The victory of Sadiq Khan – and the rise of Ruth Davidson

Although very nearly national, that is UK-wide, in their coverage – with Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland, London and many county and other local authorities electing fresh administrations and police chiefs, and with a couple of Westminster by-elections thrown in – such is the nature of our developing devolved democracy that each set of elections yields its own individual tale. There were few features that were truly uniformly national, and even the generalised weakness of the Labour Party was balanced, crucially, by Sadiq Khan’s triumph in London – hardly a fringe territory.

Mr Khan’s victory, which owed little to some of the people nominally on his own side, such as Ken Livingstone and a range of more obscure, but even more stupid, mayors, councillors and MPs, reinforces the fact that London is not a naturally Tory city. He has hard act to follow in Boris Johnson, but evidently Zac Goldsmith found it still more difficult to thrive in the vast shadow of Boris.

Then again, Scotland has been far from naturally Tory – but just look at what happened there. Nowhere is the variance in fortunes for any of the parties more pronounced than in the case of the Conservatives. In much of England and Wales the party suffered a mild case of the blues, suffering for its foolish policies on welfare and pension reform, but also benefiting from its decisions to abort those plans. The steel crisis in Wales, especially, and the dispute over doctors’ pay and conditions in the NHS also turned voters away, as must the spectacle of Conservative cabinet ministers openly insulting one another and, in the case of former leader Iain Duncan Smith, resigning in bitter disgust.

Nor has the economy continued to come good, as it was this time last year when David Cameron led his party to such an unexpected victory. Given all that, the Tories in England and Wales did comparatively well – but nowhere near as well as they did in Scotland. Political pundits are vying to claim who recognised the campaigning potential of the Conservatives’ Scottish leader, Ruth Davidson, as well they might, and more than a few in her own party are thinking aloud about her leadership potential at Westminster. For now, though, she must be more than content with overtaking Labour as the official opposition to the SNP at Holyrood, and becoming the leading Unionist politician in her own country.

She may be needed by the Conservatives at Westminster, but the Union of Scotland and the rest of the UK needs her rather more, at least for the time being. Scottish politics needs an effective opposition, and if anyone can stand up to the juggernaut of Nicola Sturgeon and the dominance of the SNP it is the brave Ms Davidson. Slowly but surely she is rebuilding her party’s traditional strengths in the borders and parts of the rural North, though the “orange vote” that gave them working class support across the central belt is, mercifully, unlikely to return.

Scotland also needs an effective government, and, despite slipping and losing their overall majority, the Sturgeon administration will face little problem in getting its legislation through – the opposition is far too fractured to pose a serious threat. However, it is also the case that her mandate for a second independence referendum is that much weaker as a result of her setback – a good thing for supporters of the Union (providing the EU referendum confirms Britain in Europe). And the longer Ms Sturgeon stays in power the more that she and her party will become the establishment, with all the disappointments and setbacks that implies. Who will benefit as she and her government run into unpopularity is much more difficult to predict. A further Conservative revival should not be discounted entirely.

Labour, meanwhile, can add London to Wales as its major elected power base across the UK, and its record in these elections will not be sufficient to prompt any sort of coup against Jeremy Corbyn. Even if it had, the party’s membership, who after all propelled him so unexpectedly into office only last September, would not have countenanced change at this stage. Labour’s continuing melting in Scotland, approaching near irrelevance, may be one of the great political stories of this or any other time, but it is not enough to unseat Mr Corbyn. Like much else about these elections, the earthquakes happened last May; these are merely the aftershocks. Plus, Mr Corbyn may be doing a better job than his many critics concede, even though he seems as far away from Downing Street as his immediate predecessors were.

The aftershocks are still unpleasant, though, for the Liberal Democrats, whose very modest showing in Scotland and pockets of the rest of the country is hardly enough to spark dreams of government again. What has happened here is that the party has been supplanted by a variety of alternatives as the natural party of protest or opposition, In the West Midland and Wales, for example, the Greens, Plaid Cymru and Ukip have capitalised on their weakness; in Scotland it is the Conservatives who are reclaiming territory; and so on. Given also the sui generis system of politics in Northern Ireland – where elections to a devolved assembly, whatever their complications are rather better than the alternative – it can be said on 2016 that the UK, more than over, does not have party system but rather a collection of regional and national varieties, ones that have never been more different. Proportional representation has done much to foster that; but so also has an electorate increasingly willing to try new parties and break decades-old voting habits and party loyalties. Not a bad thing for democracy.