On London Extra: Blue gloom

The Tories could be routed in London. Plus campaign nastiness and sadness, Davey's endeavours and when the trams stopped, 1952

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I spent Tuesday evening touring Victoria on the top deck of an original Routemaster, which was more fun than staying home to watch the first leaders' debate of the general election campaign. "Of course it's terrible," observed Professor Phillip Cowley of QMUL, who tuned in. "It's always terrible." Snap polls said Rishi Sunak had won, then said Keir Starmer had. Most people seem to think it won't make much difference anyway. Other polls just keep on making desperate reading for the Conservatives and raising the possibility that in London come 5 July they will be close to extinct.

We've seen two national multilevel regression and post-stratification "mega polls" - MRP for short, praise the Lord - in the last few days, one of which anticipated the Tories being reduced to just four London seats out of 75, the other to just three. Imagine a London political map with, say, only one blue blob on it, perhaps nicknamed Orpington Island. Imagine the unlikely but seemingly not impossible scenario of there being no blue on it at all.

Such an outcome, or even something close, would be humbling for a party renowned for winning elections. Even in 1997, when Tony Blair led Labour to a huge majority of 179, the Tories won 11 London seats out of 74. Their total improved in 2001 and again 2005. It improved still more in 2010, when David Cameron became prime minister. Yet his party didn't do as well in London as it had hoped to, taking 28 seats to Labour's 38 and failing, for example, to capture Tooting, where Sadiq Khan was MP. The marginalisation of Conservatism in the capital might be said to have begun that year.