Last night the Tories gained a council ward in Claudia Webbe’s Leicester East constituency, the gain in Humberstone & Hamilton by Daniel Crewe was in a majority ethnic ward. Leicester East is one of the top Hindu denominated wards in the country (21%). The Tories won 44.7% of the vote, an 18.4 point swing to them, Labour’s vote dropped -15.6 points to 33.2% and this was despite the Green Party vote collapsing -7.1 points to 8%. Giving the Tories their first councillor on Leicester Council for years.

The steady Tory inroad into ethnic Indian heritage voters has been given a steroid shot after Starmer’s Labour Party attacked the Tories in a chauvinistic appeal to Pakistani heritage voters with a crude negative association of Boris with India’s Prime Minister Modi. The UK has an estimated population of 1.4 million with Indian heritage and 1.2 million with Pakistani heritage. The politics of the sub-continent are finding an electoral echo in Britain today.

Keith Vaz had been out campaigning for the Humberstone & Hamilton council seat, which is within the borders of his old seat, and was the former ward of Vaz’s now deceased election agent, councillor John Thomas. Vaz has been campaigning and putting himself about very actively in recent months ahead of his successor Claudia Webbe’s imminent day in court. If the case goes badly for Webbe, Vaz would be in the running to be the Labour Party candidate in a parliamentary by-election in Leicester East. Slippery Vaz has managed to secure the chairmanship of the Leicester East constituency Labour Party to aid his efforts. Some suspect that if Vaz was blocked by Labour’s NEC he would try and stitch up the seat for his daughter, though many Labour figures are convinced he still hopes to return to the Commons in his own right. It would be ironic if the crude appeal in Batley and Spen to Pakistani chauvinism against India damaged his prospects with his core voter base…