Phil Rodgers: Lessons from the elections – and prospects for the future
Our political columnist, Phil Rodgers, examines the mayoral and county council election results and looks at what the future may bring.
Cambridgeshire is truly in a new political world now. The county council elections managed to be bad for Labour and worse for the Conservatives, while delivering a first-ever Lib Dem majority, and breakthroughs for Reform UK and the Greens. Paul Bristow defied political gravity to win the Combined Authority mayoralty for the Conservatives, but with just 28 per cent of the vote. First past the post often delivers stable majorities when there are just two main parties in contention – but with five in the running, it is a wild and unpredictable ride.
As the votes were being counted, I spent some time at both the mayoral election count in Soham, and the county council count in Cambridge, enjoying that heady mix of endless waiting around and sudden drama that only an election count can provide. Cambridge was the last district to declare, and while it was clear by then that Paul Bristow was going to win the mayoralty, the county council result went down to the wire. Lib Dem Ian Manning won Chesterton by just 10 votes, giving his party 31 of the 61 county council seats, the narrowest possible majority. Across the county, there were six other seats where the Lib Dems won by less than 100 votes.
Previously, the Lib Dems were running the county council in alliance with Labour and some Independents, but they can now cast off their former partners and go it alone. A majority of just one seat might seem precarious, as a single defection or by-election loss would take the council back to no overall control, but in practice the Lib Dems are a bit more secure than that. Even as a minority, it would require an improbable alliance of Conservative, Reform, Labour, Green, and Independent councillors to outvote them. One area that might prove a bit more tricky for the Lib Dems is votes on Transport and Works Act Orders, which are needed for projects such as new busways. For these to pass, you need a majority of all the councillors on the council, not just a majority of those who turn up to a particular meeting – a potentially crucial distinction.
For the Conservatives, I think it would be fair to describe the county council results as catastrophic. They held just 10 of the 28 seats that they’d won at the 2021 elections, losing all of their seats in South Cambridgeshire, and most of them in East Cambridgeshire and Fenland, including that of their leader, Steve Count. They suffered a double whammy from Reform UK, who took nine seats from them directly, and assisted the Lib Dems and others to take another nine.
While things weren’t quite as bad for Labour, they were still very grim. The red team lost five of the nine seats they were defending in Cambridge, their worst showing in the city since 2010. Probably the most dramatic result was the aptly-named Darren Green’s victory for the Green party in Romsey, where Labour’s previously formidable campaign organisation narrowly failed to hold the seat for Neil Shailer. The one bright spot for Labour was Alex Bulat’s gain in St Ives South & Needingworth, where she won a delicately balanced contest with just 23 per cent of the vote.
Reform UK went from a standing start to winning 10 seats, taking nine from the Conservatives and one from an Independent. Their result has been compared to UKIP’s surge in 2013, which faded away at the next council elections. However, I think things may well be different this time. UKIP never had a very extensive local organisation, and while Reform’s was only fairly rudimentary this time, I think there is a lot of scope for them to make further progress, particularly in the north of the county. In some parts of the country, Reform are now faced with the frustrating and difficult prospect of having to run their local council; in Cambridgeshire they have the more frustrating but less difficult prospect of being in opposition. It will be interesting to see what they make of it.
The Greens can be well pleased with their results. They didn’t win all their targets, but they gained their first county council seats since 2009, and pretty remarkably they have established both Abbey and Newnham – two very different areas – as safe seats. I expect them to continue to make gains at future elections. Things weren’t so good for the Independents this time, who held on to just two seats across the county.
It was a very different picture in the mayoral election, where the Lib Dems finished fourth rather than first, though in a very close race. It always looked like a victory for Paul Bristow was the most likely outcome, thanks to his lengthy head start, energetic campaign, canny political messaging, and substantial personal vote in Peterborough. It was hardly surprising that Kemi Badenoch kept popping up locally, no doubt to cheer herself up amidst the unfolding disaster of the Conservative campaign in most of the rest of the country.
For Reform UK, Ryan Coogan can be extremely pleased with his second place. While he got some attention from Reform’s national campaign organisation, a lot of their focus was on other contests, and Reform’s local organisation was patchy at best. Nevertheless Ryan finished ahead of Paul Bristow in East Cambs and Fenland, and ran him very close in Huntingdonshire, an impressive result from a standing start.
It was not a very happy mayoral election for either Labour or the Lib Dems. Neither really managed to establish themselves as the clear tactical choice to beat the Conservatives. For Labour, their relatively late change of candidate certainly didn’t help, while for the Lib Dems, their third place finish in 2021 made it harder to position themselves as the main challengers. The abolition of the second choice vote made things more difficult for anti-Conservative voters, but in the end it probably wasn’t crucial – I think Paul Bristow would probably still have won in any case. Green candidate Bob Ensch was always going to finish last, but he increased his party’s previous mayoral vote and raised its profile, without changing the outcome of the election overall.
What does this new political landscape mean for future elections? In the normal course of events, next year would bring elections for 14 of the 42 Cambridge city council seats. Labour have already lost two city council seats this year in by-elections, reducing their majority from 10 to six. Three more losses would leave them relying on the mayor’s casting vote, and a fourth would push the council into no overall control. Next year Labour are due to defend 10 seats, only three of which are definitely safe. However, it is not at all certain that the 2026 elections will go ahead as planned, since the city and county councils are due to be abolished by local government reorganisation, and replaced by a single layer of unitary councils. The expected timescale for this is that elections for the new councils will be held in 2027, and they will take over from the old councils in 2028. As has already happened in other areas, this may lead to the cancellation of elections to the old councils.
While this electoral delay may give Cambridge Labour a year’s reprieve, they still seem fairly doomed in the current political climate. As the graph shows, any plausible geography for a greater Cambridge unitary council looks like giving the Lib Dems a stonking big majority. Cambridge city on its own is too small to be a new unitary, but adding it to South Cambridgeshire district gives the Lib Dems three-quarters of the seats from one-third of the vote, based on this year’s county council results. Including East Cambs in the mix gives a very similar result, and even when you add Huntingdonshire to a theoretical new unitary council, the Lib Dems still come out on top. First past the post, so long the Lib Dem bugbear in parliamentary elections, really pays dividends for them in this situation.
Yes, some of these seats have small majorities, and yes, the Tory-Reform and Labour-Green splits really help the Lib Dems. But it still very much looks like Labour’s days of running Cambridge are numbered – even if we don’t quite know what that number is yet.
