What with all the excitement about Hartlepool and the understandable fuss about Scotland, there’s one aspect of the elections that seems to have passed everyone by, and that’s the result of the mayoral contest in London.
You may have missed it: Sadiq Khan won, with 1.2 million votes. But the Tory candidate, Shaun Bailey, did really unexpectedly well, with 977,601 votes. In some constituencies in outer London, he beat Sadiq comfortably; in other central London areas, he ran him really close, leaving the most predictably metrosexual or Corbynite areas to give Sadiq his majority. So Bailey got not far off a million votes. Just think what he might have done if Boris and the bigwigs had actually come out to support him.
It was nice to hear Boris visited Hartlepool in person two or three times. That’s probably as many times as he managed to campaign with Shaun Bailey, who was right on his doorstep, bidding to occupy precisely the same position Boris graced twice.
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