutch than a life raft.