Labour’s Claire Ward elected first mayor of East Midlands as Sunak gets boost in Tees Valley after Tory losses – live

The Green party is celebrating gains overnight. It has gained council seats in Newcastle (2), South Tyneside (2), Colchester (1), Exeter (1), Sefton (1), Peterborough (1). Adrian Ramsay, the party’s co-leader, said: “We are winning because our message of hope is being heard by new groups of voters.”

Portsmouth remains under no overall control, with the Liberal Democrats still the biggest party, PA Media is reporting.

For months Rishi Sunak and No 10 have been worried about this moment, the morning after the local elections, because they feared that bad results would lead to Tories calling for Sunak to be replaced.

And this morning there has been a Conservative on the BBC saying Sunak should go. But the good news for Sunak is that it is only Tim Montgomerie, the founder of the ConservativeHome website and a respected commentator, but not an MP or someone with more clout in the parliamentary party.

This is what Montgomerie told the BBC’s election programme:

I think we do need to resolve the question of Rishi Sunak’s leadership. He’s a nice and decent man, but he just can’t do politics.

He hasn’t defined Labour in a significant way. He’s not able to campaign. He makes announcements, waits for reaction in the opinion polls, doesn’t get one and then moves on. There isn’t the sort of sustained campaign you would expect from an effective politician …

Personally I think the results are so bad, and althought it’s a big roll of the dice, and it would be a gamble, I just don’t think he is connected with the voters at all. I think he should go.

Sunak only really needs to worry when a former Tory minister starts turning up on the BBC saying the same thing.

3 May 202401.10 EDT

How Labour won Blackpool South with 26% swing from Tories - results in full

Andrew Sparrow

Good morning. I’m Andrew Sparrow, taking over from Yohannes Lowe. I’ll be here for the day.

And as people take stock of the election results so far, the most striking is the outcome of the Blackpool South byelection, where there was a 26-point swing from the Conservatives to Labour, and the Tories only beat Reform UK by a whisker (defined as 117 votes, for these purposes).

Chris Webb (Lab) 10,825 (58.91%, +20.57%)

David Jones (C) 3,218 (17.51%, -32.09%)

Mark Butcher (Reform) 3,101 (16.88%)

Andrew Cregan (LD) 387 (2.11%, -0.97%)

Ben Thomas (Green) 368 (2.00%, +0.28%)

Stephen Black (Ind) 163 (0.89%, -0.24%)

Kim Knight (ADF) 147 (0.80%)

Howling Laud Hope (Loony) 121 (0.66%)

Damon Sharp (NonPol) 45 (0.24%)

Lab maj 7,607 (41.40%)

26.33% swing C to Lab

Electorate 56,704; Turnout 18,375 (32.41%, -24.37%)

2019: C maj 3,690 (11.27%) – Turnout 32,752 (56.77%) Benton (C) 16,247 (49.61%); Marsden (Lab) 12,557 (38.34%); Brown (Brexit) 2,009 (6.13%); Greene (LD) 1,008 (3.08%); Daniels (Green) 563 (1.72%); Coleman (Ind) 368 (1.12%)

The Lib Dems have also held on to Gosport Borough council and Winchester city council, while the party remain in minority control of Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council, the BBC has reported.

Portsmouth remains under no overall control, with the Liberal Democrats still the biggest party.

A Lib Dem source said:

We are buoyed by our gains overnight that set us up to take seats off the Conservatives at the next election.

We have made new inroads in true blue councils in Hampshire including in Suella Braverman’s back yard, gained ground in Stockport and topped the popular vote in battleground constituencies across the country.

This is just a taster of what is to come throughout Friday in the Blue Wall.

The Blackpool South byelection was the big early test for Rishi Sunak but there are other key election results that will be announced over the next couple of days that could destabilise his increasingly fragile premiership.

Conservative mayors Andy Street, in the West Midlands, and Ben Houchen in Tees Valley are among those facing pivotal re-election battles, with polls suggesting narrow contests with their Labour opponents.

The mayor has devolved powers and funding to make local decisions on things like skills, tourism, economic development and transport.

Both contests could prove totemic because if Street and Houchen lose, Tory rebels could mount another attempt to remove Sunak as prime minister.

