Local Elections: The big moments that never were

What was a dream? What was real? Well the bit where Claire Perry leapt from her seat on live TV, stood on the studio desk and began to strangle the Shadow Chancellor, his life only spared by a violent last minute intervention from Huw Edwards - well I’ve rewound it on iPlayer a few times now and can’t find it, so who knows

So. Were you up for, erm…..? What were you up for?

Were you up for Nuneaton? Were you up for Richmond? Barnet? Were you up for, quite frankly, a whole lot of not very much?

Perhaps, indeed, you just went to bed at a reasonable hour, on the long night after the long day on which the great English public, peered up at the political firmament and decided, like a cartoon dog casually drinking a cup of tea in a burning building, that ‘this is fine.’

Labour had made big noises about stealing control of some of the Conservatives’ most historically rock solid London boroughs, but it didn’t happen. The final nail in that particular coffin coming shortly before 6am, when it became clear the gains required to gain Barnet council were not going to happen.

In fact, it might just have been that the night peaked with John McDonnell bickering with Claire Perry on BBC News for what felt like eleven hours but was in fact merely two.

The problem, with this stuff, when you’re drifting in and out of sleep and the volume’s still turned on, is that you can’t quite be sure what’s real and what you’ve dreamed. The bit where the Conservative Energy Minister raised her hand three times to the Shadow Chancellor and said ‘stop talking down to me’ I am pretty sure happened.

The bit where she leapt from her seat, stood on the glass desk and actually began to strangle him, his life only spared by a violent last minute intervention from Huw Edwards - well I’ve rewound it on iplayer a few times now and can’t find it, so who knows.

It was, in fact, in about round eight of this gripping showdown that Labour lost control of Nuneaton council, the UK’s current favourite political bellwether. Mr McDonnell grimaced at the result on the screen. He sipped a cup of tea. The studio caught fire. This was fine.

Were you up for Ukip’s 48 hour party leader person Suzanne Evans, appearing on screen to spin away her party’s near total death spiral? “We haven’t had a leader,” she said. “We weren’t prepared,” sounding never more like the kid who would definitely have gone to Oxford, actually, if he’d bothered to revise, but sod that I’m having the time of my life right here at Carphone Warehouse.

Were you up for Richmond-upon-Thames, at 03.54? When the real Lib Dem Fightback started now? They took overall control of that council, gaining a huge 24 seats, with the Conservatives losing 28. There in the background, a beaming Sarah Olney, proud Liberal Democrat MP for the Richmond Park constituency for all of 151 days.

By 6.30am, Ukip had won a huge two seats, and lost 86, but proud celebrators of their demise should consider the context. Ukip has lost some local council seats. The Lib Dems have gained control of some very Remainery bits of London. But the UK is still kind of leaving the EU, if you’re wondering who’s really winning here, to quote a diamond shaped yellow placard somewhere near you.

Of course, when nothing happens, everything happens, and the night becomes a tale of pure, undiluted expectation management. When no one’s won, it’s always the other side that definitely lost.

Big Labour gains in Wandsworth, Westminster and Kensington and Chelsea fell short of overall victory, and naturally to explain why, there was Tory party deputy chairman James Cleverly on the BBC News channel, to point out that voters had probably been “scared off” by big Momentum events there. In fact, the one council that Labour did gain, Plymouth, was the only one in which its big Momentum canvassing event was cancelled. Any spin will do.

The conventional truth of recent years is that absolutely nothing you expect to happen actually happens. In fact so ingrained is that rule now, that when the mundane occurs it almost shocks. Just when you start seriously to entertain the idea that, actually, maybe elections don’t get won from the centre anymore, along comes a result like this, when two parties orbiting their fringes fail to make any meaningful gains. It is a political zombie dawn.

But the one thing you can still be sure of - whatever bearing this is meant to have on whatever big political event comes next, be it a general election, or indeed a second EU referendum, which cannot be entirely ruled out - whatever you think might happen, well it won’t happen.

Or maybe not. If these local elections of 2018, marked, for the first time in years, the vaguest return to normality, to believable opinion polls, and gradual change. Well the night ended where it started. With positions entrenched. The dial not shifting. And that position ends in Labour defeat. Nothing has changed, as someone once said. Nothing has changed.