Win election, implement manifesto – that's novel!

DIFFICULT to believe, I know, but there are people out there who reckon local government's a touch boring.

- Chris Game

It's not, of course, thanks at least sometimes to the actions and antics of councillors themselves. But the past few weeks have surely and seriously disproved it in spades.

I had the questionable luck of having my local elections round-up column appear on elections day itself, when probably most interested Post readers would know already the results of the elections one's describing, and one predicts at one's peril.

Anyway, there being no elections in the metropolitan West Midlands, I focused on our region's non-met counties - Shropshire, Worcestershire, Warwickshire and Staffordshire - noting, inter alia, that Nigel Farage's Reform UK Party was hoping, and was expected, to make significant advances, especially in Staffordshire. Indeed it did - on a scarcely credible scale. In Staffs, after three decades of Labour leadership, Reform UK, starting from scratch, won 49 of the 62 County Council seats, leaving the previously controlling Conservatives with 10, and Greens, Independents and the long-term controlling Labour party with one each. The Lib Dems, along with UKIP, the Workers Party of Britain and others, failed to score.

It typified results across the country. On what nationally was an exceptionally quiet election day, with just 23 of England's 317 councils up for re-election, Reform UK increased its nationwide base of just two councillors (both on Hampshire's Havant Borough Council), to a relatively massive 677 (39% of the total seats contested) and gained majority control of no fewer than 10 of the 23 councils.