• THE great thing about post-election analysis is that it’s truly democratic: everyone can have a view, even those new to campaigns, (The ex-council leader should stop briefing against Hampstead & Kilburn CLP, June 14).

Your correspondent Rebecca Shirazi is rightly proud of Labour’s victory in Swiss Cottage. The work of the candidates, now councillors, was Stakhanovite.

But there is context to the result. Swiss Cottage is a ward which Labour probably did well in during the 2015 general election, which Labour won in the 2016 mayoral and GLA election, and which Labour must have stormed in the 2017 general election.

The reason Labour won it in May is because people put a lot of hard work into a ward which had tilted Labour some time ago.

The exam question for those in charge of the Labour campaign in the west of the borough is how effective their targeting and volunteer management was.

Eight years into austerity, post-Grenfell, post-Brexit referendum, with the local Tories in disarray, and with a great council leader and popular MPs, perhaps Camden Labour should have done even better than it did.

Rather than pile up votes in Kilburn and waste effort in the unwinnable Frognal and Fitzjohns, wouldn’t it have been better to deploy some of the activists tied down there to Fortune Green, Belsize, or even Highgate where there were opposition seats for the taking?

It’s possible to conclude that what went on in the west of Camden cost Jeremy Corbyn three to five Labour councillors which a more disciplined effort might have delivered.

JAMES BUTLER
Savernake Road, NW3