Braverman tells Sunak to ‘own’ dismal election results and ‘fix it’ but says it’s too late for Tories to change leader– UK politics live

Key events

According to the Sun’s political editor, Harry Cole, what has annoyed Rishi Sunak most about the elections is the result in York and North Yorkshire, where the Conservatives lost the contest to elect the area’s first mayor to Labour.

George Galloway cuts off interview after being challenged over gay relationship comments

George Galloway, the Rochdale MP and leader of the Workers Party of Britain, has cut off a broadcast interview after being asked about remarks in which he suggested he did not think gay relationships were equal to heterosexual relationships, PA Media reports. PA says:

Galloway hung up the phone when asked by LBC’s Sunday With Lewis Goodall about the remarks he made in the interview with Novara Media.

Galloway’s party hopes to act as a challenger to Labour at the general election, and has claimed it will field candidates to stand against the Opposition’s key figures.

In an interview with LBC, Galloway was asked about his comments to Novara.

“This is a clip of a clip. It is an edited clip of an edited clip,” Galloway said, as he suggested a wider point he had made about gender identity had been lost.

He also claimed that the radio station was “ambushing” him, adding: “I have got a simple answer. Listen to the whole thing tonight.”

Galloway then stated he was going to hang up the phone, telling LBC: “More fool me thinking that your request that I come on and talk about the elections was genuine.”

In a clip from an interview with Novara Media, Galloway had said: “I don’t want my children prematurely sexualised at all, I don’t want them taught that some things are normal when their parents don’t believe that they’re normal. Now there’s lots of things not normal, doesn’t mean you have to hate something that isn’t normal. But if my children are taught that there’s – whatever the current vogue number is – 76 or 97 or whatever the number of purported genders that exist, I don’t want my children taught that.”

Galloway said he did not want children to be taught “that gay relationships are exactly the same and as normal as a mum, a dad and kids”.

He added: “I want my children to be taught that the normal thing in Britain, in society across the world, is a mother, a father and a family. I want them to be taught that there are gay people in the world and that they must be treated with respect and affection, as I treat my own gay friends and colleagues with respect and affection but I don’t want my children to be taught that these things are equal because I don’t believe them to be equal.”

A reader asks:

Is there any news of GLA top up seats?

Yes. The results came out late last night.

There are 14 constituency seats in the London assembly, and 11 top-up ones (awarded using a PR formula to make the results proportional).

The full results are here.

Labour won 10 constituency seats, the Tories won 3 and the Lib Dems won 1.

And, on the top-up or list seats, Labour won 1, the Tories 5, the Greens 3, the Lib Dems 1 and Reform UK 1.

This tweet shows how the top-up seats were allocated.

As Sam Freedman points out, while the Conservatives changed the voting system for mayoral elections, replacing the supplementary vote (which is mildly PRish) with first past the post, they did not want to water down the PR system for the assembly, which helps them a lot.

It’s weird how the government chose to keep PR for the London Assembly, which always helps the Tories get more seats, but not for any of the other English elections

Tory MP John Hayes calls for reshuffle to bring more rightwingers into cabinet

The Conservative MP Sir John Hayes has called for a cabinet reshuffle. In an interview with Times Radio, Hayes, who chairs the Common Sense group, which represents rightwing, socially conservative Tory, and who is a close ally of Suella Braverman’s, said that the last reshuffle, which involved Braverman being sacked, was a mistake. He explained:

I do think that the last reshuffle, I don’t think it was terribly well received because political parties need to offer a balance of views and opinions. All political parties in our system of government are coalitions and it’s right that the often called right of the party – I describe it as the authentic Tory part of the Conservative party – is represented at the top table.

And so I believe Suella leaving the top table wasn’t great from that point of view.

Rightwingers like Hayes also disliked the last reshuffle because it saw the return of David Cameron as foreign secretary. They view him as too centrist and pro-remain.

The final council election result came in this morning. It was from Salford, where Labour remains in control. Labour and the Liberal Democrats gained one seat each, and there was one Tory loss, and one independent loss.

Prof Michael Thrasher, Sky News’ elections analyst, defended the projection he released on Friday saying that Labour would not be on course for a majority at Westminister if people voted in the general election as they did in the local elections. (See 9.09am.) In an interview this morning he stressed this was a projection, not a forecast. He also accepted that the results in the Blackpool South byelection gave a different indication as to what a general election result might be, because the Tory-to-Labour swing there was much larger than in the local elections.

