Blair-like landslide or black-swan catastrophe? Let’s hope tomorrow tells us who is set for No 10

Two rival stories clash today. One is that Rishi Sunak has steadied the ship and is slowly clawing back the support the Conservatives need, if not to retain power at the next general election, at least to deny Labour a majority and to make Keir Starmer’s premiership precarious.

The other is that Labour is miles ahead, heading for a majority government, if not a Blair-like landslide; and that the Conservatives have suffered such a blow to their credibility, thanks to the combined efforts of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, that Sunak cannot hope to recover without a black-swan catastrophe visited on his opponents.

We will have early indications of which story fits the facts better in the morning, from the minority of local councils that are counting their votes overnight, and a better idea will emerge on Friday afternoon, when more of the votes are counted.

No doubt both main parties will claim to have done better than expected, but the verdict of Professor Sir John Curtice, on Friday afternoon, is likely to tilt one way or the other.

The critical number is the size of the gap between Labour’s share of the projected national vote and the Tory share. This involves modelling election results to even out local factors and to estimate how people might have voted if there had been elections in Scotland, Wales, London and the other places in England that are not voting today.

Sir John has said that if Labour is 10 or more percentage points ahead, that would suggest that Starmer has “a chance of winning the next general election” – although it might point towards a minority Labour government, just as when David Cameron had to form a coalition after posting double-digit leads in local elections before the 2010 general election.

So if Labour’s lead is more than 10 points, the test will primarily be for Sunak. “Real votes in real ballot boxes” will have confirmed that the Tories’ recovery under his leadership is more of a dead-cat bounce – the party’s reputation may no longer be in free fall, but it has not yet begun the long climb back.

Already, Yimby Tory MPs are gearing up to blame their Nimby colleagues for pushing the prime minister into abolishing housing targets. Their argument doesn’t make much sense, because the Liberal Democrats will probably have made sweeping gains in the semi-rural south, where their candidates have generally accused Tory councils of “over-development”. But it will amplify the complaint repeated by Tobias Ellwood, Conservative MP for Bournemouth East, last night that his party has nothing to offer the young.

Conservative discipline, restored with remarkable suddenness since the collapse of Liz Truss’s government, could start to fray again.

What there won’t be, though, is a challenge to Sunak’s leadership. In October, when Boris Johnson decided that, although he had sufficient nominations from Tory MPs, he wouldn’t put himself forward, all the brave talk among his supporters was that, if the local elections went badly, he would return in triumph to No 10, carried aloft on the shoulders of grateful MPs, regretting that they had ever doubted him. Well, that is not going to happen. The idea of a Johnson return now seems faintly ridiculous.

A more likely Tory doom scenario is a re-run of the end of John Major’s government, when there seemed to be nothing he could do to stop the party’s growing split over Europe – which ended in the humiliation of an election broadcast in 1997 in which be begged his MPs not to “bind my hands” in negotiations with the EU over the single currency.

Sunak will have to beg his party to be patient, and to wait to see what happens when inflation does finally come down, and if he makes progress on NHS waiting lists and small boats.

If, on the other hand, Labour’s lead is a lot lower than 10 points, it will be Starmer’s character that will be tested. We knew it, gloomy Labour MPs will say: our opinion-poll lead was soft. I think it unlikely that Starmer will panic, but there is a risk that he will make ever more unbelievable promises in order to try to hold the line: the fastest growth in the G7; the people happier than in Finland; the grass greener than anywhere in the world.

He has already taken a more sharply personal line in his attacks on the prime minister; it would be bad for the quality of our democracy if he went further in that direction. What he needs is some serious policy work that shows he is ready for the rigours of government; maybe a setback would be a spur to constructive action.

And no, I haven’t focused on the Lib Dems, the Greens or Reform. They will have their stories to tell, but they say much less about the next general election except in one respect: the extent of anti-Tory tactical voting may affect the breakeven point between Labour and the Tories.

Nor have I considered what might be the most likely result tomorrow, which would be an outcome in the soggy middle: a Labour lead of 7 to 9 points that resolves nothing and allows both sides to continue to tell the story that favours them.