If you’d like to find out more about how polls work, how reliable they are and how to make sense of them, check out my book, Polling UnPacked: the History, Uses and Abuses of Political Opinion Polls, or sign up for my weekly email, The Week in Polls:

General election voting intention polls

– indicates that party didn’t feature in the polling questions separate from ‘Others’ or that the data is not yet available.
nc = no change from previous comparable poll.

The Find Out Now Polls using their standard methodology (only) are included in this table.
Numbers in brackets show change since the previous comparable poll (i.e. by the same pollster with the same methodology). Note that natural random variation between samples means a change of a couple of points may well be just statistical noise rather than a real change in support. Very occasionally, a large change will also be noise rather than real change.
For all the voting intention polls and not just the latest ones, see PollBase, the largest collection of UK voting intention polls, which is updated quarterly.

MRP and similar seat projections

Poll ratings for party leaders

The net figure is given for each leader, i.e. their positive score minus their negative score.
The net figure may appear to be slightly different from the difference between the positive and negative scores due to rounding (e.g. +2.7 and -1.6 would be rounded to +3 and -2 but the net difference would appear as 4.3, rounded to 4).
Where a pollster appears more than once, that is because they use more than one leadership wording question.
Some pollsters have other wording that they use only rarely and/or only for a small set of names, the results of which are therefore not included.

Understanding different polling firms

You may find these posts useful:

• ‘Waiting for Survation’: a reminder of the value of checking the evidence.
• YouGov: is it biased to the Conservatives?

Frequently Asked Questions

• Why isn’t polling company X in the table?
• Are MRP polls any good?
• How can a poll of just 1,000 people tell us the views of millions of people?
• Margins of error
• How can I see the longer-term trends?
• What about the SNP and Plaid?
• What about Northern Ireland?
• Has the choice of parties biased the poll?
• Aren’t polls just wildly inaccurate these days?
• Are the opinion pollsters regulated?
• How come I don’t know anyone who has been polled?

Why isn’t polling company X in the table?

The table above includes the latest UK or British voting intention poll from each of the currently active reputable pollsters.

If a company isn’t listed this is because it has not carried out a recent poll, it isn’t reputable or I’ve made an error. Please get in touch if you suspect it’s the latter. ‘Reputable’ usually means being a member of the polling industry regulatory body, the British Polling Council (BPC). I occasionally make exceptions, such as for a new polling firm with a good pedigree which hasn’t yet had its BPC membership approved.

Are MRP polls any good?

MRP polls are a way of getting give individual constituency results without having to do a full poll in each constituency. I’ve written a guide to how MRP polls work and whether they’re likely to be right here.

How can a poll of just 1,000 people tell us the views of millions of people?

It can appear baffling that a poll of only 1,000 people is meant to be enough to reveal the mood of a nation of tens of millions of people. But 1,000 or so is indeed enough, as I explain here.

Margins of error

A rough idea of the likely margin of error in any one opinion poll is to think that it’s pretty likely to be within 3 percentage points of the correct result. Anthony Wells explains here in more detail what this margin of error calculation means, and why it does not strictly apply to modern polls. Based on the historic record of polls, the British Polling Council requires its members to use this explanation of the margin of error:

All polls are subject to a wide range of potential sources of error. On the basis of the historical record of the polls at recent general elections, there is a 9 in 10 chance that the true value of a party’s support lies within 4 points of the estimates provided by this poll, and a 2 in 3 chance that they lie within 2 points.

How can I see the longer-term trends?

When looking through the polling figures, remember the much ignored but still very relevant warning about individual polls.

To put the voting intention numbers above into longer context, take a look at PollBase, my database of general election voting intention figures from opinion polls going back to 1945. It is updated quarterly.

What about the SNP and Plaid?

Separate figures are not given for the SNP and Plaid because the relative size of Scotland and Wales means that the percentage vote share for each of the across Great Britain is too low for variations to mean much. (For example, at the 2017 general election, the SNP scored 3% of the total vote across Great Britain. A fall to 2% would be a move that is well within the margin of errors on polls yet also, if accurate, would be a massive hammering in the constituencies it contests.)

What about Northern Ireland?

Most of these polls are for Great Britain, i.e. excluding Northern Ireland but including both Scotland and Wales. General election voting intention polls conducted over a smaller area, such as London only, are excluded.

Has the choice of parties biased the poll?

A plausible-sounding critique of voting intention opinion polls is over the choice of parties to ask about. These polls list some parties up front and then give an ‘other’ option, behind which sits other, much smaller parties. Labour, for example, will be in the first category but the Women’s Equality Party in the second. Which often leads people to complain that a poll is biased against party X because it is listed in the other section rather than in the main party listing. That sounds plausible, but the evidence is that this doesn’t unfairly depress the support for other parties.

Aren’t polls just wildly inaccurate these days?

Not so: the evidence is that they are still pretty good – and haven’t got worse. Here’s the data that does that myth-busting. Here too is how the polls did in the 2024 general election.

Are the opinion pollsters regulated?

Yes, by the Market Research Society and also by the British Polling Council, which all the reputable political polling firms are members of. The BPC’s rules include requiring pollsters to publish in full the exact questions asked for their polls, protecting against leading questions being secretly asked.

The regulation could, though, be improved.

How come I don’t know anyone who has been polled?

You do now.

And for an explanation of why it’s common for people not to have been polled, see this.

How can I find out more about understanding polls?

There’s a chapter on the subject in my book, Bad News, or for a whole book about polls, see Polling UnPacked.

All took place on Maundy Thursday, which old electoral hands will remember as a day that used to be excluded from election timetables, along with weekends and bank holidays. It became a normal day for electoral purposes following the Electoral Administration Act 2006, the legislation which also gave the Electoral Commission the power to performance standards for many Returning Officers. Elections on Maundy Thursday are now a normal occurrence.

On to the results:

Congratulations to Jayne Mackie for winning her, her second win in fact in an by-election in this ward as she was previously a victor in June 2018 as an independent candidate.

This ward is in Ian Roome’s constituency and adds to a gain from the Conservatives in an adjacent ward just over a year ago.

Commiserations to George Neculaiu and the team for not quite managing to hold off Reform this time.

Andrew Teale explains the context for this by-election:

Alan Skepelhorn was disqualified in February for failing to attend any council meetings in six months. His period of absence had run from 15th July 2025 to 20th January this year, when Skepelhorn attended a full council meeting after Luton council’s democratic services team had failed to notice his disqualification. He had previously been absent from the council for more than six months after contracting a serious case of COVID-19 during the second wave in January 2021, but on that occasion the council voted to grant him leave of absence. Skepelhorn was a long-serving councillor who had been first elected to Luton council in 2003 for Round Green ward; after losing his seat there in 2011, he returned in April 2013 by winning a by-election in Wigmore ward which he had represented since then.

Thank you to Keith Bardsley for getting the Lib dems on the ballot paper here after the previous no-show.

For what all this means for the running total of council by-election results since the last May elections, see my council by-elections scorecard here.

These by-election results round-ups cover principal authority by-elections as it’s only those for which comprehensive results are available.

What do the polls say?

The results above may tell us what voters are deciding on ballot papers, but not everywhere voted. So what’s the overall picture in the polls? Find out each week with my newsletter, The Week in Polls.

What’s happening in the Lib Dems?

Sign up to my monthly newsletter, Lib Dem Newswire, to find out:

The net totals in the right hand column give the overall political lay of the land, as shown by local council by-election results.