But in the psephology Twittersphere world Thrasher is facing heavy criticism for releasing the seat projection, which many people will take as some sort of prediction. Sam Freedman, the political commentator and Prospect columnist, explains why in a post on his Substack account with his assessment of the local election results.

Sky’s attempt to model this national vote share as if it was a general election, claiming this showed we were on track for a hung parliament, was actively embarrassing, and, as one pollster put it on twitter, “verging on misinformation”.

The reality is that, despite only winning 34% of the national vote, Labour won almost everywhere they needed to win, and in quite a lot of places they didn’t. In councils covering Westminster constituencies where the Tories have majorities below 10k – like Swindon, Milton Keynes, Worthing, Reading, Crawley and Lincoln – Labour consolidated their control. In Worcester and Stevenage the Conservatives are down to a single seat. In Woking, which they are defending against the Lib Dems, they have no councillors left at all. This matters not just an indicator of support but because councillors are key to running ground campaigns.

In a series of posts on X, Chris Curtis, a pollster and Labour party candidate, suggests the polls are a more reliable guide to the general election outome. Thrasher’s NEV figure put Labour just seven points ahead of the Tories on Thursday, whereas the polls put Labour 20 points ahead.

The question you are supposed to ask is *why* is there a difference between the projected national share and the polls. What does that difference tell us about the likely outcome of the next election?

The most obvious reason for the difference is that other parties are higher. If you just scale the two party vote share up proportionally from c. 60% to c. 80% it already gets you to a 12 point lead.

But we know that, actually, those people voting for the other parties are much more likely to break for Lab than Con in a general. That might get you another couple of points.

Then there is the effect of Reform not standing in the vast majority of seats in the locals, but saying they will stand everywhere in the General. We know that most of those votes will come from the Tories.

And then there is the fact that about half of those who will vote in a General election just didn’t vote in the locals. Hard to know which way these will fall, but it is another reason why it’s always a bit mad to just read across.

As always, polls will always be the best indicator of what would happen if there was a General Election tomorrow. You really shouldn’t be using local election results to imply polls are wrong (they might be wrong...but this isn’t evidence of it)

Tory campaign in London too negative, former cabinet minister Theresa Villiers suggests

Theresa Villiers, the Conservative former cabinet minister, suggested this morning that the Tory mayoral election campaign in London was too negative. She told GB News:

In London we fought quite a negative campaign, and we need to refect on that and start thinking about a more positive message.

Villiers, who is on the right of the party, will have been referring to campaign tactics like the release of a social media video depicting London as some sort of Gotham City-style, crime-infected hellhole. It was widely assumed to be deliberately provocative because it was so over-the-top.

Asked if she was blaming Susan Hall, the Tory candidate for mayor, for the campaign, Villiers sidestepped the question. At the time the Guardian reported that the controversial video was produced by CCHQ, not Hall’s team.

Reform UK leader plays down reports Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson mulling over post-election realignment of right

In his Sunday Times article Tim Shipman also claims that allies of Boris Johnson, the former Tory PM, and Nigel Farage, the former Ukip and Brexit party leader who is now honorary president of Reform UK (which he also in effect owns, as the majority shareholder) have been discussing a realignment of the the right. Shipman says:

Allies of Johnson and Nigel Farage have recently been in contact to discuss a possible realignment of the right after a general election. Johnson has recently said that he is considering when the time might be right to re-enter the frontline political fray. His team denied claims that he has recently talked directly to Farage and stressed that he had voted Tory on Thursday, but it is understood there have been communications between the camps.

One scenario under consideration would see Farage fight and win Clacton in Essex for Reform. Johnson would likely fight a by-election in the next couple of years, if whoever replaces Sunak fails to make headway, and then help to woo Farage to rejoin the Conservatives.

Richard Tice, the Reform UK leader, played down the prospect of a Farage/Johnson alliance this morning, without denying Shipman’s report. In an interview on Times Radio, asked if the Shipman story was true, he replied:

The honest answer is, I don’t know, but I very much doubt it.

If you look at what Boris stands for politically and what we stand for, actually they’re quite a long way apart. Boris is for raising taxes, he’s for higher government spending, he’s obsessed with net zero.

That’s the opposite of what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to create growth in this country by reducing taxes, reducing wasteful spending. We all care about the environment, but net zero is killing British jobs, it’s killing the British economy, it’s killing British communities.

