"It is about bins, not Brexit," a Tory campaign director once told me. It would turn out to be sound advice for the party who went on to win some of the best sets of local election results in years. People, it would seem, do not vote on constitutional theory when their rubbish has not been collected for a fortnight.

Kemi Badenoch appears to have seized this with substantially more alacrity than her opponents. Today she launched the Conservative local election campaign, and Labour should be worried. "You vote Labour, you get trash," she boomed to a roaring audience, referencing the bin strikes in Birmingham that have been "going for twice as long as Mandelson was ambassador".

The line landed extremely well with a friendly crowd, and it will probably be just as popular with voters as a whole. Because it is true. Birmingham, Britain's second city, now resembles something close to a refuse tip, with mountains of uncollected waste and the streets reeking of rot.

In charge of this circus? A Labour council.

But Badenoch did not stop there. She spoke about ending the stench of drugs in the streets. She announced plans to scrap stamp duty on family homes giving relief for young couples trying to get on the housing ladder and she pledged to scrap business rates to get businesses growing again, help for the shopkeeper watching customers drift away.

These are the things that people actually care about, and material matters they can feel and see. Far from Westminster, in the streets of 'Real Britain' Sir Keir Starmer purports to care about, these small indignities could soon accumulate into electoral revenge.

Labour, with impeccable timing, chose to respond by attacking a comment the shadow justice secretary made about public prayers. Meanwhile, Sadiq Khan was yabbering on again for Britain to shackle itself back to Brussels. With local elections six weeks away, why talk about potholes and crime when you could relitigate Brexit and pick fights over religion?

The contrast is instructive. Badenoch is talking about what voters see every day, the problems affecting their lives and the issues that will determine how they vote in May. Labour is talking about literally anything else.

This matters because Labour's grip on power is clearly becoming far more precarious than their titanic headline majority suggests. Many MPs hold seats by margins thin enough to evaporate overnight and it is at local elections where governments receive a proper kicking. It is at local level where voters get to send a 'mid-season message' about what they think of life under this new regime.

If Badenoch keeps talking about bins and Labour keeps talking about Brexit, we know how this ends. Voters choose whoever promises to improve their lives in a real and noticeable way. Come May, the electorate will deliver its verdict.