Council elections are normally a mixed bag, with some comfort for everyone. It is rare for the overall narrative to be quite so clear – Labour’s performance in May 2016 was intriguingly mixed and productive to analyse. The results of the 2017 local elections are absolutely clear: a Conservative landslide.

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The reason for the landslide is clear too – the collapse of the Ukip vote and the transfer of many of its former supporters to the Conservative cause following the adoption of hard Brexit by the May government. The contribution of Labour’s leadership and political direction to that party’s disaster is clear. When a party’s vote collapses, everyone should pick up a bit, as we saw when the Lib Dems plunged to defeat in 2015. But this time the Tory tiger feasted on the fresh carcass of the Ukip vote while Labour and the Lib Dems could only prowl hungrily on the sidelines, and received a few deep scratches from the Tories’ claws while they were doing so.

North East Derbyshire voted Conservative, even though its parliamentary seat has been Labour since 1935 and it covers the militantly working-class town of Clay Cross where Dennis Skinner grew up.

DH Lawrence’s birthplace of Eastwood has gone Lib Dem before, but now it has turned Tory. And just down the road, the Nottinghamshire ex-mining town of Hucknall has returned an all-Tory slate of county councillors. Simply Blue, perhaps. The Conservatives were also ahead in Newcastle-under-Lyme, a Labour constituency since 1919 but now imperilled. Ten years ago, it was one of the first areas where Ukip developed a vote in local elections, which has now largely slid over to the Tories. The Tees Valley mayoral election may have been the most mortifying for Labour – for the party to eke out a lead of a little more than 2,000 votes over the Tories in Middlesbrough is a humiliation.

The blue wave also washed over the Liberal Democrats. The party had been cautiously optimistic about Somerset, but in the end the Tories increased their majority and ate into the Lib Dems’ town strongholds such as Taunton. The results do not give the party much grounds for confidence about gaining back any of their losses from the Conservatives (or even against Labour), nor can they feel much of a sense of security in most of their nine parliamentary seats. Ukip’s humiliation was absolutely complete.

The Tory tide reached surprisingly far into Scotland – recording some spectacular increases in expected areas such as the outskirts of Aberdeen and the Borders, but also representation in parts of the west of Scotland such as Shettleston and Ferguslie Park, where “Tory” has been considered an insult for generations.

There were some scattered areas where the county council results were half-decent for Labour. Many of those were in constituencies where Labour had hung on well in 2010 or 2015, with well-organised local parties, strong councillors and established Members of Parliament. There were several examples in the marginal county of Lancashire – Hyndburn, Chorley and Lancaster – although it was not enough to stop the Tories from winning overall control. In Nottinghamshire, while age-old Labour fortresses such as Hucknall, Ashfield and Mansfield crumbled, Labour won every seat in the marginal Nottingham suburbs that make up the Gedling constituency. Labour also did respectably in the South Wales cities, but in the valleys and the industrial north there were signs of weakness in the face of Independent councillors (the usual face of the centre-right in much Welsh local politics).

The local election results in the marginals that Labour lost in 2010 and 2015, in contrast with the retained seats, suggests a potentially worrying pattern for the party. A strong incumbent or a good council can insulate a local party to some extent, but once those barriers are breached the party seems to decline rapidly. Labour lost every county council seat in places such as Harlow and Dover, and slumped further, without complete annihilation, in places such as Cannock and Stevenage. These seats are still the gatekeepers to a House of Commons majority, and Labour are drifting out of competitiveness. For instance, in Warwickshire North, Labour’s number one target in the 2015 election, the Conservatives were 15 points ahead in the 2017 local elections.

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Voting behaviour in local and general elections does differ, even when they take place on the same day, as they did in 2015. Labour and the Lib Dems did rather better in those local elections than the Westminster poll, and it is quite possible that the gap between local and national is increasing because of the gulf in popularity between the leadership of the two main parties. The local election turnout this time was about 30%, less than half of that in general elections.

By stimulating interest and turnout, activism can reap rewards in local elections even against a national trend, as it has in Clive Lewis’s Norwich and Cat Smith’s Lancaster. But it is generally swamped by the less-political public who turn out in general elections and are more affected by national messages. We – politicians and commentators – learned this in 2015, and may have that lesson driven home again in June 2017. The local election results were bad enough for everyone except the Conservatives, but there might be even more extreme electoral weather ahead.