But it is the details in each row of how a party’s performance varies against its different rivals that is the most useful in my book. That shows us what’s happening below in the surface in a way that national voting intention polls often struggle to do because they give total support levels rather than vote switching figures.

Contests counted include delayed elections from the the usual May round of local elections (usually delayed due to the death of a candidate).

Much of the source data for this table comes via Britain Elects, Election Maps UK or ALDC. Thank you to all three.

What do the polls say?

The results above may tell us what voters are deciding on ballot papers, but not everywhere voted. So what’s the overall picture in the polls? Find out each week with my newsletter, The Week in Polls.

What’s happening in the Lib Dems?

Sign up to my monthly newsletter, Lib Dem Newswire, to find out:

Council by-election scorecards for previous years

The local by-election scorecards for previous years are also available: 2024-25, 2023-24, 2022-23 and 2021-22.

1. Donna Edmunds (Shropshire, suspended by Reform UK and then quit the party; later joined Advance UK)
2. Luke Shingler (Warwickshire, now an independent)
3. Desmond Clarke (Nottinghamshire, resigned as councillor)
4. Andrew Kilburn (Durham, resigned as a councillor)
5. Wayne Titley (Staffordshire, resigned as a councillor)
6. Mark Broadhurst (Doncaster, expelled by Reform)
7. Adam Smith (West Northamptonshire, suspended by Reform and then expelled)
8. John Bailey (Durham, resigned as a councillor)
9. Daniel Taylor (Kent, suspended by Reform UK and later sentenced to 12 months in prison)
10. Sam Booth (Doncaster, resigned as a councillor)
11. Ed Hill (Devon, expelled by Reform, later joined Advance UK)
12. David Maclean (Isle of Wight, resigned as a councillor)
13. Robert Bloom (North Northamptonshire, resigned as a councillor, later charged with harassment)
14. Paul Bean (Durham, suspended by Reform UK)
15. Amelia Randall (Kent, switched to Ukip, later founded her own party)
16. Gaynor Jean-Louis (Worcestershire, resigned as a councillor)
17. Angela Nash (Devon, became an independent, later joined Advance UK)
18. John Allen (Northumberland, suspended by Reform UK, later expelled)
19. Jack McGlenen (Durham, expelled by Reform UK)
20. David Knight (Doncaster, expelled from the Reform UK council group but whip then restored pending a further review)
21. Nicole Brooke (Northumberland, suspended by Reform UK, later expelled)
22. Patrick Lambert (Northumberland, suspended by Reform UK, later expelled)
23. Christopher Marriott (Doncaster, resigned from Reform to sit as an independent)
24. Rowland O’Connor (Cornwall, now an independent)
25. Robert Ford (Kent, suspended by Reform UK, later expelled and then joined Restore Britain)
26. Jack Bradley (Derbyshire, resigned as a councillor)
27. Des Watt (Cambridgeshire, first became a ‘non-aligned independent’ and then joined Advance UK)
28. Bill Barrett (Kent and Ashford, suspended by Reform UK, later expelled)
29. Oliver Bradshaw (Kent, suspended by Reform UK, later expelled and then joined Restore Britain)
30. Maxine Fothergill (Kent, suspended by Reform UK and then joined Restore Britain)
31. Paul Thomas (Kent, suspended by Reform UK, later expelled and then joined Restore Britain)
32. Karen Knight (Cornwall, now an independent)
33. Rob Parsonage (Cornwall, first became an independent and then joined the Conservatives)
34. Christine Parsonage (Cornwall, now an independent)
35. Anna Thomason-Kenyon (Cornwall, now an independent)
36. Brian Black (Kent, expelled by Reform UK and then joined Restore Britain)
37. Richard Morgan (Derbyshire, resigned as a councillor)
38. Isabella Kemp (Kent, suspended by Reform UK and then joined Restore Britain)
39. Nicola Brown (Doncaster, became an independent briefly and then joined Advance UK)
40. Ian Cooper (Staffordshire, was council leader but then expelled by Reform UK)
41. David Cumming (Durham, left for a job overseas)
42. Kathy Gibbon (Buckinghamshire, joined Conservatives)
43. Richard Litchfield (South Kesteven, elected in by-election in December, removed from Reform UK council group)
44. Edward Harris (Warwickshire, now an independent)
45. Caroline Gladwin (Isle of Wight, now an independent)
46. David Taylor (Worcestershire, now an independent)
47. Michael Ramage (Durham, now an independent)
48. Stuart Graham (Gloucestershire and Forest of Dean, now an independent)
49. Ian McKinley (Sunderland, elected in a by-election in November, now an independent)
50. Nick Brown (Durham, resigned as a councillor)
51. John Roddy (Warrington, elected in a by-election August, joined Conservatives)
52. Peter Colley (Hertfordshire, joined Restore Britain)
53. Dean Burns (Kent, departed his deputy cabinet role in November 2025 and then joined Restore Britain)
54. Darren Rance (North Northamptonshire, joined Restore Britain but now wants to rejoin Reform)
55. Jack Goncalvez (North Northamptonshire, joined Restore Britain)
56. Scott Cameron (Warwickshire, whip removed by Reform UK over claims thinking about defecting and then joined Restore Britain)
57. Luke Cooper (Warwickshire, whip removed by Reform UK over claims thinking about defecting and then joined Restore Britain)
58. Charles Whitford (Leicestershire, joined Restore Britain)
59. Andrew Thorp (Leicestershire, resigned as a councillor)
60. Chris Large (Staffordshire, was due to become council leader but resigned from his leadership roles and now an independent)
61. Kieran Mishchuk (Swale, joined Restore Britain)
62. Kathryn Shaw (West Northamptonshire, now an independent)
63. Joanne Blythe (West Northamptonshire, now an independent)
64. Graham Eardley (Walsall, suspended by Reform UK)
65. Tony Hill (Hertfordshire, resigned as a councillor)
66. Lynn Dean (Staffordshire and Newcastle-under-Lyme, suspended by Reform UK and then resigned as a councillor from one of them)
67. Andrew Barry (Merthyr Tydfil, now an independent)
68. Owain Clatworthy (Bridgend, left Reform alongside resigning as a Welsh Senedd candidate)
69. Dawn Saunders (Durham, now listed as independent on council website)

Gone, but back again

1. Tom Pickup (Lancashire) was suspended by Reform UK but subsequently allowed back.
2. Paul Cutts (Doncaster) was suspended by Reform UK but subsequently allowed back.

Other Reform councillors who have gone

Looking beyond those elected in May, there are further cases of councillors departing from Reform.

Most strikingly, Mark Whittington (South Kesteven District Council) quit Reform just 20 days after joining and James Buchan, winner of a by-election in July 2025 for Dartford Council, then joined the Conservatives.

Maria Bowtell was elected as a Conservative councillor in 2023, then joined Reform but has now left Reform for Restore Britain.

Richard Everett was elected as a Conservative to Tendring District Council in 2023, later joining Reform and also nominating Nigel Farage in Clacton constituency at the 2024 general election. He has now also departed Reform, being listed as “Not In A Political Group”.

Alistair Hendry (Somerset) quit the Conservatives for Reform but changed his mind four days later.

Todd Ferguson (North Ayrshire) left the Conservatives in July last year, joined Reform in November and then in March 2026 left Reform to become an independent.

In addition, Martin Sarfas stood unsuccessfully for Reform in May 2025 for Leicestershire. He was also already a councillor at another level of local government (Harborough), but now sits as an independent there.

But these have not left….