This answer may say more about the differences between Tice and Farage than about the likelihood of some eventual Farage/Johnson link-up. Tice is aligned with those people in Reform UK who want to destroy the Tory party and replace it. But Farage is much more interested in some sort of merger. He gave the best insight into this in an interview with Nick Robinson for his Political Thinking podcast earlier this year when he said:

I just don’t see long term how people like myself and Richard Tice don’t finish up at the same political party as a Jacob Rees-Mogg or a Suella Braverman … There is going to be – this has been talked about, by the way for decades – but there is going to be a realignment of the centre right of British politics.

In the same interview Farage also said that if the Conservative party used US-style open primaries to elect the leader, he would win. He said;

If there was an open primary right now, a rerun of the Conservative leadership, and it was myself against [Rishi] Sunak, I think I would win. I genuinely think I would win amongst Conservative members and registered Conservative supporters.

In his big read on the local elections in the Sunday Times, Tim Shipman has more details on the Labour argument that it can win a Westminster majority with a smaller lead over the Tories in national vote share than it had before the 1997 election because its vote is now more effectively distributed (See 10.55am.) Shipman writes:

Provisional analysis by Labour’s data team shows that their share of the vote is now much more efficiently distributed than under Corbyn, when the party tended to stack up votes in places where it was already strong rather than in marginal constituencies. “We were poor at putting together coalitions to win,” a Labour source said. “In 2019 if we had beaten the Tories by 12 per cent we would have got a majority of one, because of where our votes were. One of the key things we wanted to achieve when Keir became leader was to change that.

“We thought we could change that with two types of voters: one is non-graduate voters in England; two is in Scotland. We think this week’s results show we’ve got the breadth of support to win across the country. Because of voter efficiency, the winning line is no longer a 12-point lead, it is much lower.”

Pat McFadden, Labour’s national campaign coordinator, told Sky News this morning that he could not see Labour forming some sort of alliance with the SNP at Westminster if it failed to win an outright majority. Asked if he could imagine the two parties working together in those circumstances, McFadden replied:

No. Our aim is to win a majority, to govern, to meet the mood for change, and we’re not planning any alliances or pacts with anyone.

Asked if he would rule out cooperation with the SNP, McFadden did not entirely rule it out, but he said Labour was not planning for that. He replied:

You can put it to me from now until Christmas and my answer will be the same. We’re going to aim for a majority government, we’re going to meet that mood for change, we’re not planning on any pacts or alliances with anyone and I think – after the results of the last few days – we go into that fight with no complacency, but with a belief and confidence that we’ve seen in the votes that were cast a few days ago.

Labour plays down significance of projection claiming party not on course to gain majority at general election

Pat McFadden, Labour’s national campaign coordinator, has played down the significance of the Sky News projection suggesting that results like the ones from these elections would not deliver a majority for Labour at a general election. (See 9.09am.)

Asked on Times Radio about those figures, he said:

On national equivalent vote share, what we look at is the map, and the key seats. And, on the evidence of the results at the weekend, we are winning in those key parliamentary seats that will be decisive at the next election.

You can boost your national vote share by piling up votes in places that you already hold, or standing loads of paper candidates in places that you’ll never win.

For us, it’s about the key map of the places that will decide the next general election. And on that score we’re doing very well.

And of course there were no local elections in Scotland either, which is something left out of that.

Harper rejects suggestion cancellation of phase 2 of HS2 contributed to Andy Street's defeat in West Midlands

In his interview with the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, Mark Harper, the transport secretary, rejected suggestions that the government’s decision to cancel the second leg of HS2, from Birmingham to Manchester, contributed to Andy Street losing the West Midlands mayoralty. Harper said the West Midlands had benefited because money saved from scrapping HS2 was being spent on other transport projects in the region.

Street strongly opposed the decision to axe the second phase of HS2. But, in an interview on Sky News last night, he did not accept that this played a significant role in his defeat. He said voters liked the fact that he was standing up to No 10 on this issue. He explained:

Many people have said to me, when you stood up to the prime minister [on HS2], then it actually showed [you are] our independent mayor. So … there was great disappointment in the West Midlands at that decision. There was actually some admiration for how I dealt with it. So, net, I don’t think that had a huge impact.

Braverman says Sunak needs to 'own' responsibility for election results

In her interview with the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, Suella Braverman, the former home secretary, also said that Rishi Sunak needed to “own” responsibility for the local election results. She said:

Rishi Sunak has been leading us for about 18 months, he has been making these decisions, these are consequences of those decisions. He needs to own this, and therefore he needs to fix it.

She also claimed Tory voters were “on strike”.

I think the problem is that our voters are on strike, they are not coming out to support us, we have seen that with turnouts and we have seen that with losing Conservative strongholds.

