Local elections are like tea leaves, and always have been: most people can’t make much sense of them, and the small group who claim they can generally see what they want to. In the olden days, these polls would be parsed for very subtle shades of meaning. A dip in support for Labour might, via some complex logic, tell us the state of the power struggle between Blair and Brown, or what the nation really thought of Ed Balls. If the Tories did well in the 00s, that was more or less how you would expect an opposition to perform; if they did badly, experts would stroke their chins and wonder how the party could improve, to become the natural repository for the nation’s disgruntlement.

Austerity made a huge difference to local democracy; local authorities, facing huge funding cuts, mostly ended up with the same agenda, which was to survive, with execution of their statutory duties intact. They varied in competence, of course, and in the language they used, but you can’t stamp much of a political identity on keeping your head above water.

That didn’t stop anyone trying to read between the lines for how the nation really felt.........

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