The nervous wait for the first result was longer than usual, as counting centres wrestled with multiple ballots for councils, mayors and police and crime commissioners. It was well past midnight on Friday morning when the first ward flashed up, coming as always from Sunderland, which prides itself on its rapid vote counting. A big Tory to Labour swing in Sunderland’s Copt Hill.
As we moved into the small hours of the morning, the flow of data rose from a trickle to a torrent, and an overall picture began to form. Voters clearly wanted the Conservatives out. Who they wanted instead was less clear.
Well before dawn it was obvious this would be one of the worst ever results for the Tories in local elections. The governing party was losing seats at a fearsome clip all through the night, and doing worst in the places where they started strongest. In council after council, the bleak picture from polling was confirmed.
Labour’s first council gain came just after 2am in Hartlepool, an early redemption for Keir Starmer in the very place where a byelection defeat three years ago triggered the worst crisis in his leadership. Others soon followed – Labour gained control in Thurrock and Redditch and ended the Conservative majority in North East Lincolnshire – all heavily leave-voting areas with Westminster target seats. This pattern would hold true throughout three days of counting – the stronger the leave vote in an area, the bigger the swing to Labour. The scar of Brexit on the electoral landscape was beginning to heal.
With most councils only starting their counts on Friday, the true scale of the defeat was slow to emerge, though a grim pattern for the government had set in early. The Tories were losing nearly half of all the seats they were defending – the worst rate of defeat since 1996, on the eve of Blair’s first landslide. The Conservatives lost more support in seats they were defending, and the main challenger party did better, both patterns suggesting a strongly anti-Tory mood at work.
Voters were united in their desire to remove Conservatives but divided over who to install instead. This was a very fragmented set of local election results, with Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens all making substantial gains in different parts of the country. Some of this reflected tactical voting, with voters coalescing behind locally stronger parties. The Lib Dems in particular benefited from this pattern, gaining more than 100 council seats despite a relatively weak overall vote, with concentrated advances delivering major gains in “blue wall” areas such as Dorset and Wokingham, where the Lib Dems are the main opposition to the Conservatives.
But something deeper was also going on. Voters in areas where the Tories were out of the running were also switching in large numbers to the Greens, Reform UK and local independents. Such fragmentation confirms what we see in polling: a restive electorate that is angry at the Conservatives, unenthused by Labour and open to new alternatives.
The large Green advance may in particular be a sign of trouble for Labour if they take control at Westminster – the Greens had their strongest ever local election performance on vote share, and advanced most in Labour strongholds, including Bristol, where they narrowly missed out on taking control of the council. They have now built a platform to challenge Labour from the left in future local contests.
While Reform’s advance was more limited – they stood a limited slate of candidates and took just two seats – they did enough to confirm they are a clear and present danger to Tory general election prospects. The Conservatives fell further when Reform candidates appeared, suggesting they were taking a slice of the vote that might have remained blue in their absence. This will worry hundreds of Conservative MPs set to face a fresh Reform challenge in seats where Nigel Farage stood down Brexit party candidates in 2019.
Yet even as opposition parties advanced on a broad front, signs of trouble were emerging in Labour’s heartlands. The Labour vote slumped in early-reporting Newcastle wards with large Muslim populations, against the run of play. As more results came in, it became clear that tensions over Gaza were taking an electoral toll, with challengers campaigning on the issue securing big swings from Labour in northern towns and cities with big Muslim populations. Labour lost control in Oldham, and lost their deputy leader in Manchester, while many others had narrow escapes.
Nor was the discontent limited to Muslim communities: Labour support also softened in remain strongholds and student districts: hints, perhaps, of trouble to come on the party’s progressive left flank.
Clouds on the horizon, then, but the bigger picture remained bright. A high point came as dawn broke on Friday and Blackpool South declared the result of its Westminster byelection. Labour won back the seat with a massive 26-point swing, the third largest ever recorded.
While overnight counts were relentlessly bleak for the Conservatives, one of the first results on Friday delivered a rare ray of sunshine as Ben Houchen comfortably secured re-election for a third term as Tees Valley mayor. Tories on the airwaves seized on this sign of life in the “red wall”, and the prime minister soon appeared to congratulate Houchen in person.
Yet even as viewers watched PM and mayor paying tribute to each other, the tally of defeated Tory councillors was ticking ever upwards. More bad news for the government followed in the hours after Houchen won as Labour chalked up big victories in the new mayoralties of the North East, the East Midlands and in York and North Yorkshire. The last took in deep blue rural parts of God’s own country, including the prime minister’s constituency. Rishi Sunak now has a Labour mayor.
The two biggest contests of the week were also mayoral, in the West Midlands and London. Tory hopes of an upset in London soon faded as Sadiq Khan swept to victory; and while Andy Street outperformed his party, he lost narrowly in the West Midlands after a nail-biting race went to a recount. Street’s defeat will dash Tory hopes raised by Houchen’s win, but neither result has much relevance for the general election. Both downplayed their Tory links and successfully framed their contests as referendums on their personal performance.
For a sense of what is to come we should look not at the few big Tory names, such as Houchen, who survived, but the hundreds of smaller names who did not. This was, on any metric, the Conservatives’ worst performance in local council elections for a generation. The tide is still going out for Rishi Sunak’s government. And time is nearly up.
• Robert Ford is professor of political science at Manchester University
