[EDIT: Kevan Lim sets me right on the Labour borough figure, which missed out Bixley and puts Chris Mole a bit behind the Labour borough vote.]
There has been a lot of talk about personal and negative votes and how the party machines got different votes from the borough and national elections, both Kevan Lim and Ipswich Spy have made this point. They are mainly wrong.
Actually I get the following results for adding up the votes in the constituency wards, Conservatives 17,543 and Labour 15,852. This was done by adding the highest vote in Alexandra plus the vote for the party candidate in the other twelve wards. This is not an enormous difference from the Parliamentary vote where Ben Gummer got 18,371 and Chris Mole got 16,292. The difference is probably mostly made up of those Liberal Democrat voters in wards who are more prepared to switch to the least bad party in a close parliamentary election (there’s 3,389 more Lib Dem borough votes than parliamentary votes).
There were crossover votes, but they largely cancelled each other out.
Labour did better than their vote would have suggested in the borough elections not because they were getting a far higher vote but because they were targeting their effort in certain wards. The seem to have fought this as a borough election rather than a parliamentary election, fighting hardest in seats such as Bridge, Rushmere, Alexandra and Sprites and not piling up the votes in Gipping and Gainsborough in the same way that the Tories were doing in Bixley and Holywells. For Heaven’s sake they were fighting in Whitehouse, which makes no sense as Labour knew they were destined to come third in the North Ipswich parliamentary seat.
Did they do this because in their heart they thought the game was up, or that they thought the Tories couldn’t win the seat or that they could fight two elections at once? I doubt we’ll know the answer for sure for a couple of years and a couple of defectors.
With their loss in Alexandra meaning that they’ve been denied control of the council it looks like they’ve miscalculated twice over.
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