British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer — who many commentators have for months been describing as a “dead man walking” — somehow manages to find an interpretation for the Labour Party’s disastrous local election results, and thinks voters just sent a message that he needs to move faster and more vigorously to implement their vision. That’s certainly a take.
Nigel Farage is certainly enjoying the outcome:
Partial council election results in England, 8 May 2026.
Graphic from the Daily Mail
Hurrah for the Tealshirts! Nigel Farage emerged from Havering Town Hall looking smug even by his standards. For years, he has been written off, denied the respect — and peerage — he feels he deserves, forced to scrape by on gifts from well-wishers, and now he was showing them all, wreaking havoc on both Labour and Conservatives.
Nothing could hold the party back, not the endless terrible comments from Reform candidates who for some reason believe Farage agrees with them, not even a huge bribery scandal involving the party leader in Wales. Today Havering, tomorrow Westminster!
Elsewhere, people were gloomier. James Cleverly explained to the BBC that winning elections isn’t the goal of politics. The Conservatives aren’t interested in here today, gone tomorrow popularity, it turns out. They just want to govern well. Which leaves a couple of questions about the last decade and a half.
David Lammy told anyone who would listen that you don’t change pilot mid-flight. Better, he didn’t add, to wait until the plane has hit the ground.
The real show of the morning was the confrontation on the BBC between Cleverly’s colleague Vicky Atkins and their former fellow Tory, Robert Jenrick. Atkins and Jenrick have a long friendship going back to the time when he was the anti-Farage candidate in Newark in 2014, through the time he was an anti-Brexit MP supporting David Cameron, his days in Theresa May’s government, his early backing of Boris Johnson, his years in the Cabinet, all the way to his realisation this year that he’d never believed any of the things he’d been telling the voters.
“Robert and I haven’t actually spoken to each other since I supported his leadership campaign,” Atkins announced, and the rest of us fastened our seatbelts for a bumpy ride. “I’m surprised that he’s so quick to can all of the work that he did when he was in government.”
Next to her, Jenrick looked like a man who has arrived at a school parents evening to discover that his ex-wife got there first and has been filling people in on the reason she cut the crotches out of all his suits. But Atkins was just getting started. “Nobody should believe the snake oil salesmen,” she said. Jenrick had accused the Tories of messing things up. “Rob was part of the team that made those mistakes.”
Jenrick made another bid to get the conversation back on track. “The question is about honesty and trustworthiness,” he said. You could have used Atkins’ expression at that moment to freeze lava.
At the time of this Daily Mail report from James Tapfield and David Wilcock, the demands from Labour MPs for Starmer to resign hadn’t quite reached the “red alert” level yet:
Partial council election results in England, 8 May 2026.
Graphic from the Daily Mail
Keir Starmer is desperately fighting to subdue a Labour revolt tonight after a local elections bloodbath saw the party routed on English councils, and destroyed in Wales and Scotland.
Loyalist ministers and MPs have been deployed in a frantic bid to prop up the PM, after a series of backbenchers broke cover to demand his resignation.
So far no Cabinet ministers have publicly joined the mutiny – a moment that many believe would be the final nail in Sir Keir’s coffin.
Rachel Reeves and David Lammy were among those backing Sir Keir – but there has been an ominous lack of vocal support from Wes Streeting, Yvette Cooper, Ed Miliband and Shabana Mahmood. London Mayor Sadiq Khan released a statement saying the results in the capital were ‘bitterly disappointing’ and the threat to the party is ‘existential’ – without mentioning the PM.
The civil war reignited this evening after Labour’s Welsh leader, Baroness Morgan, humiliatingly lost her own seat as the party’s tally of the 96 Senedd members was slashed to just nine. In a jibe at the PM, she said the Government nationally must ‘change course’.
Until yesterday Labour held nearly half the seats at the Welsh Parliament, and has never failed to top an election in the country – regarded as its birthplace.
Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar has also conceded defeat at Holyrood, saying they had ‘lost the argument’ and pointing the finger at Sir Keir.
Meanwhile, the Greens have dealt a hammer blow by taking the mayoralty in deep-red bastion Hackney, as well as Lewisham – signposting more misery to come in London. The Labour leader in Camden – Sir Keir’s own council – has been defeated by Zack Polanski’s candidate.
Even some Labour stalwarts are reading the tea leaves correctly:
