After a recount and a knife-edge head to head, Labour’s Richard Parker has won the mayoralty in the West Midlands to defeat Andy Street.

Dick Parker: 225,590 votes – 37.8%
Andy Street: 224,082 votes – 37.5%

It clearly didn’t matter how much Street distanced himself from the national party during the campaign in the end. Losing a two-term mayor will make impossible for the Tories to spin their ‘everything is fine’ line. Truly disastrous expectation management from the Tories – who strongly claimed it would be a winner…

Politicians are nothing if not optimists. Andy Street has been firing out donation requests this week to Tory mailshot recipients, along with accompanying letter: “By contributing to my campaign, you can make a real difference to the outcome“. Not quite – six days before the election is a little too late…

Street has branded his campaign green and kept prominent Tories away. Donations are always helpful – Does he need to pay back arrears on his party account?

Redfield and Winton produced a poll that put Tory Mayor of the West Midlands Andy Street 14 points behind his Labour candidate rival Richard (Dick) Parker. Locals don’t seem too convinced. One voter asked Dick at a hustings this week: “Why should we vote for someone no one has ever heard of, is that really the best West Midlands Labour can do?” They probably haven’t heard of him because he isn’t from the West Midlands and lives outside the constituency he wants to represent…

His defence was to blame…the Tories, for not talking about him.

“The reason you haven’t heard of me is because you’re believing the nonsense the Tories have been setting out, because they’re so concerned about losing, they’ve been failing or not wanting to identify me as the candidate who’s standing for the Labour Party.“

Host Lewis Goodall was nonplussed. Dick can be forgiven for expecting the Tories to do his campaigning for him, as the Labour Party doesn’t seem to be too keen on it either. Leaflets sent to the region this month don’t mention him at all…

Labour’s dodging Dick while Andy Street dodges the Tories…

The Court of Appeal has put a spanner in the works for Tory Birmingham mayor Andy Street today. Street has made it his personal mission for some months to take over police powers from the Labour Police and Crime Commissioner – something enabled by the new Levelling Up and Regeneration Act. The Court of Appeal, however, has ruled in favour of the Labour PCC Simon Foster to prevent Street from taking over its powers and abolishing the office. They argue that the case for transferral was not made strongly enough. Ruining Street’s long-held plans with the Home Office…

Street’s office had assumed for months that the power transfer would go ahead and Guido hears they had put together a comprehensive “crime plan” to market to voters using their new powers. That will now have to be scrapped or salvaged as the Tories rush to select a candidate for the PCC election, start to finish, by the deadline at the beginning of April. When they last selected a candidate in 2019 the process took nine months and there were only two applicants. That equals a dud candidate and a damaged Street campaign…

West Midlands mayor Andy Street has come out of intense negotiations with Sunak over HS2 and announced that he won’t be resigning after he heavily trailed that he would. Street said yesterday that Rishi would be “cancelling the future” if he gave up on the Manchester leg of the project. Speaking to the Beeb’s Chris Mason, he said “Obviously, I’m very disappointed that he announced that today…but this is a good compromise.” Quite the climb down…

As the country struggles with near double-digit inflation and crippling strikes, one group of taxpayer-funded workers are doing very nicely for themselves. At a meeting of the West Midlands Combined Authority Board:

“It was agreed that the Monitoring Officer should write to the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities to request that the West Midlands Combined Authority Order 2016 be further amended to allow the payment of allowances to all members and co-opted members of the WMCA.”

To cut through the jargon: they’re asking the government for a taxpayer-funded blank cheque…

This wasn’t the only cash-grab made by the council, they also “agreed all allowances should be index-linked and increased annually as proposed”. With inflation at its current rate, that will mean thousands of pounds are dished out in near 10% pay rises. Even nurses are being denied the same privilege.

To be fair, West Midlands Mayor Andy Street has committed to turn down his £16,000 bonus. Let’s not give him too much credit, he is a multimillionaire…