The Conservative Party was hammered in a crucial byelection and was also on course for its worst set of local elections results in four decades, as the party lost roughly half its councillors in the areas where results were declared on Friday.
Tory prime minister Rishi Sunak tried to brush off the council election results as merely “disappointing”, with a battering for his party already priced in.
There was also a glimmer of hope for his position, which would be threatened by a truly catastrophic result, when the Conservatives held on in a key mayoral election in Tees Valley. Labour also failed to take control of bellwether Harlow council in Essex, which party leader Keir Starmer had said it needed to win.
Tory rebels waiting in the background for an excuse to launch a heave against Mr Sunak had not yet made a move heading into the weekend.
Voters in England went to the polls on Thursday to elect more than 2,600 councillors across 107 local authorities, while contests were also held for 11 mayoral seats including London and the areas around big regional cities such as Birmingham and Manchester. Voters in England and Wales also voted for 37 police and crime commissioners. No votes took place in Scotland or Northern Ireland.
Many of the election results came through in dribs and drabs on Friday, while others were due to be announced on Saturday and a handful on Sunday.
By teatime on Friday, with about 70 councils declared, Labour was up by 115 seats to a total of 709 councillors while the Conservative party had lost more than 270 seats, roughly as many seats as it had won. If the same run rate had continued throughout the rest of the local election results, the Conservative Party was on course to lose up to 500 of the 919 local authority seats it was defending, which would be close to the party’s worst fears for the election being realised.
The Conservative sitting mayor of the Tees Valley area around Middlesbrough, Ben Houchen, clung on to win a third term. “[Labour] have thrown the kitchen sink at this and they’ve failed,” he said, as Tories breathed a sigh of relief that the opposition had not won in a so-called “Red Wall” working class area of northern England that is key to the next general election.
Mr Sunak rushed to Middlesbrough to congratulate Mr Houchen and point to the result as evidence that the inevitability of a Labour win in the next general election was not assured. Yet there was still a huge swing to Labour in the Tees Valley mayoral result: Mr Houchen’s share of the vote fell from 72.8 per cent to 53.6 per cent.
Perhaps the worst news for the Conservative party on Friday came in the byelection for the Westminster parliamentary seat of Blackpool South. There was a 26 per cent swing in the vote towards Labour, one of the biggest electoral swings in postwar British history. Reform UK, an insurgent right-wing, anti-immigration party cofounded by Nigel Farage, came within 117 votes of pushing the Tories into third place, which would have been heralded as a disaster for Mr Sunak.
In another bitter blow for Mr Sunak, Labour also won a mayoral election in an area that includes his Yorkshire constituency. Labour also took control of Hartlepool council, an area where a byelection defeat for the party in 2021 almost caused Mr Starmer to resign.
Key results due on Friday include the mayoral election for the West Midlands area around Birmingham, where Tory incumbent Andy Street may just about cling on, and also London, where Labour’s Sadiq Khan will probably survive a Tory challenge.
