It is a thankless morning for Tories on the media round. Faced with the loss of half of their council seats, ministers are resorting to the time-honoured tactic of talking up favourable results as offering useful national lessons. This trick was pioneered by Kenneth Baker, who as Mrs Thatcher’s party chair successfully sold the post-Poll Tax elections of 1990 as a good night, based on the exceptional results of Westminster and Wandsworth. This time, Harlow is CCHQ’s favourite local council, with the Tories winning 17 of the available 33 seats therem and Labour one shy on 16.

It is clear from results elsewhere that Harlow is an exception, and not the rule in this election

The outgoing MP Rob Halfon was quick to hail the result as the ‘biggest comeback since Lazarus’. He noted, with delight, how Sir Keir Starmer made several visits to the Essex area, while Angela Rayner had elsewhere declared that a win in Harlow would mean Labour are on the ‘path to power’. It leads to one Tory source claiming that ‘whilst this is a tough night for the Conservative party, it’s clear that there is absolutely no love for Keir Starmer’. Labour ‘were measuring up the curtains in the town hall, they looked like the cat that had got the cream’, crowed Halfon to LBC, noting how the council – which the Tories regained from Labour in 2021 – has frozen tax and focused on ‘regeneration and housing’.

Yet it is clear from results elsewhere that Harlow is an exception, and not the rule in this election. This result and potentially others like the West Midlands mayoralty will enable Tory high command to claim that effective incumbents can buck the trend towards Labour. It is certainly disappointing for Labour, given that the party ran the council for nine years under first Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn. But more than anything else, it ‘reinforces Essex’s position as the new true Tory heartland’ in the words of pollster Luke Tryl. With the Liberal Democrats making gains in so-called ‘blue wall’ southern strongholds such as Winchester, the Harlow result could be an indication of where, post-Brexit realignment, the real future of the Tory party now lies.