Our political editor, WALTER CRONXITE, on Labour’s post-polling nervousness and confirmation that in Croydon council by-elections, things are never done as quickly as you might hope
Have you ever met a poor bookmaker?
No, me neither, which is why when rumours started to swirl this afternoon that Harrow hairdresser Susan Hall, the Tories’ fringe candidate, was about to be elected as the next Mayor of London, anyone who believed such nonsense will have also thought that they could have made a killing with her still offered at 6-1 by some bookies.
Going to the dogs?: Sadiq Khan, bidding for a third term as London Mayor, voting with his wife, Saadiya Khan, near their Wandsworth home yesterday
Winning six times your stake money is great for punters, but the odds reflect what the bookmakers really think of Tory Hall’s chances of beating Labour’s Sadiq Khan. They know what they are doing. The bookies are always happy to take money from mug punters…
Opinion polls had been giving Khan huge leads, although earlier this week that (theoretical) advantage had been whittled down to 10% – still a comfortable enough margin, you’d think.
The Tory campaign had a simple strategy (“It had to be simple,” according to one Conservative activist, “otherwise Susan would have struggled to understand it”), and that was: throw enough mud and some of it will stick.
To some extent, it worked.
Labour MP Wes Streeting, whose natural demeanour of a waxwork sees his facial expressions rarely betray any emotions (were he to have any), told Sky News today that he believed that Conservative attacks on Khan had had an effect.
And respected political commentator Adam Bienkov noted this afternoon, “The Conservative Party’s campaign of outright lies about Khan’s plans for the capital have had an impact…
“The racist and Islamophobic attacks on Khan, including from the former deputy Conservative chairman Lee Anderson, have also shown a much uglier side to the anti-Khan campaign, which the Conservative party has been more than willing to exploit.”
The longest day: Susan Hall found that her Vera Lynn impression went down with Tory voters in the suburbs
So amid a night of election results from across the country which had seen mostly Conservative carnage among their local councillors, here in the latte-drinking, quinoa-eating, Labour-supporting, Tory-loathed capital, there was what Bienkov called “a bout of the jitters” from the Labour Party ahead of tomorrow’s results.
And this before a single vote has even been counted.
But there are some indicators from the vote verification process.
Some suggest that turnout among postal ballots could have been as high as 65%.
And Bienkov reports Conservative sources suggesting that voter turnout has been higher in outer London, generally Tory-voting areas, where the anti-ULEZ scaremongering was targeted. Verification figures for Bexley and Bromley, hot-beds of fabricated anti-ULEZ resentment, confirmed a 48% turn-out. Croydon and Sutton’s was 42%.
Returning Officer Kerswell keeps Croydon waiting… again
We won’t know with any certainty until tomorrow afternoon, and we don’t know with any great certainty when on Saturday afternoon, either. Because no one has ever done this kind of count this way before.
Boxing day: the London election votes won’t start to be counted until 9am tomorrow
We can only give a prayer of thanks that Croydon chief exec Katherine Kerswell isn’t in charge of the London-wide count (though we’ll come back to our borough’s Returning Officer in due course).
It’s reckoned that 2million voted in the London elections, with ballot boxes gathered from more than 3,600 polling stations and taken to 14 counting centres. Croydon and Sutton’s votes (as well as Bexley and Bromley’s and the ballots from seven other boroughs and the City of London) are all being sifted through at the ExCel Centre.
The votes were verified today, with the counting not due to begin until tomorrow morning. There’s 12,000 staff involved in the process overall.
The verification process is to ensure that the number of votes received is correct as recorded being issued by polling station staff.
Previous mayoral elections have used machines to automatically count the votes. But the count this year is being done by hand, as there was a possibility that a General Election could also have been held on May 2. The General Election votes would have had to be counted manually and having two counting systems would have delayed results.
