Victorious Farage threatens Westminster's two-party system
What a morning this is turning into for Reform UK and for British politics. Nigel Farage's party has won the Runcorn and Helsby by-election by just six votes in one of the tightest results in electoral history.
More importantly, in years to come, it might just be that today will be remembered as the beginning of the end of Westminster's two party system.
After Sarah Pochin became Reform's first female MP, Mr Farage declared: 'This is phenomenal. There has been a massive swing to us – for the movement, for the Party, it's a very, very big moment indeed. What it means is that we are now the opposition.'
Election nights do not get much more exciting: Reform was ahead of Labour by just four votes after the first count and added just two more votes after a full recount.
This is a seat won by Labour with a 14,696 majority last year and was Labour's 49th-safest seat of the 411 they won last year. The swing from Labour to Reform was a massive 17 per cent.
No wonder Richard Tice, Reform UK's deputy leader, is talking about a 'seismic shift' in British politics.
Sir Keir Starmer's decision not to campaign in person in Runcorn – where Mr Farage was everywhere – is now looking decisive.
The result – the closest in by-election history – means it is not just the Tories but also the Government that will now feel threatened. Their hopes that Reform would be damaged by the internal row with Rupert Lowe MP and by Mr Farage's closeness to Donald Trump appear to have been forlorn.
Elsewhere, Reform won a significant victory in Greater Lincolnshire, where Andrea Jenkyns, a former Tory MP, became the area's inaugural mayor.
Reform has also gained scores of council seats in the local election counts going on in 23 council areas, with the Tories losing dozens of seats and Labour also down.
It is looking like a terrible day for the Tories, who are defending 960 council seats and are predicted to lose all 16 of the Conservative-controlled councils that are in play. In Staffordshire, Reform was beating the Tories by four votes to one in the early rounds of counting. The Conservative leader of the council is among those who have lost their seats.
In the west of England, where Labour held off a strong challenge from Reform's Arron Banks, the Tories came fourth, thousands of votes behind the third-placed Greens.
The picture was almost as grim in Doncaster, where Labour's sitting mayor clung on by 700 votes from Reform and the Tories trailed in third, and in North Tyneside, where Labour held the mayoralty by a whisker from Reform, who were well ahead of the Tories.
For all the talk of giving Kemi Badenoch more time to turn the Tories' fortunes around, there will inevitably be some Tory MPs who will get twitchy if the results continue to go badly.
'There's a mood of protest in the air,' conceded one senior Tory staffer when I called them this morning. In truth, the Tories never expected to hold on to council seats won in 2021 at the height of Boris Johnson's vaccine bounce.
In some ways the council election results – most of which are not expected until later today or tomorrow – are more important to Reform than the Westminster by-election.
At the start of the night Reform had just 128 councillors across the whole country; if they can add hundreds more to that number, they will begin to build the local networks of councillors and activists that they currently lack and which are so vital to gathering intelligence and getting out the vote ward by ward when it comes to a general election.
Remember, Reform UK polled 4.1 million votes in last year's general election but only won five seats in Parliament, whereas the LibDems converted fewer votes – 3.5 million – into 72 seats, thanks to their superior ability to target resources in the right areas.
If Mr Farage emerges from these and subsequent local elections with a turbocharged network of ground troops, he believes that he will be able to turn around that votes-per-seat figure.
One Reform figure I spoke to early this morning pointed out that in the areas where Reform had come second, 'people can see that if you vote Tory, you get Labour', which will probably be a message that Reform keeps repeating all the way to the 2029 general election.
The smaller parties are now talking about the rise of multi-party politics in Britain and they might be right. The alternative for the Tories is even worse – a straight swap from Labour v Conservative to Labour v Reform.
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