View image in fullscreen

YouGov polling this week had Houchen on 51% of the vote, with his Labour rival, Chris McEwan, on 44%, but the contest looks like it is on a knife-edge.

Houchen has been in the job for seven years and is defending a whopping majority – taking 73% of the vote against Labour’s 28% in 2020. Potentially losing such a huge majority could spell danger for the Tory MPs in other so-called red wall seats fighting in the general election.

Street, a former managing director of John Lewis who was elected as the first mayor of the West Midlands in 2017, is also hugely popular in his constituency.

He is going up against Labour’s Richard Parker and is working against a backdrop of polls showing tanking support for his party and a potential Labour landslide victory at the next general election. A YouGov poll this week found that the result was too close to call.

Prof John Curtice told an Institute for Government event on Wednesday the Conservative party was emphasising the two contests “because they think they might manage to win the contest and therefore they’ll be able to cover whatever disasters happen elsewhere”.

“Because of the personal votes of these two, (these contests are) going to be the least reliable indicator,” he said.

You can read about how Street and Houchen have run their mayoral re-election campaigns almost entirely separate from the Conservative party in this story written by my colleagues, Kiran Stacey and Jessica Murray, here:

• Tees Valley result expected: 12.30pm (Friday lunchtime)

• West Midlands result expected: 3pm (Saturday afternoon)

The Conservatives have managed to retain Harlow Council by one seat, after a tightly fought race.

This is from Ian Jones, a data /graphics journalist who works for PA Media:

Commenting on Labour’s decisive win in Blackpool South, Tory deputy chair Angela Richardson told the BBC: “The result was not unexpected. I think, given the circumstances that caused the byelection in the first place, it was always going to be difficult for the Conservatives.”

Elections expert Prof John Curtice said:

The only thing that’s stopped this result from being basically an unmitigated disaster for the Conservatives was the fact they just narrowly squeaked ahead of Reform.

Basically the project that Rishi Sunak is meant to be there to achieve, which is to narrow the gap on Labour, that project still has yet to provide any visible benefit.

• Labour has regained the seat of Blackpool South in Thursday’s parliamentary byelection, in a fresh blow to Rishi Sunak’s leadership. The Labour leader, Keir Starmer, called it a “seismic win”. The local and firm favourite Chris Webb won with 10,825 votes, followed by David Jones, the Conservative candidate, with a distant 3,218 votes. He finished narrowly ahead of the Reform candidate, Mark Butcher, on 3,101 votes.

• Labour won control of Thurrock (which had been under no overall control) after starting the night as the second biggest party, prompting members of the shadow cabinet to say that the result showed the party was on course to win the general election.

• Labour officially gained Hartlepool council, which is of symbolic importance to the party’s leader Keir Starmer after Labour lost the parliamentary byelection there in 2021. This council had also been under no overall control. Labour won nine of the 12 seats up for grabs, with independents winning two and the Conservatives one.

• A Liberal Democrat source said the party has already been “hearing of Lib Dem gains in former Conservative heartlands”. “Lib Dems expecting to move forward overnight in Oxfordshire, Hampshire and Hertfordshire,” the source added.

• The Conservatives won the first police and crime commissioner election to be declared, in Lincolnshire.

• Prof John Curtice, the polling expert, has said that, according to the early results, Labour are not making the sort of “dramatic” gains the party did under Tony Blair before its landslide 1997 general election victory. They are doing more or less the same as they did in last year’s elections, Curtice said, while noting that early local election results “don’t look as though they’re going to provide that much solace to 10 Downing Street”. “It is not looking very good for the Conservatives, I think one has to say,” he told BBC Politics.

• The Green party has had some impressive gains in some councils in England, with the party winning its first ever council seats on Newcastle city council.

• Before even the first result was declared, transport secretary Mark Harper said the evening could be very “difficult” for the Conservatives. His fears were later echoed by Tory councillors who warned that some voters were likely to vote in protest against the government, even if they supported the actions and policies of their local Conservative councillors.

You can continue to read all the council results live on our tracker here.

The Guardian’s North of England correspondent, Robyn Vinter, explores the significance of the Blackpool South byelection win for Labour here: