Hello and welcome to The Rundown, a podcast from Politics Home.

I'm your host, Alan Tollust, and this week we're taking a look at the fallout from last week's local elections.

Where is it leave Rishishishishanak after the Tories took a drubbing across England?

Whether all is rosy in Labour's garden after Kirstarmer's party took the West Midlands majority and a host of Bellwether councils.

And what should we make of the predictions we could be headed for a hung parliament?

To cheer over all of that, plus this week's very surprised affection by the MP Natalie Elphick,

I'm delighted to say I'm joined by Concerns for MP and former minister Mark Garnier, Director of Research

at the Campaign Group Labor Together, Christopher, and Tim Bale, Professor of Politics at Queen

Mary University in London. So I'm going to start with you, Tim, a few days on now from getting

all those results through the kind of mammoth three or four day election. What have we kind

of learned, do you think?

The key learning is from the local elections. Well, the key learning is obviously the Conservative Party

is in a whole heap of trouble, that the Labour Party would seem to be on course for a fairly

comfortable victory, although it has some cause for concern, I think, due to the failure to pick up seats and indeed

its losses of some seats to independent candidates and green candidates, possibly because

of the Gaza war. I think for the Liberal Democrats, it was a fairly good night, you have to say. But generally speaking, I do think, and we might come on to this, predictions using some of the projections made by political scientists as to the kind of national equivalent vote that Labor will be the largest party in a hung parliament are fairly wide of the mark and I can talk about

why that might be the case at more length. Yeah, that would be good. Obviously that it's been

kind of seized on by the concerted leadership that it shows that actually things aren't quite as

as bad as they are. Mark, I'll come to you next. What's been the kind of mood amongst your colleagues

in a few days since, obviously there was, say, there's some positivity or attempt of positivity from those at the top of the party. But I wonder how it's kind of

felt to your fellow Conservative MPs. Well, where I've seen colleagues, they've been sort of

fairly pragmatic, actually. To be fair, we haven't actually seen that many of them. We were on a

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