Although Amanda (Mandy) Clare has been charged with assault and criminal damage she currently is still listed as a Reform councillor on Cheshire West and Chester Council, and indeed leader of their group on her council. She has however been suspended from her job working for a Reform UK MP. (UPDATE: The charges against her were dropped just before the trial was due to start.)

Peter Mason is still a Reform councillor, but a parish council has asked him to stay away from their meetings due to offensive comments that he had previously made online.

Michael Ramage was listed as having left the Reform group on his council (Durham), but is now listed as being back with them.

Laura Anne Jones, a Reform member of the Welsh Senedd, was “banned from the Senedd chamber for 14 days after using a racial slur to describe Chinese people … and [had also] not taken action when one of her staff members had made separate offensive comments.”

Town and parish councillors who have left Reform UK

James Regan (a town councillor in Epping) has also been suspended by Reform UK (that linked news report originally had a mistake over which council he was elected to).

Finally, another town councillor, Tony Hewitt on Ferryhill Town Council, resigned over a garden competition.

Note: for by-election results where Reform was defending a seat but then lost it, see my council scorecard. The causes of those vacancies are included in the list above.

How many Reform MPs have resigned?

In related news, Reform UK has also shed two of its MPs:

1. Rupert Lowe
2. James McMurdock

How many Scottish Parliament candidates has Reform lost?

A full list of Reform UK candidates for the Scottish Parliament elections who have fallen by the wayside is here.

How many Welsh Senedd candidates has Reform lost?

A full list of Reform UK candidates for the Welsh Senedd elections who have fallen by the wayside is here.

Other sorts of departures of Reform councillors

These folk remained as Reform councillors but departed council posts:

1. Sarah Shields, deputy leader of the Reform group on Basildon Council, reports that she has been removed as a Reform candidate for the next local elections. (Facebook, March 2026)
2. “A Reform UK cabinet member in charge of purging Kent County Council (KCC) of waste and inefficiency has resigned .” (Kent Online, February 2026)
3. “Reform UK Councillor Guy Aston has stepped down as group leader on the City of Doncaster Council, claiming he has received “vitriolic texts that border on abuse” from members of his own party.” (Doncaster Free Press, November 2025)
4. “Reform group leader in Cornwall quits role.” (BBC, October 2025)
5. “Two Derbyshire Reform councillors have been demoted from committee positions after they “didn’t realise the time commitment”. Cllr Richard Morgan and Cllr Charlotte Gates, both Reform councillors on Derbyshire County Council, have been dropped from the committees they sit on due to attendance issues.” (Derbyshire Live, October 2025)
6. See previous item in the list, as two councillors were involved.
7. “The deputy leader of Worcestershire County Council has resigned, three months into the role.” (BBC, August 2025) (The councillor – David Taylor – has since left Reform. See main list above.)
8. “Joseph Boam sacked as deputy leader of Leicestershire County Council.” (Leicester Gazette, August 2025)
9. “The recently elected leader of Warwickshire County Council has resigned, leaving his 18-year-old deputy in charge. Reform UK councillor Rob Howard, who was in power for 41 days, said he had made the decision with ‘much regret’, citing health reasons were behind his departure.” (BBC, June 2025)

In addition to the above, Reform has also lost a council leader – Ian Cooper – who is in the main list above as he’s also been expelled from the party. Similarly Chris Large, who was set to become council leader in Staffordshire to succeed Ian Cooper, resigned from his leadership roles and then later left Reform, and hence is in the main list.

Note: this final list I only recently started collating in response to requests from readers. So it may not yet be complete. Do let me know of anyone I have missed.

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As one of the authors, Zach Dickson, explains:

We study NHS GP practice closures in England: nearly 1,700 practices closed since 2013, directly affecting 600k+ patients. Using a staggered DID design, we find that closures reduce patient satisfaction AND increase support for populist right parties (UKIP, Brexit Party, Reform UK) by 2-4 percentage points.

The effects are immediate, persistent (4-5 years), and replicated across two independent panel datasets…

Crucially, effects are strongest where immigration is highest. Why? UKIP and Reform UK consistently blame immigrants for NHS decline in their communications – and voters in high-immigration areas find that framing more credible.

Two things that I’m chewing over regarding that. First, the 2-4 percentage points impact is worthy of attention though also much smaller than the overall rise in the support for Reform. Perhaps if you add in other public services, you would get a bigger impact – but then you’d also expect other public services which have declined to have some geographic overlap with those areas where GP closures have taken place, so you can’t simply multiply up 2-4 points for each extra public service added to the mix.

Second, the interaction with immigration is surprising in that generally the pattern is that support for Reform, and before that Ukip, was stronger in areas with lower immigration.

Added together, both those factors suggest that the effect found in this research is only part of the picture. A useful part to understand, however.

Here is the research paper, accepted by the American Political Science Review though not yet published by the journal:

You can read the other posts in the Evidence-based campaigning: what the academic research says series here.

The latest episode of Political Fictions is out, taking a look at Malcolm Tucker and his colleagues in a TV show that in no way bears any relation to any of my own political experiences or memories:

Mark and Cory talk about political TV for the first time, and there’s nowhere better to start than The Thick of It. After rewatching the first series, they talk about which fictional policy proposals ended up becoming reality, why it’s important that focus groups thought Keir Starmer was an eagle, and given that Malcolm Tucker keeps screwing everything up perhaps the secret genius behind the British Government is actually Terri Coverley?

Next time we are watching the classic All The President’s Men.

Sign up to the podcast’s email list

Don’t miss any episode: subscribe to the podcast in your favourite podcast app or sign up to our email list. If you are on the list, you’ll also get the occasional bonus content too:

Show notes

• You can view the IMDB page for The Thick of It here.
• UK listeners can watch the show on BBC iPlayer.
• If you enjoyed our segment on focus groups, you may my post about them here (note the date).
• Cory’s email newsletter Paperback Rioter.
• Mark’s family of email newsletters.
• Our theme tune is “Monkeys Spinning Monkeys” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) and licensed under the Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

At election time, Liberal Democrat members and supporters are often asked to put up a poster in their window or if the local team can put up a poster on stakeboard outside their home.

We often treat such requests as if it is obvious why someone should say ‘yes’. But we also get people saying ‘yes’ more often if we treat them respectfully and also explain why putting up a poster is a helpful thing to do.

There are two main reasons.

The first, and often overlooked, is that some people like expressing their support for a cause. Whether it’s a lapel badge, a sticker on a a car or a poster in a window, there may be some vague sense of wanting to publicise a point of view but often the main motivation is a desire to show your own support for a cause. People enjoy being able to do that. In that sense, offering such a person a poster is almost doing them a favour, by letting them express their support.

That’s why, where practical, even if you are not fighting a serious campaign somewhere, having some generic Lib Dem posters is always a good idea at election time. It means those who want to show support can still do so.

The second reason, however, is the main one.

Putting up posters helps win elections. It helps because campaigns that look like they are doing well tend to attract more support.

(I’ll sidestep in this piece the subtle though important distinction between whether ‘look like they are doing well’ means ‘look like they have momentum’ or ‘look like they are in with a high chance of winning’. Those are two different things to measure and so that distinction matters for the serious academic research and number crunching. It doesn’t really matter for persuading the next member you speak with to put up a poster.)

The additional support comes for a variety of motivations. It can be about picking up tactical support because it makes us look like we’re the one in with a chance of defeating the incumbent or the party voters most fear might otherwise win.

It can also be about the way that people often like to be associated winners. My favourite illustration of that comes after polling day as typically more people will tell a pollster that they backed the winning party than actually did. It’s also a factor before polling day too, and hence the value of posters in showing that you are or could be winning.

