Reform wins 'beginning of end for Tories', says Farage

Nigel Farage claimed yesterday that he had broken the grip of Britain's two main parties, after Reform UK gained an MP and swept to a string of victories in England's local elections, making deep inroads into Labour and Conservative heartlands.

- Peter Walker Eleni Courea Kiran Stacey

On a sobering day for Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch that brought immediate recriminations, the hard-right populist party took hundreds of councillors from the Tories, and won the Runcorn and Helsby byelection with just six votes more than Labour.

In further signs of fracturing political loyalties, a BBC projection of how the voting would have looked in a UK-wide election put Reform first on 30%, with Labour at 20%, the Liberal Democrats on 17%, the Conservatives fourth with 15% and the Greens on 11%.

An increasingly jubilant Farage said his party had now supplanted the Conservatives, as he pledged that Reform-run councils and mayoralties would block asylum seeker accommodation and, in a direct echo of Donald Trump, dismantle equalities programmes.

"We've dug very deep into the Labour vote, and in other parts of England we've dug deep into the Conservative vote, and we are now, after tonight there's no question, in most of the country, we are now the main opposition party to this government," Farage said.

Speaking at a later rally, he said the elections marked "the beginning of the end of the Conservative party".

Reform won in Runcorn and Helsby with a 17-point swing away from Labour, overturning a majority of more than 14,000. The former Conservative minister Andrea Jenkyns easily won the new mayoralty of Greater Lincolnshire for Farage's party, which also took the mayoralty in Hull and East Yorkshire.

By late yesterday, Reform had taken control of seven councils - Durham, Kent, Lincolnshire, Lancashire, Staffordshire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire with a gain of well over 500 seats.