Rishi Sunak will have been relieved when Ben Houchen was declared the winner in the Tees Valley mayoral election, but he can’t disguise the fact that these were very bad election results.
Council elections are difficult to interpret – there are a host of local factors at play. The best thing to look at is what is known as national equivalent vote share. The BBC’s estimate at the time of writing is that Labour got 34% and the Conservatives 25%.
