Morning Call: Labour’s avoidable mistake in the May elections

It has no story about what a good result might look like.

Good morning. The election campaigns across England, Scotland and Wales are nearly over and polls open at 7am tomorrow. The latest projections have Labour losing badly across the board.

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In the event of an electoral bloodbath, we got a taste of what the post-election Labour Party might look like this morning with the Daily Telegraph’s splash, in which Eluned Morgan, leader of Welsh Labour, candidly said that Keir Starmer “comes up as an issue on the doorstep”.

While we’ve been out and about across the country, the NS politics team has heard much the same, privately, from Labour candidates. One prominent Scottish Labour MSP recently described the PM to me as “electoral Kryptonite” in Scotland.

Plans are being made to shore up Starmer’s position if/when he faces a wave of personal recriminations for the party’s performance. But this will all be after the party potentially loses thousands of council seats and comes third in Wales – and the wave of emotion may be hard to bottle up.

What strikes me as remarkable is how little expectation management there has been from Labour about these results. Many past incumbent governments have faced punishing electoral tests in the middle of the parliamentary term but found clever ways to cast them as bad-but-not-terrible – the most famous, perhaps, was in 1990 when Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives, at a low ebb, held up their wins in Westminster and Wandsworth as signs of political health.

In 2026, such narratives from Labour have been elusive since it’s hard to make confident predictions about any of the party’s heartlands. So there is no ready-made story about what a decent night might look like for the Prime Minister. We are in the realm of hoping for miracles.

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Ethan’s picks

Tom has written the politics column this week about the continuing drama of Angela vs Andy vs Wes vs Keir. Rayner is prepared to risk it all for the crown, he writes.

Alex Niven reflects on the Nairn thesis half a century on. Britain is still breaking up, he writes, and these election results will prove it.

In the US, Freddie says that the Democrats cannot afford to ignore alternative left-wing media figures like Hasan Piker.

And here is the full interview with First Minister Eluned Morgan from the Telegraph’s Amy Gibbons (paywalled).

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And with that…

Thanks for reading. Please get in touch with any feedback by emailing ethan.croft@newstatesman.co.uk.

—Ethan