The direct academic evidence of the impact of posters is limited, though there is some. That finds a positive impact, and it’s plausible that the impact for smaller party candidates in multi-party elections is even higher as those circumstances are ones where the benefits of posters are more likely to be relevant.

There is also indirect evidence, such as polling data showing that people are more likely to vote for a party if they think others they know are backing it (e.g. this from 2010) or if they think it could win locally.

Then there is also the indirect academic evidence that perceived campaign momentum is an electoral benefit, and posters form part of that. I discussed this on a podcast in the last Parliament with Justin Fisher, one of the academics who has studied the topic:

Oh and remember. Lib Dem posters are diamonds, not squares. Diamonds, not squares. Diamonds, not squares.

PS Posters featured in my favourite Labour local election tweet.

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At times the government resembles a recalcitrant teenager unwilling to take the time to tidy up the mess in their bedroom. Sure, doing other things is more fun. Sure, it’s a pain to have to spend time tidying up. Sure, there’s so much other stuff that’s more important. Sure, it’s BORING BORING BORING.

In this case, the teenager’s bedroom is the election law sections of the statute book. And there are some signs of hope that a bit of tidying up may finally happen.

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Two promising pieces of news on election law consolidation

To recap, as I wrote last year:

Election law is in a mess.

That is not a condemnation of the policy choices embedded in the law (though I do have views on issues such as the choice of electoral system…), but rather a comment on the technical state of the legislation.

It is scattered across numerous Acts and pieces of secondary legislation. The Acts themselves are littered with sections that, although passed by Parliament, have not yet been commenced and are not in force. The effect of multiple amendments is to leave many parts of electoral legislation drafted in complex ways that make mistakes easy.

Over two decades there have been several reviews of this state of affairs and they have all concluded with the equivalent of an exasperated parent telling their child, ‘go clean up your room!’.

And yet, the legislative tidy-up (called ‘consolidation’) has never happened, while the problems have got worse.

The problem is that consolidation of election law takes time, requires resource and doesn’t have an obvious pay-off for any minister’s personal ambitions or a government’s political ambitions.

I will happily lead a standing ovation for any minister who gets to grips with this issue. But I won’t dare look around while doing so to see how few people are joining me. And even if it were a Lib Dem minister doing it, you wouldn’t find me putting it on the front page of a Focus leaflet.

The consolidation of election law is therefore caught in the Bermuda Triangle of British politics where good ideas which don’t have a political imperative so often end up.

Things seemed to get even worse last year when the government appeared to be stepping back from even a nominal commitment to the eventual consolidation of election law.

Hence my oral question in Parliament last year, which at least elicited a slightly more positive response, though it still ran into the government’s line of putting something off because it’s going to take a long time. As I pointed out, that is perhaps an excellent reason to get on with it. The longer it is going to take, the sooner you should start it, perhaps?

Now though we have two further pieces of promising news.

First, the Rycroft Review – the independent review into countering foreign financial influence and interference in UK politics. It had this to say on consolidating election law:

The legal and regulatory framework of political finance has developed over time, with incremental changes made in response to the changing nature of our system. Electoral law in the UK is currently spread across 25 major statutes and has become increasingly complex and fragmented. In turn this makes the law difficult to navigate and prone to loopholes. I am aware that, in making recommendations to respond to the specific threats within my remit, I am adding further incremental changes and thus additional layers of complexity. Although a full consolidation of political finance legislation sits beyond my remit, I urge government to consider the recommendations made by the Law Commission, as yet unimplemented, with a view to improving the effectiveness and consistency of the law.

We have yet to see how the government will respond to that recommendation. However, it is helpful to have the review give the government a push – and a potential new motivation for consolidation.

Now you had better tidy up your bedroom because the Russians, the Chinese and/or the Americans are coming.

Then there was the answer to my written questions about poll cards. As I explained earlier, the issue with them is:

These official documents, sent to people to remind them when and where to vote, are a crucial official communication at election time. Yet they are poorly designed, to put it mildly.

In fairness, everyone involved has a bit of an excuse. The Returning Officer can blame their software supplier. The software supplier can blame the prescriptive rules in primary legislation. (Yes, Parliament legislated the details of a form.) Parliament can blame the government for not getting on with changing the law. And the government can blame the public for worrying more about the NHS. And the public can blame the Returning Officer whose contact details are on the poll card.

Everyone has an alibi.

Yet look at a poll card and ask yourself, ‘If I were looking to employ a graphic designer and this was the first thing in their portfolio, would I employ them?’

Hence my pair of written questions about them.

The first elicited positive news about the government’s plans to look at this issue with a planned review of election documentation. But the second elicited some bonus positive news about that review:

Lord Pack: To ask His Majesty’s Government, further to the Written Answer by Baroness Taylor of Stevenage on 13 March (HL15001), whether the review of election documentation will be completed in time for any necessary changes to primary legislation to be incorporated in the Representation of the People Bill.

Baroness Taylor of Stevenage: The planned review of election documentation will not be completed in time for any changes to be included in the Representation of the People Bill.

However, the Government is planning to consolidate existing legislation regarding election documentation using the powers from the bill. This will make it simpler for the Government to make improvements to the prescribed format and design of electoral documents through secondary legislation, including potential changes informed by the outcomes of the review.

Of course, it would be unwise to read too much into plans without a timetable. But note the plans are “to consolidate existing legislation regarding election documentation”.

That would be only one small part of consolidating election law.

But after decades of calls to consolidate the whole lot failing, the idea of making progress bit by bit has a certain appeal. As long as it goes better than this:

I will certainly be following up on this.

In case you missed previously…

Good news! Government is, hopefully, serious about improving poll cards

Are parcel firms getting away with poor service?

Elsewhere from me…

The good, the bad and the unknown of Zack Polanski’s poll ratings

Thank you

I hope you enjoyed reading this; if you did, please encourage others to take a look too: Share

Best wishes,

Mark

Focus group questions such as ‘if a political party leader were an animal, what sort of animal would they be?’ often get mentioned in order to ridicule them. But the reason they are used is the same reason I love them: the answers tease out something useful. As I wrote in my book, Polling UnPacked:

If this book were an animal, what sort of animal would it be? That is the sort of apparently absurd question beloved of media coverage of focus groups. But there is value in asking what sort of animal a politician would be, because the answers tap into a wide range of characteristics and emotional responses.

For example, in the summer of 2020, focus group respondents often picked ‘eagle’ as the answer when asked about then leader of the Labour Party in the UK Keir Starmer. An eagle – as in smart, carefully eyeing up opportunities, but detached and elegant rather than cute. An eagle is no panda, nor is it a terrier. There is much meaning bundled up in the choice of eagle.

Asking people to pick an animal extracts expressive answers from those less confident with words. It teases out answers that tap into our instincts and subconscious rather than merely prompting people to give a rational, considered answer.

So ahead of the local elections, I’ve teamed up with the Hackney-based market research firm Artisanal Analytics to use this technique. But to increase the value of it, we decided to force people to think harder about their responses. Picking an animal is relatively easy as there are so many and people already have multiple views about different animals.

Therefore, we went for a category everyone is familiar with, but doesn’t usually think about much (unless you are a Lib Dem campaigner slaving away late on a Friday night getting the mail-merged target letter sorted for the action day the next morning): envelopes. If a politician were an envelope, what sort of envelope would they be?

It was a choice that worked out very well, after we aborted a pilot that asked people what piece of street furniture a politician would be. For most politicians, nearly everyone picked “a pothole” (not technically a piece of street furniture, of course). Hence the switch to envelopes for a more nuanced understanding.

