LAST week looked set to be another bad week for Theresa May but now she can spend the Bank Holiday relaxing. Who knows, she might even try running through a wheat field again.

Monday started badly when Amber Rudd, our local Hastings MP, resigned as Home Secretary. She was seen as Mrs May’s ‘human shield’ – protecting her against the fact that the Windrush Generation scandal originated when she was in charge of the Home Office.

It looked like it could get worse for Mrs May when she was forced to appoint Sajid Javid as Mrs Rudd’s successor. Never a fan of Mrs May nor she of him, Javid repaid the ‘favour’ of being promoted by immediately turning against the PM in the crucial cabinet meeting that considered the vexed question of what do about the EU Customs Union when we’re no longer members.

It’s odd how this issue – now the biggest problem confronting UK negotiators - hardly ever came up during the referendum campaign; a tribute to the Leave campaigners’ studied silence and the Remainers failure to alert the electorate to the complexities of the issue. Put simply it’s that if we stay in the Union we lose the ability to negotiate our own trade deals outside the EU, but we gain frictionless trade which means goods can move seamlessly between us and Europe; and we also don’t have to face the huge problem of reinstating the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic.

If we leave the Union we gain the ability to negotiate our own trade deals, but we face the problem of reinstating the Irish border with all the threats that this would entail to the Good Friday agreement. We would also have to reinstate customs checks between Britain and the continent which will mean delays at our ports and endanger the ability of companies here to continue to manufacture products that require fast turnaround imported components.

Mrs May thought she’d squared the circle by saying we would be leaving the Customs Union and instead join something called the Customs ‘Partnership’. But a majority of her colleagues, perhaps not being as dumb as she thought they were, said nope not having that. She lost this vote by one – step forward Mr Javid, candidate for the ‘how not to say thanks for the promotion’ award for 2018.

So it was all looking pretty grim for Mrs May on Thursday, and probably getting worse, as voters in various parts of the country (including Hastings, Worthing and Crawley) went to the polls – most likely to express their anger with the Government, which is the normal pattern in such elections. But hey ho, Mrs May woke up on Friday to discover that not only had things not turned out quite as badly as she had no doubt been fearing, and had indeed been predicted, but things had actually turned out rather well.

Labour had (perhaps foolishly) been suggesting it would be capturing three key Tory strongholds in London - Wandsworth, Westminster and Barnet - as well as a number of other councils. In the event they captured just one council, Plymouth, counter-balanced by the Tories’ surprising takeover of Derby. And while Labour’s failure to win Barnet, which has London’s largest Jewish population, might have been attributable to the Party’s internal rows about antisemitism, no such explanation could be offered for the Party’s failure to capture the other two London boroughs it had in its sights.

In the 2017 election Labour won 40 per cent of the national vote, many in the party saw that as a launch pad for moving into a commanding lead over the Conservatives. It didn’t happen, or at least hasn’t happened yet, and the results of this week’s local elections offer little sign that this is going to happen any time soon.

So as we head into this, hopefully, sunny bank holiday weekend the parties, and their leaders find themselves in very different places. For Mrs May, there is the hope that no matter how much of a mess the Government appears to be getting into in its Brexit negotiations the electorate appears to be saying “not bothered’. Mr Corbyn has to think very hard as to whether the face that Labour has been presenting to the voters since the 2017 election has appeals to 40 per cent of the electorate and no more – not enough to form a government. But one party leader can head for the beach with a smile on his face. Vince Cable’s Liberal Democrats have, since the collapse of the Coalition Government, been written off as a spent electoral force; but these elections have shown that is far from the case and just maybe British politics is returning to its ‘normal’ three-party pattern, which is good news for neither Mrs May or Mr Corbyn.

Ivor Gaber is Professor of Political Journalism at the University of Sussex and a former Westminster political correspondent.