This is going to be an ugly weekend for British politics. How ugly we won’t quite know until Saturday night, when enough votes will have been counted to judge whether Keir Starmer’s government has suffered merely a midterm kicking or a full-blown collapse, and what dark forces may have been unleashed in the process. For you needn’t be a Labour voter to worry about the implications of local elections in which so many candidates were caught expressing views so extreme they chill the blood.
It’s fear of what this means for Britain in the long term that explains, in part, why the prime minister’s enemies were gathering long before the polling stations closed.
