Liberal Democrat revival should worry Tories

Good morning. Some thoughts on two parties today: one that scares the Conservative party and shapes much of its leadership’s thinking, and another that they should probably be worrying about a lot more.

Right here, right now

One neglected story of the local elections is just how well the Lib Dems did: they finished second, with 522 seats, narrowly ahead of the Conservatives, who won 515 seats.

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This isn’t the first time this has happened in a local election: in 1996, under the leadership of Paddy Ashdown, the Lib Dems won 5,078 seats compared with John Major’s 4,276. But there is an important difference — in 1996, the Lib Dems did much better in terms of votes cast than they did in 2024.

Depending on your preferred measure, the Lib Dems in 1996 were one point behind the Conservatives in the Projected National Share (PNS). They were just five points behind the Conservatives, with 23 per cent to the Tory party’s 28 per cent, in the National Equivalent Vote (NEV) — the measure that has given the Conservative leadership so much hope in recent days. This year Michael Thrasher projected that Labour is on course to be the largest party in parliament but would fall short of a Commons majority.

Last week, the Liberal Democrats finished eight points behind in the PNS, and 11 points behind the Conservatives in the NEV. However you calculate it, it’s a reminder of two really, really important stories of the elections in recent years.

First, the Labour and Lib Dem vote has become more and more efficient, winning seats with fewer votes than it used to and with electoral coalitions that are better optimised for doing so. The second story is that the Lib Dems ought to be worrying Conservative MPs as least as much as Reform is.

These local elections were a good gauge of Reform’s strength, because although they contested a relatively small fraction of the elections, they did so largely in the areas where Nigel Farage’s previous parties — whether Ukip or the Brexit party — had done well before. What did we learn? While the Reform party does enjoy some support in the country, it is nowhere near some of the more eye-catching polling for Reform — something a lot closer to 8 per cent of the vote across the UK, very far from the polls suggesting that Reform is polling almost as well as the Conservative party across the UK.

We also learned that there is not a particular dividend for the Conservatives in trying to target Reform voters. In London — where 145,409 people voted for Reform on the London Assembly citywide proportional list, electing a Reform member to the assembly for the first time — Susan Hall managed to get about half of those voters to support her in the London mayoral race.

Given her campaign platform was pretty much Reform-lite, and given that her opponent, Sadiq Khan, is a figure of demonology for some of the voters that Reform most appeals to, and she was their only chance of beating him, this was not a very good result, not least because she still got fewer votes overall than the defeated Tory candidate Shaun Bailey managed in 2021.

There’s a good comparison point to be found in Andy Street, who again looks to have persuaded many Reform voters to vote tactically for him, based on the elections to local councils on the same day.

Although Elaine Williams, the Reform candidate in the West Midlands, got 5.8 per cent, a higher vote share than that won by Howard Cox, the Reform candidate in London (3.2 per cent), that needs to be put in the context that a larger proportion of the electorate in the West Midlands voted to leave the EU and is open to backing Reform than the electorate in the London mayoralty. In the end, Williams did only as well across the West Midlands conurbation as Reform did on the London Assembly list (where the party got 5.9 per cent of the vote).

Street, however, got a larger share of the vote in the West Midlands and did a better job of getting other voters, not least Labour voters, to back him. Labour and Lib Dem voters are just worth more to Conservative MPs, just as Conservative votes are worth more to Labour and Lib Dem candidates, because they count for double — one vote on their pile, one vote off that of their opponents.

The lesson of these elections is that Reform is real: but that Conservative candidates who tack to the right to win Reform votes incur losses elsewhere in doing so.

Now try this

I’m off to see Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry at the cinema tonight, and I am very excited about it. However you spend it, have a wonderful weekend.

Top stories today

• Small steps | The UK economy has exited last year’s technical recession with above expectations growth of 0.6 per cent for the first quarter, providing welcome economic news for Rishi Sunak ahead of the general election expected later this year.

• Alleged use of ‘Slapp’ | Nadhim Zahawi’s lawyer is at risk of facing sanctions for attempting to restrict a critic of the former Conservative chancellor with intimidatory warnings. Zahawi announced yesterday that he would step down from parliament at the next general election.

• Dodds defence | Natalie Elphicke, the Tory MP who defected to Labour this week, has apologised for comments she made in support of her disgraced ex-husband after he was convicted of sexual assault. Earlier in the day yesterday, Labour chair Anneliese Dodds defended the party’s decision to admit Elphicke.

• Starmer’s plan for border security | Keir Starmer will announce that MI5 agents would be deployed directly to tackle the small boats crisis for the first time under a Labour government, reports the Times’ Matt Dathan. A Labour government would also seek to negotiate a new deal with the EU to opt-in to its fingerprinting system.

Below is the Financial Times’ live-updating UK poll-of-polls, which combines voting intention surveys published by major British pollsters. Visit the FT poll-tracker page to discover our methodology and explore polling data by demographic including age, gender, region and more.

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