Lord Porter of Spalding is a former Leader of South Holland District Council and a former Chairman of the Local Government Association.
As the dust settles on the local government elections, I want to offer the perspective of someone who fought and lost. There are some who say we lost because we had previously chosen Boris Johnson – and those who say we lost because of the way he was removed. Some people have said we lost because we chose Liz Truss – and then there are those who say we lost because of the way she was removed. We also have those who say we lost because we have Rishi Sunak. I think in truth none of them are right, and yet all of them are right, but only in the margins. We lost over a thousand seats and I honestly believe there are probably a thousand reasons why we lost them.
In my own patch, we had no political opponents as such, the Greens managed to field four candidates, Labour only one, and the LibDems none. The largest opposition Group were Independents and despite the name they were a Group, registered as a political party with a common platform and a joint fundraising effort. They managed to take the majority of the seats in my main town but did less well in the more rural seats. In Donnington (my most northern settlement) we took two of the three seats, yet in 2019 we failed to take any. In Sutton Bridge, my most Eastern settlement, we came within 100 votes of taking a seat, in a ward where we have never won one. In Crowland to the south, we held our two seats although swapped one of our candidates for someone who lost in 2019.
Yet in my own seat, I came fourth out of four being beaten by: a good well-known community campaigner who had failed to win a different seat in a previous election, an ex-Conservative who lost a different seat at the last election, and the MP’s son who was just returning from four years away at uni. At the count, it was obvious that I had failed to secure what little blue vote there was with at least 45 of the MP’s sons’ votes being exclusively for him rather than the pair of us. It has led me to question whether having me on the ballot actually cost him votes – and made me wonder if he had run with someone else, would he have done enough to actually take the second seat?
I do know though, that losing wasn’t for the want of trying – I put more shoe leather into this election than I had in the last three combined. Last time out I delivered only two leaflets and did a marginal amount of canvassing and I topped the poll; this time out, if you were really unlucky you would have had seven pieces of communication and had one or two conversations.
Speaking to other Leaders who have lost their seats (a large crowd of us) there were a whole host of reasons for the poor showing in their patches. These range from a conspiracy of the parties to the left to abandon seats in favour of another party. Probably look at Bracknell and Windsor to see this – or they had targeted almost exclusively, certain seats (see the result in Sevenoaks).
I hope that the Party puts some real effort into understanding why we lost and what we need to do, to avoid doing it again in future local elections. We seem to be expecting the next general election to be an air war, but I fear that we have lost the people who would have paid for that over the last couple of years. We will have to fight a ground war – and if we replicate these elections in the future, we won’t have any troops to fight it.