Local Elections 2025 – Reform breaks through
Were you up for Runcorn & Helsby? A new dawn had already broken before multiple recounts confirmed that Reform’s candidate Sarah Pochin had gained Labour’s 16th safest Parliamentary seat by the narrowest of margins of six votes. Reform Leader Nigel Farage was smiling like the Cheshire Cat knowing that the first by-election of this Parliament had demonstrated that his Party is now threatening Labour in the way they defeated several Conservatives at last year’s General Election.
The Runcorn by-election win was the crowning achievement in a first wave of election results which verified recent opinion polls suggesting that Reform is now seriously competing with Labour as the leading party, relegating the Conservatives to third place. As of this morning, Reform has won the new Greater Lincolnshire Mayoralty position with controversial former Conservative Education Minister Andrea Jenkyns victorious and is on the cusp of winning outright control of Staffordshire County Council with outgoing Conservative Leader Alan White losing his seat.
The first wave of results could easily have been even stronger for Reform as they narrowly missed out to Labour who defended the Mayoralties in Doncaster, North Tyneside and West of England with Reform in a close second place. However, there is no escaping the fact that only ten months into office, Keir Starmer’s honeymoon with the electorate is well and truly over and that Labour MPs will be more worried about the rise of Reform than they will be about the possibility of a regenerated Conservative Party. Indeed, we are already seeing a handful of Labour MPs calling for the need for a reset. While there is no danger to Keir Starmer’s position, it is clear that the gloss of his landslide General Election victory has largely disappeared.
The first set of results were even more dire for the Conservatives as they incurred major losses to Reform in Staffordshire and lost control of Northumberland Council to No Overall Control. Should the Conservatives lose outright control of all of the county councils they are defending and not gain the Mayor of Cambridgeshire & Peterborough position then the embattled Kemi Badenoch’s position could be significantly under threat only a few months into her leadership. While the Conservatives have become notorious in rapidly dispensing with their leaders in recent times, the threat of Reform means that the Party will have to move quickly to prevent the irrelevance which will be caused if the Party is relegated to third Party status behind Labour and Reform in the national polls for any considerable period of time.
Both of the Liberal Democrats and the Greens are likely to have positive breakthroughs later today and the early results were not in their target areas. The Liberal Democrats appear confident about winning an outright majority in Oxfordshire and stand a chance of defeating the Conservatives in both Wiltshire and Shropshire and becoming the largest party on Hertfordshire County Council. The Greens will be looking for significant gains in Warwickshire and Worcestershire in particular.
Cratus Group will be back in touch as the full picture of the 2025 Local Elections emerges later today, but the early results demonstrate that Reform is now the credible national political force which Nigel Farage has long claimed that it eventually would become. UK politics just got even more interesting.