The sessions piggybacked on a series of four focus groups which AA were running anyway. (I contributed to the cost of the sourdough sandwiches for the participants, while the firm covered the other costs.)

The focus groups were held in a large city, a small town, a village serving a wide rural catchment and an airport hotel (chosen for the convenience of getting people in low-paid long-hours jobs in the areas to participate, an important balancing act against the frequent bias in focus groups in favour of the time-rich).

Let’s start with the Prime Minister: if he were an envelope, what sort of envelope would he be? There was striking agreement across nearly all participants:

One of those brown envelopes from HMRC, full of complicated forms and demanding money from you – Hannah, 50s, small town

A misprinted prepaid reply envelope. Good intention, but all messed up and makes your life harder – Ajmal, 60s, city

An envelope marked “DO NOT BEND” that has been bent. He’s damaged goods – Steve, 40s, village

What about the Leader of the Opposition, Kemi Badenoch? Here, answers were far more mixed:

One of those small cream envelopes my grandmother used to send me letters in. Used to be used by everyone, now just for our grandparents – Ivy, 20s, airport hotel

I don’t know… perhaps a tattered envelope? Best days are behind it like with her party perhaps? – Archie, 30s, village

One of those brightly coloured ones you get greeting cards in. You know the type – trying to stand out and grab your attention – Elsie, 40s, city

And what about her rival on the right, Nigel Farage?

One of those white envelopes, thick paper, absorbs the ink of your pen properly, can be tucked in properly with the flap on the back – all about bringing back the times when we made things and were the best in the world at making them – Harry, 70s, village

He’d be a padded envelope – old-fashioned, not environmentally friendly, not as good as those modern Amazon boxes – Amanda, 30s, small town

Turning to the Greens and Zack Polanski:

He’d be a postcard, not an envelope. Because he’s got to be different, doesn’t he? Jessica, 20s, city

I don’t know what it’d look like, but he’d hypnotise you to make you think the envelope has got bigger – Zack (a different one), 20s, city

Finally, what about Lib Dem leader Ed Davey?

It’d have to be waterproof so you can take it on those water slides – Brianna, 20s, airport hotel

One of those envelopes that plays a song when you open it, something that is fun – Wayne, 40s, small town

These snippets are just a taster of the insights from these focus groups. The follow-up questions asking people to compare different party policies with pieces of stationery were particularly useful. Intriguingly, planning reform is strongly associated with ring binders while the idea of a customs union with the EU makes people think of a laminator.

So watch out for the follow up piece coming shortly, from the Chief Insight Guru at Artisanal Analytics, Loof Lirpa.

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Continuing the theme of the changing nature of party competition shown by council by-elections, in the first quarter of 2026 there were 11 by-elections had in wards which had previously seen Labour and Conservative in the top two but in the results, only one ward came out with Labour and Conservative as the top two.

You can also check out the running total of council by-election results since the last May elections, on my council by-elections scorecard here.

Thank you to John Swarbrick and also to Elections Maps UK, both of whose data fuels much of this analysis. Any errors are all my fault.

Understanding the opinion polls

For understanding what is happening in politics, by-elections have the advantage of being real votes in real ballot boxes. But the opinion polls have the advantage of trying to be a representative sample of voters, not just those in the places that happen to have by-elections. To understand the polls properly – and what they do and don’t really tell us – see my book, Polling UnPacked: The History, Uses and Abuses of Political Opinion Polls.

Get by-election results by email

If you sign up for my daily email with the latest pieces from this site, you’ll also get included as a little bonus the full set of council by-election results each week:

1. Cory Edwards: quit as candidate after Nazi salute controversy.
2. Patrick Benham-Crosswell: quit as candidate saying Reform UK has “sunk deep into the sewer”.
3. Derek Roberts: quit as candidate “for personal reasons”.
4. Owain Clatworthy: quit as candidate over unhappiness with selection process.

Meanwhile, Reform candidates in Scotland have also gone and Reform UK councillors keep on going too.

Note: Andrew Barry is described in some media reports (e.g. here) as also having quit as a candidate, but while he applied to be a candidate he was not in the list published by Reform and so has not been included in the list above.

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1. Roland Jackson: resigned as a candidate saying the announcement had been an error.
2. Linda Holt: quit as a candidate after a series of offensive messages.
3. James Glenn: quit as a candidate, expressing support for Linda Holt.
4. Jordan Brown: changed his mind about being a candidate.
5. Stuart Niven: suspended after revelations about his business career.

Scottish Reform leader Malcolm Offord had called his party’s vetting process “terrific”.

Meanwhile, Reform candidates are going in Wales as well and local councillors keep on going too.

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A leading Reform candidate who appeared to perform a Nazi salute in a photo has quit ahead of the Welsh Parliament election.

Corey Edwards, a former Conservative special adviser, was only announced as his party’s lead candidate in the constituency of Pen-y-bont Bro Morgannwg on Wednesday…

Nigel Farage told ITV News on Thursday: “It was a Fawlty Towers impression. Maybe we should ban the BBC, I don’t know”.

Corey Edwards is the third Reform candidate to have gone in recent days, following the departure of a Scottish Parliament candidate and of a Mayor candidate.

Yet as I’ve pointed out previously, Nigel Farage has several times boasted about how good Reform’s candidate vetting is.

Meanwhile, Reform has shed yet another councillor and Corey Edwards is not the only Welsh candidate to have gone.

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Stephen Fisher is an elections expert who is one of the brains behind the BBC exit poll and the annual projected national vote share calculations done for each set of local elections.

Taking as a starting point the latest councillor number totals from Open Council Data (which will change slightly between now and the first Thursday in May), then the result after Stephen Fisher’s predictions is that the total number of principal authority councillors for each party will be:

• Labour: 3,951
• Liberal Democrat: 3,395
• Reform: 3,246
• Conservative: 3,186
• Green: 1,393

The Liberal Democrats have only been in the top two once before, briefly in the mid-1990s. The Conservatives then were still in the third place, so falling to fourth would be a record low for the party.

Note: for all sorts of reasons, including the likely margins of error on predictions, do not read too much into the exact figures even though I have given them to the nearest councillor. Stephen Fisher also points out that his predictions are based on the notional seat numbers up for election in May (i.e. adjusting for boundary changes) while the Open Council Data does not include these. That adds some extra uncertainty though other calculations, such as looking at what proportion of their own seats up for election each party won last year, also point towards the Lib Dems being in with a real chance of replacing the Conservatives in second spot.

Here are all the predictions so far as to what is going to happen in the May 2026 local elections:

I will update this table if and when new predictions are published. Do let me know if you have spotted any that are missing from this table.

Three published predictions are not included in the table above as they do not include estimates for net seat gains/loses for each party. They are from BritainVotes.Now, Kronaxis (using AI to generate artificial voters from whose behaviour election results are then predicted) and PoliticsUK (vote share predictions and calculated from before the Gorton and Denton by-election).

A word about those Bombe numbers: they are new to this prediction activity this year, and it’s welcome to see the field expand. Their figures have received widespread media coverage, and seem to have widely spread among Labour MPs. But three big caveats. First, the details of their methodology are relatively sparse; second, the full figures are being sold commercially rather than being available for all to inspect; and third, the picture they paint, such as of the Conservative holding roughly steady, is very much out of line with what other people are expecting. Similarly, the ward data of theirs that I have seen is fairly eyebrow raising, in particular over its ability (or inability?) to distinguish between wards with a strong Lib Dem campaign this year and wards with a minimal one. That said, sometimes the surprising and unconventional prediction is the right one, so do bookmark my words in case you should throw them back at me in a few weeks.

