From the Ridiculous to the Sublime: Britain is building a state-of-the-art, sea-going research lab and someone had the bright idea of letting the public name the ship through an on-line vote. The winner, by a landslide, was “Boaty McBoatface”, a joke suggestion which went viral. (Repeat after me: “You can’t make this stuff up”.) As you can imagine, the government was not keen on the idea of attaching a stupid name to its expensive new vessel. So they decided to name it after David Attenborough, in honor of his 90th birthday. But they are going to name a small, remote-controlled research submarine Boaty McBoatface. In response, there is apparently an online petition seeking to change David Attenborough’s name to Boaty McBoatface.

And in the Real Election: As you may recall if you have been reading this blog, Britain had local elections on Thursday. The Mayor of London and four other cities was decided, as was the Sottish and Welsh Assemblies (and maybe the Norther Ireland one too) and various local councils around England. At the same time, the Brexit vote is looming in six weeks and the Conservative Party is in chaos, caused by a series of missteps as well as internal disagreements about Brexit. And Jeremy Corbyn’s Blairite enemies in the Labour Party were sharpening their knives and predicting a bad result due to his unpopularity.

On Election Night, the BBC and the other networks had all of their spiffy sets and electronic gizmos all ready. The problem was that there was nothing to report. They seem to have this habit in Britain of waiting for the votes to actually be counted, rather than breathlessly calling the result based on exit polling or whatever. (What would Wolf Blitzer think?) To make matters even slower, the television coverage of election official actually counting the votes revealed that they were all dealing with huge piles of paper ballots which all had to be separated, unfolded and put into piles. (No computerized or mechanical voting machines for these Brits. I guess the good thing is that there are no hanging chads.) And as if the paper ballots didn’t slow things enough, after the first preferences are counted, they have to go back and count the second preferences. It is all such a time-consuming mess that the results of the London election were not announced until late on Friday afternoon. (Actually, that was the point when the papers were willing to report the result even though the actual counting had not finished completely.) That London election was not all that close and you can bet that in the USA, the networks would have announced the winner about 15 seconds after the polls closed. Here they acted like it was all a big mystery for almost a day.

So what exactly happened and what does it all mean? Here is what I think:

• Sadiq Khan (Labour) won the London mayoral election pretty easily. Zac Goldsmith (Conservative), risked his reputation on racist attacks on Khan late in the election, trying to link him to Radical Islamists. It backfired and you’d think that Goldsmith’s political career is over. (Kind of tough in a way because he was pretty progressive for a Tory and was very good on a number of issues, especially the environment. But he’ll just have to go back to being absurdly wealthy.) Khan basically ran away from Corbyn during the election, especially at the end, so it is hard to see how Corbyn and the Labour leadership can claim much credit for this win, although they will try.
• Scotland had traditionally been Labour territory, but in recent elections they had been losing out to the Scottish National Party (SNP) and had dropped to second place. This election was the only real disaster for Corbyn, as Labour lost a lot of seats and dropped to third, behind the Conservatives. (It seems like the Tories took over the spot in the electorate that opposes leaving the UK, which, while not nearly enough to give them a chance at governing, did make them the choice of those who want to restrain the SNP.)
• Wales is even stronger Labour country and they kept control, although they did lose a few seats. Interestingly, the party who picked off the Labour seats in Wales was UKIP, a right-wing, anti-immigrant party that probably got a boost from all of the the anti-immigration talk surrounding Brexit. They are pretty close to being fascists, so it is a bit worrying that they are showing any strength at all.
• As for the local Council elections, Labour looks like it will lose somewhere around 25 seats. Normally a party out of power gains seats in one of these by-elections, just the way the Republicans usually pick up sets in an off year election when there is a Democratic President, and vice versa. So on one hand, Labour should have been expected to pick up seats. One the other hand, Labour picked up a large number of seats (for the same reasons) in by-elections four years ago, so it may not have been realistic to expect another huge gain. A large cohort of Corbyn haters were predicting that he was leading Labour off an election cliff and that they were going to loose 150-200 seats. So basically it wasn’t that bad for Corbyn, although the haters are switching to complaining that Labour didn’t add seats. (Although, you have to wonder if you can glean anything about Corbyn’s leadership from local Council elections, which are more about local than national issues.)
• In the end, Corbyn survived. He didn’t do well enough to silence his many critics but he also didn’t do badly enough to embolden those critics to try a coup. It is not hard for me to see Corbyn hanging around until the big Parliamentary elections in 2020, constantly besieged by unhappy MPs (with rumors of plots) and belittled by much of the press, but ultimately supported by enough of the membership that he makes it to the big election, when I have no doubt he will lose spectacularly and fade into oblivion. If that scenario is correct, the big winner tonight is the Conservative Party, since they get to keep their favorite punching bag and don’t have to deal with a stronger leader (although it is not entirely clear who such a leader would be at this point). Of course, the whole Brexit thing is the real wild card in the whole equation and the aftermath of the vote is likely to throw the Tories into absolute turmoil. In such a circumstance and without Cameron’s ability to mask their true colors, it is possible that the electorate could be well and truly sick of the current government (if not actually repulsed) and ready for any sort of change. That would be the Corbyn pipe dream.