Before a vote is counted, this much we know. More results than ever will involve the winning party getting a disproportionate amount of power, considering the number of votes cast for it; fewer people will get what they voted for. The ever more random roulette wheel of our voting system will produce wildly odd winners and losers.

Our never-fit-for-purpose first-past-the-post system breaks apart under the strain of having five or sometimes six parties bunched together with no more than 11 percentage points between them in the polls.

A vote share of less than 20% may secure a win. Look how bad the last local elections were: in 2024, Tories in Broxbourne, Hertfordshire, scored 90% of the seats with 50.5% of the vote. Lewisham became a one-party Labour state with not one opposition councillor in 2022, on just 55.4% of the vote. Labour’s clean sweep of Barking and Dagenham’s seats was won similarly. Moscow and Pyongyang would be proud.

This time, the electorate may be determined to define its vote more precisely, but it will be thwarted. Gone are the 1950s when more than 95% voted for Labour or the Conservatives, holding their noses to choose the less unpalatable of two great portmanteau parties. It’s better that we now have five choices in England (more in the other nations of the UK) – though Kemi Badenoch, in shifting too close to Nigel Farage, has failed to provide traditional Tories with a pro-European refuge, so they flee to the Liberal........

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