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Welcome on Friday for a special emergency RESTISPolitics podcast with me, Aleister Campbell.

And me, Rory Stewart. And rather weirdly, we pushed the emergency podcast button,

but this date had been in the diary for quite a long time, hadn't it?

We did sort of know the local elections were coming.

It wasn't quite like one of our resignation emergency podcasts.

No, but I think the reason why a lot of our listeners started to say we'd like to hear what you think is because

what always happens in the wake of any election, but particularly local elections, I think,

is that the parties nationally have their narrative and they try to dare I say spin it in a way that is most conducive to their morale and their effectiveness, etc.

And so I think it is one of those days where there's actually quite a lot of crap to cut through.

And actually it's surprisingly difficult making sense the whole thing, isn't it?

So local elections, just a quick explainer on local elections, people.

These are elections happening for district councils or county councils,

or sometimes unified councils up and down the country.

Some of those council seats traditionally were independent,

but increasingly almost all the seats are contested between the different parties.

And there's often quite a strong relationship between the way that people perform in the local council elections

and the run-up to a general election, general election, so that's one thing they worry about.

But the second thing, of course, is local councils really matter in and of themselves,

so we shouldn't just be reading it in terms of national elections.

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