Bombe has said (3 April) that an update to its numbers is due on 15 April and that, “We are not claiming it is 100 percent accurate – we know it’s wrong and why it’s wrong in places – but we are confident the model is at least 80 percent accurate against real world by-election results.” I am not sure how reassuring that is given that the venerable Thrasher and Rallings used to make annual local election predictions based on council by-election results and stopped because the relationship between by-elections and the full set of May elections was just too variable. So doing well at predicting one may not be a sign of success at the other. We will see!

The track record for Electoral Calculus’s predictions is here and you can see how previous predictions and polls turned out in 2025 and 2024.

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However, after a Lib Dem gain in the Vale of White Horse two weeks ago, this week brings:

Thanks and commiserations to the Lib Dem candidate, Adrian Bettridge.

This was (only) the third Lib Dem loss of a by-election seat to the Conservatives since the last May local elections. By contrast, the party lost 10 to the Conservatives between the 2024 and 2025 local elections.

Elsewhere:

Thanks here go to Alan Kelly for standing as the Liberal Democrat here.

Thank you to Stephen Maines for standing here.

The Lib Dem here was Michael Shaw, thank you.

For what all this means for the running total of council by-election results since the last May elections, see my council by-elections scorecard here.

These by-election results round-ups cover principal authority by-elections as it’s only those for which comprehensive results are available.

What do the polls say?

The results above may tell us what voters are deciding on ballot papers, but not everywhere voted. So what’s the overall picture in the polls? Find out each week with my newsletter, The Week in Polls.

What’s happening in the Lib Dems?

Sign up to my monthly newsletter, Lib Dem Newswire, to find out:

Welcome to Lib Dem Newswire #207, which includes a look at why the Lib Dems need more local election candidates, a discussion of James Graham’s hit play This House, news of how the Cabinet Office moved very slowly to correct an error in government pay and more.

First, however, congratulations to the new Lib Dem councillors since last time, and their teams – Chris Shank, Caleb Pell, Paul Evans and Barbara Jayson.

The seat changes across the principal authority by-elections since last time are Reform +3, Conservative +1, Green +/-0, Labour +/-0, Lib Dem +/-0, Plaid +/-0, SNP +/-0 and Independent/Other -4.

A reminder that you can get more Lib Dem news from me via WhatsApp throughout the month without waiting for the next edition of this newsletter. The WhatsApp service is broadcast-only and people signed up to it receive around three to five batches of messages a week with the latest news about the party, by-election results, and the like. It’s a free service and all members and supporters are very welcome to join.

You can sign up to the WhatsApp updates here.

One final preliminary: I have recently switched to using the online Keeper password manager, which makes it easy to create secure, unique passwords for all your logins, while also keeping them easy to use. You can get a free trial and then 30% off your first year with this affiliate link.

Best wishes,

Mark

P.S. If you haven’t yet had time to read it, last time’s edition is available online: It’s boom time for bar charts and MRPs (LDN #206).

Parcel delivery problems

The government’s new strategy guidance for Ofcom has very little to say about improving the performance of parcel delivery firms. Yet, mention the topic to most people and they will have a tale of woe, a claimed ‘sorry you were out’ message when they were in all day, a parcel thrown over a fence, or their local Facebook group being home to regular messages as people ask ‘the delivery company claims they left a parcel with me but that’s not my doorstep in the photo; does anyone recognise it?’

This is why I have put down a motion in Parliament:

Are parcel firms getting away with poor service?

This House: James Graham’s play discussed

The latest episode of Political Fictions is all about governments struggling with small majorities in the 1970s:

Mark and Cory talk about James Graham’s play This House. The hit play, available to stream from the National Theatre, is about party whips trying to prop up a government without a secure House of Commons majority in the 1970s. Mark and Cory marvel at the kipper ties and rotary dial phones, discuss the importance of treating your political opponents with respect, and ponder whether works of art would be improved if they spent more time celebrating the achievements of Labour governments.

Regular listeners will know we have a ‘Phil Woolas award’ segment in the show. Our sincere condolences therefore to his friends and family on the news that broke just before publishing this episode of his death from cancer at 66.

You can also find this episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube and all the usual podcast places.

Next time we’re reviewing the first series of The Thick Of It, which UK listeners can currently watch on BBC iPlayer.

Why the Lib Dems need more council candidates

With another set of local elections almost upon us and much hard work going into increasing our candidate numbers, it is a good moment to remember why that work is so valuable.

If you are taking part in it, thank you, and here is why your efforts are so valuable, while if you are asked to help, such as by being a candidate yourself, here is why saying ‘yes’ is so helpful.

It boils down to one simple thing. When we debate party policy, strategy or election tactics, questions about what might attract or put off voters often – and rightly – come up.

But there’s one sure-fire, guaranteed, rock-solid way of repelling voters, and it’s one we use far too often.

It’s not having a Liberal Democrat on the ballot paper. Zero votes for the party guaranteed.

Even in wards with multiple seats up for election and where we stand someone but not a full slate, it is still a problem – we’re still forcing people to vote for someone other than us.

(There is an important exception with STV local council elections in Scotland, of course, where the way the voting system works means standing ‘too many’ candidates can harm our election chances in a way that doesn’t happen under first past the post. So in Scotland, it’s at least one candidate in each ward that’s the equivalent of the full slates we should be aiming for elsewhere.)

The party has collectively been on a long journey over the last few years to raise our candidate numbers. We’ve made good progress catching up with the Conservatives and Labour, and now Reform and Green candidate numbers are also there to spur us on.

We regularly see our candidate numbers in council by-elections on the up and in last May’s local elections we continued our improving trend.

So we are making progress – but we are still short of where we want to be. Remember – every single voter gets a ballot paper, showing them whether we are standing or not.

Putting up candidates is not only about credibility and relevance. It’s also the way to get more people into the habit of regularly voting for the Liberal Democrats – a crucial step in building the sort of larger core vote for the party that will help us succeed more often.

It is also an important stepping stone for smaller local parties in building up their presence and activity. Getting some additional vacancies covered this time is one of the more straightforward and tangible pieces of progress that everyone can take pride in, and use to pick up some extra experience along the way. Even someone filling in a nil expenses return for the first time has chalked up some useful additional experience.

And you never quite know when putting up more candidates, or failing to do so, will turn out to be rather more important than you thought at that election.

That is just what happened in North Shropshire. Back in Spring 2021, the local party successfully put great effort into increasing its number of candidates. Then when an unexpected Parliamentary by-election took place, that boost in our local credibility – and the improved bar chart it provided – was vital for Helen Morgan’s campaign. A clear-cut case of us making our own luck.

Where our candidate numbers have increased in the last few years, it’s notable that this has happened across the board – from weaker local parties through to the strongest. It is part of how we are continuing to spread our local organisational strength more widely.

So, whatever your local situation, if you have elections coming up this May, let’s all do our best to make it a record-breaking year for the number of candidates.

Or if this has inspired you personally, you can find out more about standing here.

Good luck with your candidate numbers and let’s make this year a record-breaking one for the number of candidates our party puts up.

Cabinet Office takes three years to fix errors in Ministerial pay

A new Magna Carta: Lib Dems in the news

The key stories

1. Ed Davey’s conference speech: A new Magna Carta to save our country from Farage.
2. Lib Dems table Parliamentary motion calling for the King’s state visit to the US to be cancelled. Petition on the topic here.
3. Jess Brown-Fuller: “David Lammy’s plans to slash jury trials are an insult to victims left waiting for justice and will do nothing to tackle the spiralling backlog.”

