Local election results live: Farage’s Reform snatch Runcorn from Labour while Tories’ vote collapses

Our Whitehall editor Kate Devlin writes:

Nigel Farage’s party dealt a serious blow to Keir Starmer at 6am this morning, when it took the Westminster seat of Runcorn, previously one of Labour’s safest seats.

As the recriminations begin within Labour, the party is trying to pile the pressure on the Tories when it comes to Reform.

Ellie Reeves, Labour’s party chair, said the Conservative Party needs to “come clean” about whether there is going to be a “grubby backroom deal” with Reform UK.

The issue is a sore point for the Tories.

And this morning the Tory chair Nigel Huddleston appeared to suggest they would not happen, despite Kemi Badenoch leaving the door open to the idea at the weekend, saying parties could only do deals with people they “trust”.

Reform’s deputy leader Richard Tice has declared that his party is “parking our tanks on the Tory lawns of Lincolnshire and we are taking Labour seats in the Labour heartland”.

He told Times Radio: “It’s certainly a political earthquake because up and down the country in some 650 elections, give or take, voters have voted and the votes are coming in against the main two parties, against the failures at every level.

“And I think that, yeah, this is a seismic shift in British politics. We’ve won a parliamentary by-election. That’s, to put it in context, it’s the equivalent of winning Hackney South from Diane Abbott.

“It’s that sort of majority is how safe a seat, safe a Labour seat, that was. And in the county of Lincolnshire where I’m an MP, we have convincingly won the mayoral election and we’re on course to take control of that council from a standing start.

“So, you know, we’re parking our tanks on the Tory lawns of Lincolnshire and we are taking Labour seats in the Labour heartlands, the Hartlepools, the Tynesides of this world. And it’s, yeah, it’s pretty remarkable.”

Asked on BBC Breakfast whether Tory leader Kemi Badenoch’s position was secure after the local election results, party co-chairman Nigel Huddleston said: “Kemi’s position is certainly solid.

“She’s only been leader for six months and she was out and about right across the country, and I can tell you this, everywhere we went, people wanted to see her more and hear more from her.”

Pressed on his use of the word “solid”, Mr Huddleston said: “I say that in a really positive way. She’s very sensible, she’s very honest, she’s very straightforward.

“She doesn’t go around telling people what they want to hear. That’s the easy route in politics.”

With vote counting ongoing and just one in 23 councils having so far declared, the Tories are – as expected – the biggest losers of the night so far in terms of seats lost.

With Reform surging ahead to pick up 79 council seats so far, the Tories were second with 37 and Labour lagging behind with 11, according to the BBC.

Yet the Tories had so far suffered the biggest losses, thanks to their large victory in the previous 2021 elections – so far losing 62 seats compared with 13 for Labour.

Labour’s party chair Ellie Reeves, on BBC’s Today programme, is now asked if the party was willing to rethink following its by-election defeat in Runcorn and Helsby.

“None of the political parites have said how they would fund the NHS, they may have criticised Labour’s policies and the tough decisions we’ve taken, but none of them put forward solutions on how they would fund the NHS, how they get waiting lists down, how they would recruit extra GPs,” she says.

Asked if the party was willing to do more than listen to the electorate, she says: “We are listening and delivering on our plan for change. It takes time.”

She said, in Runcorn, the government needed to go “further and faster” on schemes to help local people including rolling out breakfast clubs for children.

She adds: “We know people want to feel better, that’s why our increase in national minimum wage gives a pay rise to 3.5 million lowest paid workers in places like Runcorn. But we know that people don’t feel that overnight.”

Asked whether the Tories could do deals with Reform, Conservative Party co-chair Nigel Huddleston told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “I can’t see why we’d want to do that. Reform’s goal and strategy is the destruction of the Conservative Party and at the end of the day they don’t share many of the core values and principles that we hold.”

Pressed again, he said: “We’ve done deals in the past on a council level where it’s to implement Conservative policies and Conservative principles … I welcome the fact that Nigel Farage seems to be adopting some Conservative policies and principles because running efficient councils is exactly what we do.

Challenged a final time, he said: “It’s a broad spectrum of things here – you also need to go into deals with people that you can trust. The key thing here is that we want to make sure that we get Conservative values, Conservative policies and Conservative principles implemented, whether that’s a local or national level.

He added: “We are under new leadership now. We’re using our time in opposition wisely, we’re developing a whole new set of principles and policies because we need to present ourselves as an alternative government – not a protest party, not a populist party that will go around saying that we’ve got simple, straight answers to really complex questions. That’s not a credible long-term proposition.”

As we heard earlier, Ros Jones, who won a fourth term as Labour mayor of Doncaster with a narrow margin,said the government needed to listen to the public on issues such as reforms to PIP and changes to the winter fuel payments.

Now we are hearing from Labour’s chair Ellie Reeves, who is speaking to the Today programme. Ms Jones’ comments have been put to her on a night her party has lost the Runcorn and Helsby by-election to Reform.

She says: “I think that we are getting on with delivering for people. We have had to take some tough decisions since getting into government, some difficult decisions to stabilise the economy.

“We inherited a mess after 14 years of the Conservatives, so we have had tough decisions, we have taken those tough decisions so we can put money into NHS, to bring down waiting lists, they’ve been going down six months in row.

“But we know that there is more to do. People voted last July at the general election for change, we are getting on delivering that change, it does take time, we know people are impatient, we are too.”

Tory co-chair Nigel Huddleston said that while his party had expected a bad night in the local elections, it had been “a terrible night for Labour”.

He told Sky News: “Our key job as His Majesty’s Opposition is to hold this disastrous Labour government to account on the terrible policies that they are implementing and on that actually, that resonated well on the doorsteps.

“People do recognise that we’re doing that, but these local elections were always going to be tough, and it’s not a surprise that Reform won in Lincolnshire or indeed in Runcorn.

“In fact, actually, I thought they would have won by more in Runcorn.”

A senior Tory source has told The Independent that the party’s hopes of winning the mayoralty in Peterborough and Cambridgeshire are “rapidly fading”.

The party’s candidate Paul Bristow had been favourite to win and the Tories had been hoping for victory to help deal with an otherwise dreadful set of results.

But now it is believed that Reform, who had not targeted the mayoralty, is expected to win. The Lib Dems are projected to be in second with a greater chance of winning than the Tories.

Here is some analysis from our political editor David Maddox:

In the end the by-election result in Runcorn and Helsby which will get the headlines and it is a very significant breakthrough moment for Nigel Farage.

His party’s candidate Sarah Pochin’s win by just six votes is the first time a Farage led pro-Brexit party has won a by-election where they did not have the sitting MP recontest the seat.

In so doing they overturned a majority of more than 14,000 for Labour, so the result is impressive but not unexpected given Keir Starmer’s problematic first six months in government.

However, Labour will be pleased to have held on and beaten Reform in the mayoralties in North Tyneside, Doncaster, where energy secretary Ed Miliband has his seat, and the West of England. Doncaster was one Reform had been expected to win and it underlines that Farage’s march to power in Westminster is far from inevitable.

But in the previously Tory area of Lincolnshire Reform’s Dame Andrea Jenkyns has scored a big result. Farage’s party may also have controlling majorities in two councils.

This all means that there is a chance to scrutinise Reform as a party of power before the next election.

The biggest losers tonight are the Tories who look to be bereft of heartlands and could find themselves being replaced by Reform.