2 May 2025, 12:24 | Updated: 2 May 2025, 13:05

By Suella Braverman

There is no gentle way to dress this up: these results are a catastrophe for Labour.

Less than a year into office, after a victory of historic scale and self-satisfied moral preening, the governing party has suffered a collapse so broad and so brutal that it now resembles something more profound than a political hiccup.

It looks like the beginning of the end.

These weren’t just setbacks in marginal wards. They were defeats in the very places that propelled Sir Keir Starmer to power—towns long taken for granted as Labour’s spiritual base. These losses suggest not merely disappointment, but disillusionment on a national scale.

Of course, Labour remains in office. But it governs now with the air of a party that has lost the room. Just 12 months ago, Starmer was hailed—largely by himself—as the “adult in the room,” a messianic alternative to years of alleged Tory chaos.

Today, he cuts a diminished figure: stilted, evasive, and palpably out of his depth.

This is no mere midterm grumble. Voters are not in a sulk—they are in revolt. The collapse in confidence is not an aberration; it is the consequence of governing without conviction.

Of pledges abandoned. Of policies that seem dreamt up in Islington chambers and........

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