But the overall point is that - our losses were very heavily concentrated in a small number of councils, and understand that is important in terms of both understanding what happened overall (ie it wasn’t a general rout across the whole country), why many people in the party have reacted the way they did (ie for by far the majority of activists and members the results in their area were good or indifferent rather than bad) and for understanding what some of the keys are to getting a better result next year (ie it doesn’t take many councils to have a huge impact on the overall figures).

I’m not denying those results were bad from a local government point of view - in fact I’ve said as much. But as the key question for the party is whether it can survive the next General Election relatively intact, the news is nothing like as bad.

Of course there are a small number of areas we did exceptionally badly, but if you’re going to discount them, then you need to discount the ones where we did exceptionally well as well.

Sorry James, but that proposition is nonsense on its face.