It’s the most wonderful time of the year here in the UK: we’re just four weeks away from this year’s local elections! Celebrate good times, come on.

Councils holding elections on Thursday 3 May include the great cities of Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle and Leeds; another 29 metropolitan boroughs in the orbit of one of those cities; as well as assorted county, district or unitary councils around the country.

As if that wasn’t enough excitement there will also be five elections for borough mayors, and a new metro mayor for Sheffield and South Yorkshire. The most exciting battles though, is likely to be in the 32 boroughs of Greater London, where the governing party might plausibly lose control of such reliably Tory councils as Wandsworth.

As the short campaign kicks off, I thought it seemed like a good moment to drag New Statesman correspondent Stephen Bush back into the podcast dungeon to talk about what to watch out for over the next few weeks. What would constitute a good night for each of the major parties? And could Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party really be on course to win Westminster?

Skylines is the podcast from the New Statesman’s cities site, CityMetric. It’s hosted by Jonn Elledge.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.