Congratulations to…

1. Sarah Teather gave a cracking maiden speech in the House of Lords.
2. Congratulations also to Wendy Chamberlain, Daisy Cooper and Caroline Pidgeon for making it into Women in Westminster’s top 100 list which “highlights one hundred individuals who are making a significant and lasting impact across the Westminster landscape over the past year”.

Other people and party news

1. The English Council voted by 85%-15% to give the go-ahead to reforms to our candidate process which had previously been passed by Federal Conference and by the Scottish and Welsh parties. For the background, here’s the piece I wrote at the time of the Federal Conference debate.
2. The Federal Communications and Elections Committee (FCEC) has a new chair following Kath Pinnock stepping down. It’s, ahem, me.
3. The Lib Dem Campaign for Gender Balance (CGB) has a new team of officers.
4. Ed Davey is advertising for a Chief of Staff.
5. A lovely tribute to Arthur Preece has been published by Lib Dem Voice. I remember with affection working through his old electoral records to help on a by-election many years ago. Many condolences to his family and friends.

You can get more updates like the above in real time through my WhatsApp updates three to five times a week. Sign up details here.

How many councillors has Reform lost?

In case you missed them first time around, here are some of my blog posts and assorted pieces since the last LDN:

• How many councillors has Reform UK lost since May? Updated, yet again.
• Courts grant Reform legal relief over missing imprint.
• An early handwritten election letter: Charles Curtis Craig in 1910.
• A fine example of how to point at two potholes at once.

And one from the archives:

• Are you doing the wrong thing with your guest Lib Dem speakers?

What the polls are saying

Issues

Votes

Leaders

For more details on both voting intention and party leader ratings, and for updates in-between editions of LDN, take a look on my website.

Nigel Farage vs YouGov

Reform’s standing in the polls with all the pollsters has been slipping. But YouGov is one of the pollsters with the lowest ratings for the party, and Nigel Farage was not happy at all about that:

Nigel Farage versus YouGov

Selections news

Selections since last time have included Lisa Smart’s reselection in Hazel Grove and the completion of the team for the Scottish Parliament elections.

Meanwhile, Reform is down a candidate in Scotland.

No further Westminster constituencies have advertised for selection since last time.

See all the Liberal Democrat Westminster PPCs selected and publicly announced so far here.

Council by-elections round-up

Contests since last time have included the Lib Dems just seeing off Reform in Southampton, the first Labour gain from Reform in a council by-election (the first Lib Dem one was last year), an exchange of seats with the Greens and a Welsh contest with a Lib Dem on the ballot paper after the previous no-show.

The seat changes across those contests are Reform +3, Conservative +1, Green +/-0, Labour +/-0, Lib Dem +/-0, Plaid +/-0, SNP +/-0 and Independent/Other -4.

This brings the total net seat changes since the last May local elections to Reform +68, Lib Dem +21, Green +3, Plaid +1, SNP -2, Independent/Others -14, Conservatives -25 and Labour -52.

For more details, see my table of net seat changes since the last May local elections.

Other changes

A Labour councillor has joined the Lib Dems in Flintshire as have two independents in Swansea and two more in Huntingdonshire. A councillor is also back in the party in Sheffield after a complaint against him was dismissed, and a councillor has similarly returned in Luton.

However, a Lib Dem has left to sit as an independent in Warrington as have ones in Norfolk, Surrey, Sutton, Tewkesbury, Welwyn Hatfield and Woking. One has also joined the Conservatives in Buckinghamshire and a councillor who was suspended last year in Oxfordshire following a complaint has now decided to join Reform.

Finally, a councillor in North Somerset who previously quit the Lib Dem group but remained in the party has now quit the party but plans to remain in the Lib Dem group.

Britain Votes: The 2024 General Election

The latest of my reviews of books about the general election is out, and this one is a great introduction to the work of serious academic experts for the more casual reader:

Britain Votes: The 2024 General Election

Can you help?

Liberal Democrat Newswire is provided for free but isn’t free to run. Thank you so much to all the kind readers who donate to help cover its costs. It is quick and easy to sign up for a small regular donation with your debit card using GoCardless:

£10 per month / £5 per month / £2.50 per month / £1 per month

Thank you! (Other donation options, including by PayPal or cheque, are here.)

And finally…

Can you guess which Liberal Democrat councillor accidentally discovered a hidden Sudanese military base?

If you enjoyed this newsletter, please forward it to a friend or share it online: Share

Thank you and best wishes,

Mark

Note: Links to books in the newsletter are usually affiliate links that generate a commission on sales made.

Note also, though, that after the promising debut of Bluesky in the statistics last year its usage among MPs has, on this measure at least, dropped. It usage varies hugely by party: 54% of Lib Dem MPs say they visit Bluesky every day, compared to 29% of Labour and 0% of Conservative MPs.

Here is the full report.

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The Hampshire Chronicle reports:

This comes after Dr Parry described a Jewish community group as “Islamists on horseback” and “cosplayers” in the wake of the North London arson attack.

Liz Jarvis, Lib Dem MP for Eastleigh, had called for Reform leader Nigel Farage to sack Dr Parry following his comments.

She said: “These remarks were deeply insensitive, insulting and not befitting of someone who wants to hold public office and represent people from all walks of life across our county.

“At a time when we are all thinking of the Jewish community after such a disturbing attack, these comments will compound the pain and worry people are already feeling.”

As previously reported, Dr Parry faces criticism for a historical tweet where he said David Lammy should “go home” to the Caribbean.

Prior to the sacking Lib Dem MP Max Wilkinson had said:

Nigel Farage should act now to drop Chris Parry as Reform’s Hampshire mayoral candidate. These remarks were deeply insensitive, insulting and not befitting of someone who wants to hold public office.

At a time when we are all thinking of the Jewish community after such a disturbing attack, these comments will compound the pain so many people are already feeling.

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So it was lovely to see her get a special award at the party’s Federal Spring Conference in York:

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Kate Crawford, who has been a councillor for East Acton ward since first being elected in 1998, has resigned from the Labour Party and joined the Ealing Liberal Democrats. The move follows discussions with the party’s local group leader, Gary Malcolm, and comes ahead of May’s local elections…

Councillor Malcolm said: “We are delighted to welcome Councillor Kate Crawford as a member of the Liberal Democrats. I have known Kate for more than two decades as a hard-working and conscientious councillor and a consistent carers’ champion. She has always advocated for the people of Acton.”

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Reform UK has suspended one of its Scottish candidates after it emerged he had been struck off as a company director, and the party faces growing attacks for fielding candidates making Islamophobic remarks.

Reform confirmed on Friday morning it had suspended Stuart Niven, its candidate for Dundee West, after The Herald revealed he had been struck off after diverting tens of thousands of pounds of Covid grants into his personal account.

Nigel Farage used to boast about how good Reform’s candidate vetting is, as with this quote from last year:

We’ve been vetting, I bet, to a standard that no other party has ever done before for local council elections.

That Guardian piece also quotes Nigel Farage as saying of these Scottish elections:

I promise you we are doing everything we can to make sure these candidates for the Scottish parliament are vetted, and are fit and proper people to put before the electorate

It’s also only earlier this year that there were claims from Wales about how “brutal” Reform’s vetting of potential candidates had become.

A full list of Reform candidates for the Scottish Parliament who have now been dropped in one form or another is here.

Meanwhile, Reform councillors keep on going too.

