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There are lots of sighs of relief being breathed at the top of the Conservative Party right now. Rishi Sunak’s supporters have for weeks been stressing the significance of the mayoral elections in the Tees Valley and the West Midlands, where the declaration is coming tomorrow but Labour have effectively already conceded defeat. Here’s where the statistical and the political perspectives diverge. Ask an elections expert and they say these mayoral elections, with strong incumbents who have run independent-minded campaigns, are a poor guide to what might happen in a general election. But Conservative MPs waking up this morning to dire council results told me they were waiting to see these mayoral results before forming an assessment about the political picture for the Conservative Party. So - what do the election results so far mean for Rishi Sunak? Henry Zeffman explains.