Down-ticket, things are not quite so rosy for the Labour left

Jeremy Corbyn’s victory turned out to be on an extraordinary scale – 59.5% of the vote. His political message contrasted hope and the possibility of following an idealistic path to victory with the initially downbeat message from his competitors that we had to compromise with an electorate with harsh views on the economy, welfare and immigration and this galvanised both new members and registered supporters to join up, and a substantial section of the existing membership, going way beyond the people who habitually back candidates with Corbyn’s politics. Organisationally his team knew how to dominate social media, to manage large numbers of volunteers, to create momentum through online twitter storms and old-style rallies, and crucially they understood that recruitment was essential in an election where you could alter the size of the electorate. Professionally, it is impossible not to be awestruck by their campaigning achievement even if you don’t agree with the politics of their candidate.

And yet…

It is scant consolation to Labour moderates who have just suffered their worst leadership result ever, but in the other down-ticket elections held at the same time, things look more like the Labour Party version of normality than like the coattails of a political revolution.

The organisers of Labour’s Hard Left have over 30 years experience of battles for Labour’s internal machinery and key decision-making committees, so whilst they will be busy coming to terms with the huge new powers they have through virtue of taking the leadership, they will probably be casting a wistful eye at the rest of the results and wondering how they didn’t do better.

For Deputy Leader, Angela Eagle was effectively Corbyn’s running mate, endorsed alongside him by the main leftwing groupings like CLPD (Campaign for Labour Party Democracy), and using campaign emails to link herself to him. This was slightly overstating her left credentials, as she has been a loyal and constructive Soft Left frontbencher rather than a Corbyn-style Hard Left rebel, but all the same she was the most leftwing person on the ballot. She came 4^th of 5 candidates on the first ballot, with just 16.2%, and was knocked out before two candidates clearly to her right, Caroline Flint and Stella Creasy. The winner was Tom Watson who whilst he has radical credentials as the scourge of Murdoch, and deep links to the trade unions, made it clear both in his final major stump speech and his interview with Andrew Marr on Sundaythat he has his own politics, which include support for NATO and Trident, a partnership view of the relationship between business and unions, and is opposed to the left’s longstanding proposals to make it easier to deselect MPs. Far from being a double-act, it now looks like Watson is bringing balance to the leadership team and will try to combine loyalty and giving Corbyn’s leadership and strategy the chance to succeed with acting as a brake on any wilder or more sectarian proposals and a bridge with an angry and worried PLP. Given Watson got a lot of support from the party’s traditional right and also because of his personal campaigning record, it is extraordinary compared to the leadership result that the three “New Labour” candidates – Bradshaw, Creasy and Flint – got a combined 44.5% on the first round, 3% higher than the three non-Corbyn leadership candidates. It does make you wonder what would have happened if Watson had stood as a candidate with cross-factional and union support for leader against Corbyn, or whether Corbyn would even have run in these circumstances.

For London Mayor, the picture looks similar, even in what is perceived to be a very leftwing region (actually it’s a very polarised one compared to the far less factional atmosphere in regions outside London). The candidate who shared Corbyn’s Hard Left politics, Diane Abbott, got a remarkably similar score to Eagle – 16.8%. She came third behind both a clearly Blairite candidate (Tessa Jowell) who got 29.7% (another Blairite, David Lammy, got a respectable 9.4%), and the eventual winner Sadiq Khan, who got 37.5%. Khan is identified with the Soft Left of the party – he was a close ally of Ed Miliband, who the Corbynites have derided as insufficiently radical, and since his selection has been at pains like Watson to stress he is his own man with different, more inclusive politics to Corbyn.

For the Conference Arrangements Committee, a nationwide ballot for two seats representing CLPs, the franchise was restricted to full members rather than registered and affiliated supporters. This committee plays a crucial role in ruling on which contemporary and emergency policy motions and rule changes are valid and can be debated at Annual Conference. Placing Corbynite voices on it for the 2016 Conference would have given the left a far greater chance of getting their most radical policy and constitutional changes debated earlier in the Parliament. The result was a landslide for the moderates. Gloria De Piero, who had backed Liz Kendall for Leader, got 109,888 votes, and Michael Cashman, previously an MEP and NEC member elected on the moderate slate got 100,484. They defeated former Scottish Campaign Group MP Katy Clark (80,193), and Jon Lansman, a veteran organiser for the Bennite left who had helped mastermind Corbyn’s victory but could only deliver 37,270 votes for himself. An independent candidate took 33,077. This seems to show that name recognition still counts for something even if your politics are not on the left of the party. Ironically it was the left who had campaigned for this to be an OMOV ballot rather than one among Annual Conference delegates. These seats do not come up for re-election until the term that starts with the 2018 Annual Conference.

The National Policy Forum CLP section elections are also conducted by OMOV among full members only, but broken down into 11 regions, each electing 4 ordinary delegates, and a youth delegate only elected by young members. Here the moderates and left each took exactly the same number of seats, 25 apiece, if judged according to who had been on the Labour First and Grassroots Alliance recommendations lists. A further 5 people were elected without either endorsement, though analysis of their public views suggests three lean left and two lean right. This represents a net gain of 11 seats by the left, 9 of which are explicable by just two regions. In Scotland the left narrowly regained seats they had lost in 2012, and in the South East, traditionally a moderate clean sweep, everything was lost with possible explanations being the retirement of three well-known incumbents and no less than five independent candidates meaning that non-left votes were splintered. Elsewhere, the results look very similar to 2012, with the left strong in Wales, London and Yorkshire, the East balanced and the moderates strong in the North, North West, West Midlands, East Midlands and South West. The national victory for Corbyn clearly disguised some regional variations, with London and the South East both having a very large share of the member and registered supporter electorate due to demographic factors (put bluntly, density of Guardian readers) and recruitment in London by the mayoral campaigns, being disproportionately supportive of Corbyn because of the same demographic factors, and London having a high turnout due to the efforts of the mayoral campaigns.

In the context of the sweeping Corbyn victory these rather mixed other results are an important morale boost for the moderate wing of the party at its point of deepest despair, prove other traditions in the party than the Hard Left can win with the same voters in the same ballot as Corbyn did, let alone in the future under different circumstances, and have a practical impact in providing a series of checks and balances that may make it less easy for the left to rapidly change the rules and core policy direction of the party.