Gavan Reilly: Starmer plays smarter by keeping his head down...

While we await our own trip to the ballot boxes in four weeks’ time, watching the results of the various elections in England and Wales was an interesting exercise to whet the appetite – and one from which Ireland could draw some learnings.

The obvious task facing the Conservative Party now, with one drubbing behind them and another one beckoning in a general election in November (possibly the same week as our own!), is to do something different. The problem is deciding on what that difference should be, with duelling calls to pivot into different spaces.

One suggestion for Rishi Sunak came from Suella Braverman – you might remember her as the Home Secretary who said she literally dreamed at night about sending asylum seekers to Rwanda. You might also remember her as being such an intellectual powerhouse that she was sacked from that job, twice, in 13 months, by two different prime ministers (imagine the ignominy of having a tenure shorter than Liz Truss!).

She says it’s too late to change party leader (again) but the election results are Sunak’s sole responsibility, and so the only way out of the hole is for the PM to start digging. And no, that’s not me mangling the metaphor: that is the precise analogy Braverman used in a piece in the Sunday Telegraph. I’m not sure how anyone ever got out a hole by digging more urgently.

But: is she right? Should the Tories pivot even further to the right, so as to recover the votes lost to Reform UK (née UKIP)? That’s one theory, as the Tories would be set to retain many seats were Reform not eating their lunch. But stall: a lesser-remarked stat from the weekend was that, in the specific areas casting votes, the Conservatives won even fewer seats than the Liberal Democrats. The votes might be leaning rightward but the seats are being won by centrist parties.

On that note, it’s hardly a coincidence that Labour are doing so well by shunning the Jeremy Corbyn wing and going Blairite; the left of the party mightn’t like it but there have been 11 general elections in the last 49 years and Tony Blair is the only Labour leader to have won one (or, indeed, three).

But the candidates that tried that, had mixed results too. Any fellow election anoraks paying close attention to Friday’s results will have seen Sunak celebrating the re-election of Ben Houchen as a mayor in the Tees Valley – clinging to it as proof of how Conservatism is ‘working’, even though Houchen turned out to be the only Tory mayor re-elected. What’s more, Houchen’s campaign pointedly shed the Tory branding (the logo was barely visible on any of his literature) and his share of the vote dropped by 19 points.

His counterpart in the West Midlands, the former John Lewis chief Andy Street, also tried to shirk the party brand and lost the job outright as his share dropped by 12 points.

Sun Tzu said if you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies eventually float by. For Kier Starmer it’s just a case of keeping the head down and waiting for the tides.

…so what can Simon Harris learn from it?

The first upside for the Taoiseach from the fate of the Conservatives across the water is that, within a few months, the Rwanda scheme which has contributed to so much of his short-term trouble will be binned. If not in power by Christmas, Keir Starmer will be prime minister by early 2025 and has made ditching it a pillar promise.

That may be the only upside, though – as the Tories’ travails largely mirror the sort of issues that Harris has inherited.

The novelty of his premiership already appears to have worn off, if the Sunday Independent poll is anything to go by, so people seem unlikely to treat him as some kind of new broom. Whether he likes it or not, Harris is not seen as someone who has been in power for a month, but as someone who has been in Cabinet for eight years and in a party which has governed for 13.

Sunak’s woes illustrate the real trouble for Fine Gael: if the local elections don’t go well (and 2019 was Varadkar’s high watermark, so they mightn’t) there will be even further calls for the party to get back to ‘traditional’ values, to dump some parts of its programme, and knuckle down on law and order.

But if Sunak’s local election experience is anything to go by, Fine Gael could well find itself losing votes to its right, and ultimately losing seats to its left.

An even bigger problem is that the Sunak experiment hasn’t yet found any way to overcome this.

Tories who ran on the party’s record, like its candidate who suffered a 26-point swing in losing a Blackpool by-election, were hammered. So too were the candidates with personal successes but whose party affiliations (think London mayoral candidates Ben Houchen and Andy Street) were absent.

Sunak put a brave face on things but at the end of the day there was little to celebrate – and certainly, little learnings from Harris if he hopes to cling onto power.