It looks like the resignations of Hazel Blears and Jacqui Smith have taken the spotlight from Cameron and his £350,000 repayment bill (the mind boggles as to why he felt that it was necessary to claim, as that is a mere 1% of what he is worth). Gerald Warner in the Torygraph has written a good post on the subject but perhaps the government in meltdown is a rather more salient story for the moment.
So how will the Tories actually do in the local elections this time? Will the voters of Lancashire and Derbyshire (to name but two of the councils up for grabs this time round) give the Tories a clean sweep? I’ve been out for lunch up to the neighbouring village of Riseley, and met the local councillor Stuart Munro out delivering leaflets; he didn’t sound as happy as he normally does (he normally claims to have hundreds of volunteers for the party knocking on doors, though I have never seen one out with him) and that’s saying a lot because he did seem rather non-committal as to how it was going. I am lucky in that I can pose as whatever party I want to, having been involved with a fair number of them – I can even be a disgruntled Labour voter, a disgruntled Tory and probably in the near future a disgruntled Green. (I told him not to drop me a leaflet, and that I was voting Green, but no, I still got one. Yuck.) I enjoy that more than being a supporter – or glory supporter – of anyone as it usually elicits more intimate information from all sides and none. I haven’t tried being a LibDem yet but if this keeps up longer and the opposition don’t get their skates on then I will approach the LibDems for the general election, then perhaps after the next election become a disaffected LibDem and slag them off here.
I am the cat who walks by herself, and all places are alike to me. Rudyard Kipling had me nailed J.
Anyway, Clarence is itching to get on with the reading for the Tories, so let the fun commence.
READING: THE CONSERVATIVES at the LOCAL ELECTIONS on THURSDAY 4 JUNE
Situation – VI Wands, reversed
C: The Conservatives are not going to get much of the promised vote here and their moment of triumph is in abeyance because of the poor overall result for national parties. This seeps through to the council elections too – it is already evident that the north is still a fairly no-go area for the Tories, and taking councils there is still difficult. The Salford by-election, held during the expenses scandal, was still a result for Labour, with the BNP coming before the Tories. So any victory is likely to be pyrrhic in nature, in that although they may well come nominally first, the spillage from the national picture is still likely to hit them hard.
Conservative Party nationally – The Empress
C: The party nominally sits in judgement of the status quo and is commanding the same lead in the polls in which it found itself in April and early May, though of course the Independent poll may be more indicative of the mood since Cameron’s mortgage came to light. The Empress is a card which plants a body in a sitting position; it does not necessarily mean complacency has set in but it means that someone is waiting for events to come to them rather than able to direct them. It may not work in this situation where the party needs to overcome the handicap of its own shocking expenses problems and overcome an inertia which stems from before the scandal broke. Patience may help it in some respects, but it needs to combine this with a more dynamic posture in order to look like it would be a successful government.
Conservative Party in the places where people are voting on county councils – Strength
C: Again, not necessarily a bad card but a card in which control and discipline trump external movement, either positive or negative. Strength solidifies the Empress as above, but it denotes a caution and the exercise of restraint rather than a dam-busting exercise in capturing these last remaining councils. Not a bad omen, but not a card which augurs much explosive success.
Results of the vote – II Swords, reversed
C: Not a good card, not an excessively bad one, but nothing to write home about. The balance is disrupted, but this works against the party rather than for it. The rupture in the main firmament has been injurious to the confidence of the party’s activists on the ground; although the government provides the main sideshow this week, the chaos and destruction are only going to intensify when a stalemate is produced as opposed to a promised rout. With Labour already clearing out its deadwood, it makes it more difficult for Foxy to justify keeping his own pilfering politicos, and the damage this could do is to knock over any promising results even from the elections seen as less dangerous to the main parties. Also, if people are voting on local issues, then the Tories may lose the national popularity they have and be forced to confront their own weakness on the local front from the beginning of this year where they have failed to gain local seats from Labour where they ought to be winning hand over fist. Even in Jacqui Smith’s and Hazel Blears’ backyards, they have failed to capitalise away from the glaring national headline poll results. So not a good night for the Conservatives.
Outcome on the night – Queen of Swords
C: The devil is in the detail. The Queen of Swords forces people to look rationally at the situation to find any strengths or weaknesses, but the emotional and subjective nature of the media attention means that anything less than what the Conservatives need to show to win convincingly next year – if it still is next year – will be taken as a sign of weakness rather than as a sign of progress. The Queen forces us to look penetratingly at the whole situation, rather than just react spontaneously to an overall feeling. If the Tories had looked harder at 2005 then they would have seen the result differently. The Tories need to look hard at this result to learn the lessons they need to learn; will they? The Hermit, reversed, says that this kind of introspection is possible and likely, but will not produce a good result for anyone concerned. The devil really will be in the detail, and the Tories will always find a way to do themselves down.
Owlperson: I disagree, Clarence. An alternative reading of these two cards is not that they will – I know the party deeply and know they can be equally blind to success and failure if they want to be, rather than taking both into account – and the Queen says to me that there will be a hard lesson delivered to them but they will choose not to learn it (the reversed Hermit). Although we agree, it is too soon to say that the party will collapse in on itself; after all the result from last night’s reading on the Independent poll was a slightly more positive card, Temperance; because the focus is on the government for now the government will lose more from these elections than the Tories will. However the result will be such that the momentum which the Tories have lost will be only further eroded because the results here will be warped by the times in which we all “live”. The lessons from the elections will be heeded only if they are forced into listening by the press; and what we are all wondering is when or if those lessons will be rammed home by another such poll putting the Tories down to 30% again.
Built in problems/margin for error – IX Swords, reversed
C: The Nine reversed is lessening the fear of manipulation but still shows some suspicion around the results. The Tories would obviously never call foul on any result which didn’t go in their favour, but some of their more vocal blogosphere supporters very rarely have such scruples. The election is more likely to be problematic when the result is known days or weeks before the poll is held. We are past the point at which the postal vote results would be known. The Tories have more reason to fear manipulation than Labour do – judging by the results for this position on the Labour spread – but the fear is lessened by the fact that because the media “know” the Tories are going to win, the fear is negated or pushed to the back of the mind because the Tories may well be benefiting from the theories posited in the Rotten Boroughs articles. (See posts passim.)
Any other factors – The Hierophant, reversed
C: Conventional wisdom overturned. The results are dangerous in that they, like all elections up to and including 1992, are unpredictable in a time of such great political agony as this. There is less ability to predict these results, and far higher stakes than would normally be the case. The period in which the media or the government could tell which way elections would go is over, as witnessed by the Glenrothes by-election in the autumn; the strategists may be deliberately seeding the press with misinformation to make any real result look better; and the element of fixing might be more or less depending on the desire of the media to see change. Polls have plunged for both main parties over the last month; the Conservatives suffered a large hit yesterday and local canvassers no longer seem as bullish as they were when they started canvassing (Redwood appeared in Swallowfield, Louise’s home village) early in May before the scandals had got going and appeared more confident than Stuart did this afternoon on his own. There is no prediction here which will guarantee a win or lose, and the danger for the Conservatives is that their poll results may have changed too late to rescue them.
Outcome in general going forward – The Devil
C: A decisive and destructive influence in all its forms; the Devil always means that the querent succumbs to desires and conceits that are intense and turbulent. The surprise is in the result, which leaves those involved in this reading reeling from the sharp rebuke the electorate give them; and these are the elections which were believed to be relatively immune from national considerations. The Devil is the unleashing of fury and anger in a situation where there needs to be restraint, grace and magnanimity. It can only end in tears.
