The Commons Library researchers have had a go at analysing party membership numbers. Labour’s influx of young millenials and aging Marxists under Corbyn has seen their membership exceed the total membership of all the other parties combined. The SNP will of course argue that their membership is actually a higher proportion of their Scottish electorate. The librarians generously put Tory membership at 124,000.

On election days like today, party activists are crucial to getting out the vote. This is where the lack of members really undermines the Tories. Emails, texts and phone calls only go so far…

50 years ago it was the Tories who had more members than their rival parties combined. It presaged 18 years of government. Have the rules of political marketing changed so much that you can have a governing party without a mass membership to support it? A decade of Blair rule with a party membership smaller than the Tories suggests the answer is yes…

The best indicator of how a general election might go is the number of council seats a party has won. In ’79 the Tories had in previous years got 4,000 more seats than Labour, in ’97 Labour had won some 8,000 more seats than the Tories. After 8 years of Tory rule, Labour will need to win some 1,500 seats off the Tories tonight just to even match them…