| The first sign of the direction of the night came in North Tyneside, shortly after 2am, where Labour held the mayoralty – but saw their majority massively reduced. Labour’s Karen Clark beat Reform’s John Falkenstein by just 444 votes. In 2021, Clark’s predecessor Norma Redfearn won with 53% of the vote; Clark prevailed with a shade over 30%. “A win is a win,” science minister Peter Kyle told the BBC. But a win can also be a warning. Here’s what else you need to know. What happened in Runcorn? Nigel Farage was reported to have spent quite a lot of the night sitting in a car somewhere near the DCBL Stadium in Widnes, where votes in the Runcorn and Helsby by-election were being counted, ready to sweep in to claim the glory if it went Reform’s way. He was waiting for a long time. The extraordinarily tight margin of the first count – four votes - was followed by a full recount, and close scrutiny of every ballot (“I’ve seen more drawings of penises than I’ve ever seen in my life,” one observer told Josh Halliday). At 4.24am, Farage made a premature claim of victory on social media, and said it was Labour that demanded the recount. He finally got out of a car with his candidate, former Conservative councillor Sarah Pochin, at 5.49am. A few minutes later, the result finally landed: Pochin had won. In her speech, hilariously delivered with the Monster Raving Loony Party candidate hovering inches to her left, she said that the voters had delivered an anti-system message: “Enough is enough. Enough Tory failure. Enough Labour lies.” This was a brutal result for Labour, given Runcorn was one of their 50 safest seats in the country at the general election. Keir Starmer stayed away from the seat, presumably hoping to avoid being too closely associated with a potential defeat: he may now be wondering if he might have swayed the four people he would have needed to fend off the Reform challenge. “Bloody hell,” Josh Halliday said in Widnes. “It was pretty dramatic. Often when you do these things, you hear that it’s too close to call, and actually most of the time people have a good idea who won. This time no one knew which way it would go right until the wire.” What is the broader significance of the result? Pochin doesn’t seem like a classic Reform candidate on paper: she has previously welcomed refugees, and appeared compassionate towards criminals in her role as a magistrate. “But she was very much on message during the campaign,” Josh said. “‘Stop the Boats’, bashing Labour for letting prisoners out early, but also criticising them over the winter fuel allowance. She was quite provocative on sensitive local issues, with a video outside a local hotel housing asylum seekers and another one outside a Turkish barber’s in the city centre.” Ahead of the vote, there were suggestions that tactical anti-Reform voting might play a crucial role here. And the number of votes for the Green party and Lib Dems – 3,256 between them – suggests that that may have been the case. But it was not enough to hold off Reform, who may have similarly benefitted from Tory switchers. “I spoke to a couple of Tories who said they were going to back Labour because they couldn’t stomach Reform, and that probably made it closer than it would have been,” Josh said. “I’ve been here four times since the end of January, and it’s felt like Reform’s to lose – I wonder whether polls showing them winning made people ask if they really wanted a Reform MP. But at best, it cushioned the Labour defeat.” Luke Tryl, of More In Common, said that one key question ahead of the by-election was whether Reform’s momentum could be converted to actual votes against the traditional parties’ “get out the vote” operations: “Clearly they’ve done that in Runcorn,” he said. “Their performance in the by-election significantly exceeds the swing you might you expect based on current opinion polls.” What else do we know so far? In Greater Lincolnshire, Reform’s candidate Andrea Jenkyns – who you may remember giving the finger to protesters outside Downing Street in her previous incarnation as a Tory minister, and who campaigned on a “DOGE Lincolnshire” ticket – won comfortably: she won more than 100,000 votes, 42% of the total, against less than 65,000, or 26%, for her Conservative opponent. “This is a painful blow to the Tories in an area that’s one of their heartlands,” said Ben Quinn, who was covering the count. “It wasn’t without damage for Labour as well – she annihilated the Tories across Lincolnshire, but even the places were Labour might have done better she beat them comfortably.” In the West of England, Labour’s Helen Godwin finished ahead of her closest rival, Reform’s Arron Banks, by 5,945 votes – a much better performance for Reform than the polling had indicated. And in Doncaster, Labour’s Ros Jones beat Reform’s Alexander Jones by a whisker – 23,805 votes to 23,107. While that was a relief for Labour, it also represented a 21% swing to Reform. “Everyone has been talking for quite a long time about Reform being a threat to the Tories, but this is a really good example of the threat they pose to Labour,” said Robyn Vinter, who was covering the count there. “The Conservatives actually did better than they could have expected, considering they’ve never won here before. Ros Jones told me she was frustrated with the national party over the winter fuel allowance cut and the Pip cut, which she thought had gone down very badly here.” Those looking for a sense of how the Conservatives are likely to do in the many councils they hold across the country that are up for grabs were paying close attention to Staffordshire, where the Tories held 55 of 62 seats until yesterday. Of 30 results called by 5.30am, 24 had gone to Reform – every one of them previously held by a Conservative. Sam Freedman, author of the Comment is Freed Substack, reasonably called it an “absolute shocker” for the Tories, and added: “I thought it was one of their best chances to hold a council and Reform are going to win it outright easily. I can’t see them holding any of their 19 councils now.” Across all of the council seats declared in England a short while ago, Reform had 66 seats – from a standing start – while the Tories were on 37, down 50, and Labour were on 11, down 13. What’s still to come? Only one council was expected to complete their count overnight – Northumberland – and the results there should land soon. If the Tories lose control there, with Labour hopeful of becoming the largest party but with no one having overall control, it may be the start of a very long day for Kemi Badenoch. There’s a break until 1pm when Durham are next to announce, and you can expect that void to be filled by considerable broadcast pontification. While Reform has undoubtedly had a good night, we should wait to see the council results before making any claims about the complete picture. The mood of the electorate presented by most recent polls – with Labour, the Conservatives and Reform all between 20% and 25% – means that quite small variations can make big changes to the overall result. The BBC publishes John Curtice’s estimate of national vote share in the afternoon, and the final results drop around 7pm tonight: by then, we’ll have a sense of just how ugly things might get for Badenoch and Starmer – and whether Reform really can claim to be the most popular party in England. | 