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Thank you to Sam Warden for getting the Lib Dems on the ballot paper here after the party’s previous absence.

For what all this means for the running total of council by-election results since the last May elections, see my council by-elections scorecard here.

These by-election results round-ups cover principal authority by-elections as it’s only those for which comprehensive results are available.

What do the polls say?

The results above may tell us what voters are deciding on ballot papers, but not everywhere voted. So what’s the overall picture in the polls? Find out each week with my newsletter, The Week in Polls.

What’s happening in the Lib Dems?

Sign up to my monthly newsletter, Lib Dem Newswire, to find out:

Most of these newsletters are complaints about something the government is doing too slowly or doing wrong. But I’ve had some good news with an unusually positive and comprehensive reply to a written question.

Did someone share this with you? If so, sign up here to get future pieces sent directly to you:

Poll cards: poor value public spending that everyone can see yet no one has fixed

It is 17 years since I first started writing about the problem with poll cards. These official documents, sent to people to remind them when and where to vote, are a crucial official communication at election time. Yet they are poorly designed, to put it mildly.

In fairness, everyone involved has a bit of an excuse. The Returning Officer can blame their software supplier. The software supplier can blame the prescriptive rules in primary legislation. (Yes, Parliament legislated the details of a form.) Parliament can blame the government for not getting on with changing the law. And the government can blame the public for worrying more about the NHS. And the public can blame the Returning Officer whose contact details are on the poll card.

Everyone has an alibi.

Yet look at a poll card and ask yourself, ‘If I were looking to employ a graphic designer and this was the first thing in their portfolio, would I employ them?’

What is more, poll cards are not cheap.

As I wrote last year:

We have an abundance of governments unveiling drives to get the most out of public expenditure. Efficiency, austerity, modernisation: there is a bundle of labels for a frequent aspiration for governments of all political hues.

More colourfully at times, there has been a succession of government advisers – sometimes of eye-catching sartorial choices – who have also promised plans for cutting red tape, ending waste or introducing commercial mindsets.

And yet through it all, there is one line of government expenditure that keeps rolling on, being spent poorly time after time but surviving intact through all the drama and demands.

In the second half of 2019, £19 million spent this way. Now, in the overall scheme of government expenditure, £19 million is not that much. NHS England’s annual budget, for example, is just over £180 billion.

But still, it is £19 million and it was not just a one-off.

Hence my recent written question in Parliament:

Question: To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the efficacy of the design of poll cards; and whether they have plans to improve the effectiveness of poll cards in communicating electoral information to voters. (HL15001)

Answer (Baroness Taylor of Stevenage): The government is committed to improving the voting experience for electors, helping ensure they have the information they need to participate confidently in the democratic process.

The 2024-25 strategic review of electoral registration and conduct highlighted the need to improve election documentation, including the content of forms sent to electors ahead of polls, such as poll cards. In response to this, and as part of our wider work to improve information for electors, the government intends in the future to consider how best to enhance the design and clarity of poll cards.

Any work in this area will be conducted in close collaboration with local authorities and the Electoral Commission.

Promising, though it does prompt this follow-up question:

To ask His Majesty’s Government, further to the Written Answer by Baroness Taylor on 13 March (HL15001), whether the review of election documentation will be completed in time for any required changes in primary legislation to be incorporated into the Representation of the People Bill 2026.

More news when it comes.

A fun historical footnote: poll cards were rather controversial when they were first introduced.

In case you missed previously…

Are parcel firms getting away with poor service?

Sarah Teather’s cracking maiden speech in the House of Lords

Elsewhere from me…

Britain Votes: The 2024 General Election

Thank you

I hope you enjoyed reading this; if you did, please encourage others to take a look too: Share

Best wishes,

Mark

Mark and Cory talk about James Graham’s play This House. The hit play, available to stream from the National Theatre, is about party whips trying to prop up a government without a secure House of Commons majority in the 1970s. Mark and Cory marvel at the kipper ties and rotary dial phones, discuss the importance of treating your political opponents with respect, and ponder whether works of art would be improved if they spent more time celebrating the achievements of Labour governments.

Regular listeners will know we have a ‘Phil Woolas award’ segment in the show. Our sincere condolences therefore to his friends and family on the news that broke just before publishing this episode of his death from cancer at 66.

You can also find this episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube and all the usual podcast places.

Next time we’re reviewing the first series of The Thick Of It, which UK listeners can currently watch on BBC iPlayer.

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Show notes

• You can view the IMDB page for This House here.
• The play features the role of David Steel and the Liberal Party during the 1970s, which you can find out more about in an episode of Never Mind The Bar Charts.
• Cory’s email newsletter Paperback Rioter.
• Mark’s family of email newsletters.
• Our theme tune is “Monkeys Spinning Monkeys” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) and licensed under the Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Welcome to the latest in my series of reviews of books about the 2024 general election. I am reading them all so you can pick which ones to look at.

If you’re the author or editor of a general election book, please do get in touch to ensure that I do not miss your own title.

Britain Votes: The 2024 General Election, edited by Alistair Clark, Louise Thompson and Stuart Wilks-Heeg is the latest in the Hansard Society’s series of general election books. The series has been going since the last century with a consistent format: coming out relatively promptly after a general election (this one came out in 2025) with a range of highly credible academic authors each penning a short chapter on their own area of expertise.

Although the authors are academic, the writing style is – mostly – aimed at a more general audience, making these volumes a good introduction for the more casual reader to whom some of the real experts are, and therefore whose work you might want to look out for on any topics that particularly interest you.

The book was published as the steep slide of Labour and the Prime Minister into unpopularity was already underway, and perhaps as a result does well at highlighting the brittleness of Labour’s huge MP tally at the general election; brittleness such as the vote shares behind its seat hauls in Scotland and Wales.

It is studded with useful insights, such as the big increase in three-way marginals (from 17 in 2019 to 100 in 2024), the continued importance of legacy media (the post-2017 talk about the importance of new media in fuelling Jeremy Corbyn’s rise now seems rather dated) and the degree to which the election was about competence and trust. And of course, there is a waspish footnote from Phil Cowley.

The thing though that I’m most likely to remember from this book is Table 2.6, which shows that although the Liberal Democrat vote was more geographically concentrated in 2024 than in previous general elections – which is a good thing under first past the post – it was not particularly highly concentrated by comparison with the historical records of Labour and the Conservatives. In other words, it is plausible for Lib Dems to hope, if they wish, that in future elections the party’s vote is distributed even more efficiently than in 2024, even if the party’s overall vote share rises.

As that snippet shows, even if you think you already know a lot about the general election, the chances are you will find new material in here too.

The production quality is overall good, though there are some rather odd graph design choices (such as Figures 4.1 and 4.4).

The Pack Mentions Index is, alas, a worrying 2.

Get the book

You can get your own copy of Britain Votes: The 2024 General Election, edited by Alistair Clark, Louise Thompson and Stuart Wilks-Heeg, from:

• Bookshop.org (works with independent bookshops)
• Waterstones
• Amazon

Next up

The next book I cover will most likely be The British General Election of 2024 by Rob Ford, Tim Bale, Will Jennings and Paula Surridge. You can skip ahead of me and get your copy here: Bookshop.org, Waterstones and Amazon.

Links to books are affiliate links, which generate a small commission for each sale.

Catch up on the last three books

Political Marketing and Management in the 2024 UK General Election

General Election 2024: The Media and the Messengers

Taken As Red by Anushka Asthana: paperback edition now out

Thank you

I hope you enjoyed reading this, and if you did please do encourage others to take a read too: Share

Best wishes,

Mark