(If Conservative voters were public sector workers, the government would be able to use its Strikes (Minimum Services Levels) Act to require some of them to show up. Unfortunately this is not an option for Sunak.)

In her interview Braverman said Sunak should respond to the results with policies like tax cuts and a cap on legal migration.

Asked for evidence that a shift to the right would help the party, Braverman replied:

The evidence is that people are not voting for what [Sunak] is doing because they don’t believe that we are serious about some of these issues.

Asked if she regretted supporting Sunak for the Tory leadership in 2022, Braverman replied: “Honestly, yes I do.”

Several readers have been asking this question.

Given that the counting is now (almost) done, any chance of a quick explanation of why your seat loss/gain numbers and the BBC’s are so different?

We use the figures provided by PA Media, and they measure losses and gains by comparing the results to the council seat numbers just before the elections took place. The BBC compares them to the seat numbers from 2021, when most of these seats were last contested. So seats the Tories lost over the last three years (in byelections and defections) are included in the BBC figures, but not in ours.

Tory MP Andrea Jenkyns says Sunak is 'staring down barrel of gun' and needs to deliver on 'true conservative values'

Back on Sky News, Dame Andrea Jenkyns, the Tory rightwing and outspoken critic of Rishi Sunak, says she wants to see Boris Johnson return to frontline politics. That could involve Johnson getting a seat, or just him being at the centre of the election campaign.

Asked if that is realistic, she says that she has not spoken to Johnson but that she’s an optimist.

Asked what else she would like Sunak to do, she says the party should be “really strong” on illegal migration and propose a referendum on withdrawal from the European convention on human rights.

UPDATE: Jenkyns said:

I would like to see the return of Boris on the front line of politics, whether that’s going for a seat in the next election and being front and centre of our election campaign …

He’s still got a pull and he’s still got a pull in my area, still on the doorstep. People say to me that they’re saddened that Boris is no longer on the front line of politics.

And, on what else Sunak should do, she said:

We need to be really strong [on] illegal migration, we’ve got to get these flights off to Rwanda, I think we should have it as a manifesto commitment to come out of the ECHR, I think we need a referendum on that, because then the civil service cannot stop us trying to enact what we were elected to do.

I think [Sunak] is staring down the barrel of the gun isn’t he, as every Conservative is – we’ve got to wake up and smell the coffee, we’ve got to actually start delivering true conservative values. I think he might listen a little bit.

Asked if Labour would continue with the Rwanda deportation scheme, if it is up and running at the time of the general election, McFadden says Labour does not want it to continue. He says Labour wants to use the money for other purposes, like cracking down on people smuggling.

Pressed to say if Labour would abandon it “on day one” in government, McFadden does not give that commitment – he says he is not certain what will happen on day one – but he again makes the point that Labour does not want it to continue.

Q: Will Labour bring people back from deportation if they have already been sent there?

McFadden says Labour is not planning that. He says that, under the government’s plans, there are provisions anyway that allow migrants from Rwanda to come to the UK.

Q: Do you think you have sealed the deal? You are not as far ahead on national share of the vote as you were in 1996.

McFadden says in 1996 it did not feel like they were cruising to inevitable victory.

He says there is more confidence in the party now. People can see that Labour has changed, and it has rebuilt trust, he says. But he stresses that not a single vote in the general election has yet been cast.

Pat McFadden, Labour’s national campaign coordinator, is being interviewed on the BBC.

Asked if he accepts that Labour’s position on Gaza cost the party vote, McFadden accepts it was a factor in places like Oldham. But he says there were also some other factors at play in Oldham that contributed to the result there.

Labour lost seven seats in Oldham, losing the council to no overall control.

Braverman says it would be impossible for alternative leader to revive Tory fortunes before general election

Earlier Suella Braverman, the former home secretary, told BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg that she was in despair at the election results and that it would be impossible for a new leader to revive Tory fortune. She said:

The plan is not working and I despair at these terrible results.

There is no spinning these results, there is no disguising the fact that these have been terrible election results for the Conservatives and they suggest that we are heading to a Labour government and that fills me with horror.

I love my country, I care about my party and I want us to win, and I am urging the prime minister to change course, to with humility reflect on what voters are telling us, and change the plan and the way that he is communicating and leading us.

Asked if she wanted a new leader, she replied:

I just don’t think that is a feasible prospect right now, we don’t have enough time and it is impossible for anyone new to come and change our fortunes to be honest. There is no superman or superwoman out there who can do it.