Nigel Farage is the ultimate political gambler, so it was fitting he used a racing metaphor to describe Reform UK’s overnight surge.
He compared the substantial gains to a notoriously difficult jump in the Grand National, where even experienced jockeys lose their seats in a flurry of spruce branches and runaway horses.
“This for me was our Becher’s Brook,” Farage said, in early morning comments. “If we cleared Becher’s Brook and landed well, we go on to win the Grand National. What is very clear to me is that our voters will stick with us now all the way through. They are not lending their vote to Reform.”
Farage’s suggestion that his party was on course for a general election victory after these local successes now doesn’t look outlandish. He has shown that Reform isn’t a fresh Ukip, doomed to stutter and fall. His clear wins might even silence those who claimed his party is a modern SDP, which flew high at the start of the 1980s but never converted high polling numbers into actual votes.
Of course, we don’t have all the results, and the early declarations were always going to favour Reform target areas. But on the emerging picture, Farage can point to substantial success, securing about a third of the seats that have been declared. By contrast, Labour lost just under half of the seats they had been trying to defend.
Look more closely at the results and Reform has racked up wins in areas long dominated by Labour. They include Tameside, which Labour lost after 47 years in control. In Redditch, Labour also lost control, and in Hartlepool, Reform became the largest party. That latter is where the loss of a parliamentary seat to the Tories in 2021 made Sir Keir Starmer seriously mull resignation as leader of the Labour Party.
Don’t forget the psychological implications of these losses on those in the Cabinet, who are thinking very carefully today about Starmer’s future. Tameside is the patch of former deputy prime minister Angela Rayner and in Wigan, where the MP is Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy, Labour lost 22 of the seats it was defending to Reform.
Not content with smashing through Labour’s heartlands, Farage took his teal sledgehammer to those parts of the red wall Starmer painstakingly won back from Boris Johnson’s Tories. And he looks set to take Tory strongholds too in Kemi Badenoch’s backyard, taking 15 of the first 21 seats to be declared in Essex.
And it’s also looking set to be a bad day for the Tories. Early analysis by elections expert John Curtice found the Tories’ support is down on 2022 by 11 points across all the wards that have declared so far. So far, the Liberal Democrats have made a modest gain of seats, but any surge for Ed Davey’s party should come later.
With full results in from 13 of the 136 councils, Reform gained 103 seats to Labour’s loss of 80. But Labour sources countered the party’s vote had held up in places like Lincoln and Reading, where Reform and the Greens could have made inroads.
The central point of Labour’s argument is that local elections always present challenges for governments and do not accurately predict the results of the next general election. But this only works as an argument if you ignore the fact that the governing party didn’t go backwards in terms of seats in 2011, 2015, 2017 or 2021.
Starmer started the day defiant, insisting he was “not going to walk away and plunge the country into chaos”, despite growing noises of concern within Labour. Friday might end very differently.
As more results come in, Labour will engage in soul-searching about which way to head. And their conclusions might be different depending on where they are in the country. Northern Labour members may see the imminent danger of Reform. But in London, where the Tories have just about retaken Wandsworth, local Conservative sources pointed out their success is down to the Greens swiping Labour votes.
For now, Farage has his morning in the sun. “It can’t continue to be a fluke or a protest vote,” he insisted in an early press conference outside Havering Council. It was a hard message for Labour and the Tories to digest before breakfast.
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