According to the Evening Boris, if manual counting had been used in the previous, first-and-second preference Mayoral elections, “then it could have take three days to get to the final result… But using first-past-the-post should significantly speed up the count.” There’s more than a sense of wishful thinking by the Standard reporter there.
The count starts at 9am tomorrow. Three ballot papers will need to be counted – the votes for Mayor first, then the constituency London Assembly members, and finally the London-wide Assembly members.
Underperforming: Sky News ran projections based on yesterday’s voting result, and found Labour under Starmer only 2% better in a General Election than in 2019, not enough for an overall majority in parliament. ‘In seats where Greens/Independents are organised, Labour is haemorrhaging votes,’ wrote iC columnist Andrew Fisher
These 11 Assembly Members will be elected using the Modified d’Hondt proportional representation system.
“Londoners will likely have to wait until late on Saturday to learn whether Sadiq Khan or Susan Hall has won the Mayoral contest,” the Standard reckons.
One of the really neat things about London’s elections is the funky website run by the authority, which allows you to (almost) follow the process in real-time. You can find it here: https://www.londonelects.org.uk/im-voter/election-progress/verification-and-turnout-data.
The verification process had to be completed before Kerswell and her merry little band of Croydon Council functionaries could get to work to count up the votes in the two local by-elections, in Woodside ward and Park Hill and Whitgift.
Both by-elections had been called because the respective councillors, Labour’s Mike Bonello in Woodside and Conservative Jad Appleton for PH&W, had resigned because they found they had more important things to do with their lives (who can blame them?).
Andrew Price, the replacement Tory, and Jess Hammersley-Rich, the Labour substitute, were both expected to be elected and swiftly signed up to the £11,000 a year council allowances scheme. But that all needed the confirmation of counted votes.
There had been some expectation that the results might be declared by around 5pm. After all, how long does it take to count a couple of thousand votes? But this is a count firmly under the control of Croydon’s Kerswell, who in 2022 needed four whole days to complete the local election process.
As 6pm came and went, Croydon’s London vote verification had still not been finished, when all but one other areas had completed their job.
So, yet again, we waited…
Oh, and for the record, according to Oddschecker this afternoon, Keir Starmer is 1-5 to be the country’s next Prime Minister (that’s place £5 to win £1… which is marginally better than putting your money in the building society for the next six months) and Labour are 2-17 to win the General Election. Not that we here at Inside Croydon Towers would ever encourage anyone to gamble.
So while we all wait for the confirmed by-election results, I’m off down the pub, taking a detour via the local branch of Ladbrokes. It is a Bank Holiday weekend after all.
Read more: Now Tory newspaper turns against Tories’ fringe candidate Hall
Read more: MP calls on Met to investigate Tories’ ‘vile cesspit’ groups
Read more: Tory minister is member of online group that salutes vandals
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It’s not over until the fat lady sings. The Park Hill and Whitgift turnout at yesterday’s by-election was up by nearly 10% from the May 2022 council elections.
Labour’s share of the vote went up from less than a quarter then to nearly a third now, with the Tories down by over 10%. The Greens were stable at around the 10% mark, while Pelling pushed the LibDems up by nearly 4%.
The odds of Sue winning were twenty to one a couple of days ago, so any punter worth their money will be cashing out their bet now for a cool trebling of their money.
So this is all a sting to take the bookies?
The only analysis I’ve seen of turn outs is that Bailey voting areas last time collectively have fallen as much as Khan voting areas. All this turnout wind up is based on the 4% increase in blade riding Bexley & Bromley, but omit to tell you it has fell by 4% in Hall’s Ealing & Hillingdon base. The claims of a Hall victory seem to have as much credibility as a GB News conspiracy theory presently, but does tell you a lot how political narrative is created in a media corrupted by vested interests.
If you’re referring to the corrupted and controlled mass media Derek, you might not have noticed that no one looks at or reads it. Social media, like IC, is today’s thing, in case you hadn’t noticed.