Local elections: who had it worse?

In normal political times, local election and by-election results would show a bad night for the government and a good night for the official opposition. Not so with this set of results in English councils and the Runcorn and Helsby by-election, where both Labour and the Conservatives have been given bloody noses and Nigel Farage is celebrating the best set of results for Reform in both its history and that of its predecessor party, Ukip. 

There are a number of councils yet to declare, but what we know so far is that Reform beat Labour in Runcorn by just six votes (confirmed by a recount) and has picked up more than 500 council seats, as well as its first mayoral positions. Andrea Jenkyns and former boxer Luke Campbell won in Greater Lincolnshire and Hull & East Yorkshire respectively, and the party now has its first female MP, with Sarah Pochin winning in Runcorn. 

Farage repeated his claim that Reform is now the official opposition to Labour, with many Labour MPs themselves pointing out that their party got a hammering partly because of its cuts to the winter fuel payment and proposed benefit cuts. He also punched the sore in the Conservative party, telling Kemi Badenoch ‘please stay. I mean, please don’t resign, we want you to stay on as leader’. On our Coffee House Shots live podcast, our incoming political editor Tim Shipman says he has noticed an increase in Tory MPs talking to him today about the need to replace their leader. Henry Hill looks over the results and what they mean for Conservative MPs here. What he finds explains why Tim is getting more messages from MPs about another defenestration. 

As for the party in government, well, Keir Starmer gave an ‘I get it’ response this morning, but then said the message that he’d got was that the government needed to go ‘further and faster’ to deliver the change voters wanted. The response from the left of his party, though, has been that the government is already steaming too fast in the wrong direction towards welfare cuts and other things that are actively putting voters off. So the next few weeks are going to be fraught for both main parties – if ‘main party’ is something Conservatives still feel they can call themselves, that is.