For Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour party, the results were merely excruciatingly bad.
But for Kemi Badenoch’s Conservatives, the dramatic rise of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK was — in the words of a leading Tory councillor — “apocalyptic”.
From the moment Farage strode into the media spotlight just after 6am on Friday to celebrate his party’s win in the Runcorn and Helsby by-election, it was clear that Britain was waking up to a transformed political landscape.
Reform’s capture of Labour’s 16th safest parliamentary seat heralded a day of electoral carnage, as Farage built a formidable local government base from scratch, largely at the expense of the Tories. “This is a very big moment indeed,” Farage beamed.
Roger Gough, former Tory leader of Kent County Council, described the situation as “apocalyptic”, as Reform ended 30 years of Tory control, a wipeout repeated in shire counties across England.
The Conservatives went into Thursday’s election with 62 councillors in Kent, a county sometimes called the “garden of England”. By Friday evening, they had just five.
Labour also took a battering from Reform. “I get it,” said Starmer, who admitted that voters were hurt and angry. But while the prime minister is at least in power — and has levers to pull to resuscitate his popularity — for Badenoch, the rise of Reform UK is existential, and it is not entirely clear what she can do about it.
Although local elections are an opportunity for protest voting, and often marked by low turnouts, neither Labour nor Conservative strategists believe that Farage’s party is anything other than a threat to a century of two-party duopoly in UK elections.
Labour advisers recognise that Starmer will be leaving the door wide open to the populists if he cannot prove to voters that a mainstream party with a House of Commons majority of more than 150 can deliver improvements to their lives.
Britain may have had its first modern populist moment with the 2016 Brexit referendum, but Farage is coming back for more almost a decade later, his Reform party feeding on a familiar wellspring of economic gloom and fears about immigration.
Starmer is determined that the centre must hold and vowed to go “further and faster” in delivering reforms intended to stop populists growing in strength in Britain in the way they have done in the US, Italy, France, the Netherlands and Germany.
Morgan McSweeney, the prime minister’s chief of staff, has already started deploying what is loosely called a “Blue Labour” strategy: Starmer has cut the overseas aid budget, retreated from positions on trans issues, taken tough stances on defence and sounded more “patriotic”, including hosting the first St George’s Day reception at Number 10.
But Starmer’s allies insist there will be no panic and no lurch to the right. There will be no immediate cabinet reshuffle, they insisted, and no change of course: just a deluge of activity intended to show Labour has a grip.
In the coming weeks, Starmer hopes to sign improved trade terms with the US, EU and India. He will also set out an immigration white paper as well as an industrial strategy and an NHS plan, which is intended to accelerate the downward path of hospital waiting lists.
But a lot of these are plans, not action — and they may not be enough for some voters. Starmer’s early decision to strip winter fuel payments from 10mn pensioners is seen by many Labour MPs as a key factor in the party’s poor performance in these elections.
“That was our original sin,” said one Labour MP. “It was a ‘whose side are you on’ moment for voters. It morally defined us.” Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, will now come under more pressure to reverse the policy, along with looming benefit cuts that would see millions of people lose thousands of pounds.
Another senior Labour MP said: “It’s not about being more leftwing or more rightwing — it’s about boldness of purpose and leadership.” Many Labour MPs privately want Starmer to raise his game.
But while Labour’s defeat in Runcorn, by a knife-edge six votes, and a collapsing vote elsewhere is deeply concerning for Starmer, the May 1 elections have exposed a split on the right of politics that might perhaps help him to cling to power.
One former Tory cabinet minister said: “There is no way the Conservatives could endorse Farage as a potential prime minister at the next election. After these results, Farage is never going to accept that the Tories are the principal challengers to Labour. So we’ll go on fighting each other.”
The same thing happened on the left of British politics in the 1980s, when the breakaway Social Democratic party and Labour split the left vote, helping to cement Margaret Thatcher’s Tories in power for a decade.
For Badenoch, there is no obvious way back. She has tried in vain to chase Farage by taking tough stances on migration, trans rights and other cultural issues. While that has not worked, so far, it has only seemed to accelerate the drift of liberal Conservatives in the prosperous south into the arms of the Liberal Democrats.
Ominously for Badenoch, shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick — the man she defeated for the Tory leadership last year and who appears still to be running for the job — struck a defiantly loyal tone.
Jenrick claimed Badenoch was doing a “bloody good job” and pointed out she had only been in post for six months, saying it was “complete nonsense” to suggest he could have done better. Privately, many Tory MPs despair of their leader’s performance.
“The renewal of our party has only just begun, and I’m determined to win back the trust of the public and the seats we’ve lost in the years to come,” Badenoch insisted on Friday, writing on X.
But the mood within the Conservative party on Friday was “awful”, according to one veteran party official, who said its dismal performance had left Badenoch in an “even weaker” position and facing a “long summer”.
Tory MPs forecast that she will enjoy a stay of execution in the short term, in part thanks to the party’s fatigue with regicide, having ousted three prime ministers in the past six years.
Some frontbenchers believe she will have had to have made significant progress by the local, Scottish and Welsh national elections next May if she is to survive in the post. One shadow minister said the party was facing “big existential challenges”.
While the soul-searching and recriminations began on Friday at the top of the Labour and Conservative parties, for Nigel Farage and Reform, the party was only just starting.
