Local elections 2022: Tories face test on cost of living and Partygate as voting opens across UK – live

Rory Carroll

If the size of the press pack waiting at her polling station in Coalisland, County Tyrone, is any indicator, Michelle O’Neill is on track to be Northern Ireland’s next first minister. About 20 photographers and TV camera operators greeted Sinn Féin’s leader in the north when she turned up to vote this morning.

Asked by the Guardian about the significance of Northern Ireland possibly getting its first nationalist first minister, O’Neill made no mention of a border poll for a united Ireland and focused on bread-and-butter issues. She said:

It’s a hugely historic election and people are very in tune to that. What we’re asking for people today is come out … and to vote for a first minister that will stand up for everybody, that will turn up on day one for everybody, someone that will invest in people in terms of getting them through the cost of living crisis and that will work to fix the health service.

O’Neill declined to be drawn on the timing of Brandon Lewis’s hint that the government was rowing back from a threat to disapply parts of the Northern Ireland protocol in the Queen’s speech next week. (See 10.25am.) “I’m not going to speculate. The protocol is here to stay, it is our best defence against the hardest Brexit that the DUP and the Tories delivered to us.”

Last month the Daily Telegraph published the results of a poll suggesting that the Conservatives are on course to lose more than 800 council seats in the local elections. The report was widely dismissed as a Conservative-friendly exercise in expectation management, even though it was based on an analysis by Electoral Calculus, a political consultancy, and the polling firm Find Out Now. The same report claimed Labour was on course to win more than 800 seats.

This week Electoral Calculus revised down the figures for Conservative losses a bit, but it still suggested the party was on course to lose almost 550 seats. It also had Labour on course to win 819 seats.

Yesterday Ben Walker, a data specialist at the New Statesman, published his seat projections, based on an analysis of recent polling. His figures are very different. He expects the Conservatives to lose just over 200 seats, with the Labour gains limited to around 150. He says:

My forecast … predicts that the Conservatives will lose more than 200 council seats across Great Britain on polling day (Thursday 5 May). They will suffer net losses of 63 in London, 38 across the rest of England, 83 in Scotland and 22 in Wales.

Labour, meanwhile, will make a net gain of 35 council seats in London but a net loss of 16 across the rest of England. That net loss, however, will be more than compensated for by net gains of 87 and 41 in Scotland and Wales respectively.

Steve Fisher, an Oxford University academic who works on the team producing the election results analysis used by the BBC, published an alternative seat projection yesterday. His figures are closer to Walker’s than to Electoral Calculus’s; he is forecasting 304 Labour gains, and 281 Tory losses.

In a blog explaining the figures, Fisher says:

The Conservatives are expected to lose seats in all three countries. They are defending a strong 2017 base in Scotland and Wales, and dropped in the polls since both 2017 and 2018 when the English seats were last fought.

Labour are expected to be the main beneficiaries from Conservative losses. The projections suggest Labour might recover most but not all the losses they suffered in 2017 in Scotland and Wales. In England, Labour are trying this week to build on cumulative gains from 2010, 2014 and 2018. They already control over half the seats up this year. Since Labour are at 40% in the polls, their poll support is no greater than it was in 2018. Instead of gaining seats from winning more voters, Labour are projected to make council seat gains in England primarily from the drop in the Conservative vote. But, as discussed below, last year’s experience shows there are various reasons why that might not happen.

As Prof Sir John Curtice, the country’s leading psephologist (and a colleague of Fisher’s) explained in an interview yesterday, counting seats gained or lost is not necessarily the best way of assessing how parties perform in local elections. Experts pay as much or more attention to the national share of the vote, but this takes longer to calculate.

Bill to overhaul Northern Ireland protocol not likely to be in Queen’s speech, minister hints

Lisa O’Carroll

The government is not expected to include threatened domestic law to disapply parts of the Northern Ireland protocol in the Queen’s speech on 10 May outlining the bills it hopes to introduce in the next year.

The Brexit opportunities minister, Jacob Rees-Mogg, recently promised unilateral changes if the EU did not agree to change the rules on Irish Sea border checks, as did Boris Johnson who said he would “fix” the protocol.

However, last night the Northern Ireland secretary, Brandon Lewis, hinted there would be no such fix in the Queen’s speech, telling ITV’s Peston: “We’ve not said that.” Lewis went on:

Our focus is on resolving the issue of the protocol. Ideally, we want to do that by agreement with the European Union.

EU sources say there could be room for further compromise on the border checks but talks have slowed because of the situation in Ukraine.

It is thought that the government will retain the right to bring forward some changes at a later date in relation to clause 38 (b) in the EU Withdrawal Act 2020, which underlines parliamentary powers in domestic law.

Shell has reported a record quarterly profit of $9.1bn (£7.3bn) for the first three months of the year, piling more pressure on the government to implement a windfall tax to fund measures to tackle soaring household energy bills. My colleague Alex Lawson has the story here.

Good morning. Voters have already started going to the polls across the UK in elections that could determine whether or not the Conservative party decides to stick with Boris Johnson as its leader, that will almost certaintly see Sinn Féin, the republican party committed to a united Ireland, become the largest party in the Northern Ireland assembly for the first time, triggering a crisis in unionism, and that will provide that will provide the best indication to date as to whether Labour is on course to win the next general election.

Last night YouGov published some new polling looking at what might happen in 16 key councils in England. In his analysis, YouGov’s Patrick English wrote:

Our models suggest that while Labour will make gains up and down England, they will find their pace of growth to be much slower in some areas of the country than others.

Overall, the story is fairly consistent – we expect swings of varying sizes from the Conservatives to Labour in all areas, and also some notable improvements for the Greens and independent/smaller party candidates. However, the Conservative vote seems to be holding up better in some areas of England than others, and this will impact the pattern of results on the night.

Sam Coates from Sky presents the results in a different format, region by region, which illustrates more vividly how Labour is on course to do well in London and the south, but struggle more in the north.

Still, for Labour to win Wandsworth, which the YouGov poll suggests is possible, would be significant. The south-west London council has been in Conservative hands since 1978 and it was sometimes described as Margaret Thatcher’s favourite local authority. In a particularly bad set of local elections for the Tories in 1990, the party successfully spun a line to the media that, because Wandsworth had stayed blue, it had not all been a disaster. For almost 20 years the council was then run by Eddie Lister, who went on to serve as Boris Johnson’s chief of staff. The YouGov poll also suggests the Tories could lose Westminster, the council covering Downing Street, the Houses of Parliament and Buckingham Palace, which has been Conservative since it was set up in 1964. That would be an even bigger gain for Labour – although, in an excellent ward-by-ward analysis of the contest at On London, Dave Hill concludes a Tory defeat is unlikely.

My colleague Archie Bland has a good preview of what to look out for in the elections in his First Edition briefing.

Boris Johnson has already voted. He turned up at a polling station in Westminster with Dilyn, providing today’s first example of #dogsatpollingstations.

Often on election day #dogsatpollingstations is as good as it gets in terms of news, because broadcasters don’t show political interviews while the polls are open, and there are legal limits to what the media can report in terms of how the voting is going. But I’m sure we’ll find something to fill the blog.

The polls are open until 10pm, when we will be launching a new blog to cover the results coming in overnight. Many councils do not count until Friday, which is also when counting starts in Northern Ireland.

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