Local elections 2022: Johnson admits ‘tough’ losses for Tories after Labour wins key London seats and Lib Dems and Greens also benefit – live

Johnson says results have been ‘mixed’ for Tories, but that in some places they’ve had ‘remarkable gains’

Boris Johnson has recorded a clip for broadcasters about the results. He started by paying tribute to Conservative councillors, and said the result were “mixed”.

In some parts of the country it had been “tough”, he said.

But in other areas there were “quite remarkable gains in places that have not voted Conservative for a long time, if ever”.

He said that the message he drew from the results was that people want him to get on with “the big issues that matter to them”.

UPDATE: Johnson said:

It is mid-term. It’s certainly a mixed set of results.

We had a tough night in some parts of the country but on the other hand in other parts of the country you are still seeing Conservatives going forward and making quite remarkable gains in places that haven’t voted Conservative for a long time, if ever …

The big lesson from this is that this is a message from voters that what they want us to do above all – one, two and three – is focus on the big issues that matter to them, taking the country forward, making sure we fix the post-Covid aftershock, get us all through the economic aftershocks in the way we got through Covid, fix the energy supply issues, that’s where the inflationary spike is coming, and keep going with our agenda of high wage, high skill jobs. That is what we are focused on.

Boris Johnson Photograph: Sky News

Updated at 07.55 EDT

There has been an interesting early result from Glasgow city council where the SNP’s Susan Aiken, a former council leader, was re-elected – but beaten to first place by the Greens on first preference votes. Aitken has faced ongoing criticism about cuts to council services, particularly during last November’s Cop26 conference in the city when transport and rubbish collection problems came to global notice.

Are we seeing a Green surge, spurred by their power-sharing deal with the SNP following last May’s Holyrood elections? They also gained their first ever seat in the Scottish Borders and are recording strong results elsewhere.

The Lib Dem leader Ed Davey says it is time for Conservative MPs “to plunge [Boris Johnson] into the abyss”. (See 11.36am.) But there is little evidence that they are minded to do so.

There were reports in recent days suggesting that Jeremy Hunt was preparing for some sort of leadership bid. But the i’s Paul Waugh has been told that Hunt does not see this as a priority at the moment.

One Conservative MP who has been critical of Boris Johnson in public todayt is David Simmonds, who represents Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner in west London (which is next to Johnson’s own constituency). Simmonds says Johnson has “difficult questions to answer”. (See 9.41am.)

But, in an interview with PA Media, Simmonds said that although he thought the party had to change, he did not believe that had to involve replacing the leader. He said:

[Johnson] needs to find a way to restore confidence in the government and I think there’s a number of ways he might do that. A change of leader would be one of them. Alternatively he needs to demonstrate what the alternative plan would be.

Voters in the Western Isles have elected a woman councillor, the first in a decade, after the local council held the unwelcome status as Scotland’s only all-male local authority.

Susan Thomson, a Scottish National party candidate, was elected in South Uist, Eriskay and Benbecula after a series of disappointing results for other female candidates in the Comhairle nan Eilean Siar elections.

Thomson, 50, a projects officer with Scottish Rural Network, said she was delighted to be chosen. “I stood because I believe in independence and I believe in what the SNP stands for, but equally I believe that the council needs representation from a broad spectrum of people.”

Voters in the Western Isles failed to elect any women in 2017; eight women came forward at this election but most lost after standing against male incumbent councillors. One, Dorothy Morrison, was 38 votes short of a seat on first preference votes.

All Scottish council seats are elected using the single transferrable vote system of proportional representation. Many in the Western Isles believe that job security, low pay (councillors in Scotland receive an allowance of £18,604) and the dominance of male incumbents, many of whom are prominent figures in local churches or golf clubs, are significant barriers to women being elected.

Thomson said one option, in addition to better remuneration, was to consider job-sharing as councillors. That is someone done in the US, she said.

Updated at 07.27 EDT

Q: If a majority of people in Northern Ireland back parties that support the Northern Ireland protocol, will you work with the EU to make it work?

Johnson says the key thing is to support the Good Friday agreement. He says that means any arrangments for the Northern Ireland protocol need cross-community support.

The most important thing is that we continue to support the balance of the Good Friday agreement across all communities in Northern Ireland. That’s what we’re going to do. And whatever arrangements we have, they have got to have cross-community support, that’s what the Good Friday agreement is all about, that’s what the government is going to do.

That answer does nothing to contradict reports that the govenrment is planning legislation that would allow it to rewrite parts of the protocol, on the grounds that this was necessary to protect the Good Friday agrement.

And that’s it. The interview is over.

Updated at 07.57 EDT

Johnson claims his government is doing ‘big, difficult things’

Asked why he is not backing a windfall tax on energy companies, Johnson says he has spoken to the bosses of Shell and BP about this. He says he needs them to invest massively in green energy, to guarantee secure supply.

It is better for them to take that cash and invest it in green energy options, to make sure “this country is protected in the future”. He goes on:

One thing about this government, it does big, difficult things.

He cites getting Brexit done, and doing the vaccine rollout, as examples of this.

“Clobbering” energy companies would not guarantee a stable energy supply, he says.

UPDATE: Johnson said:

I had the head of Shell in yesterday, and the head of BP. And I’ve talked to them both. Our message to them, and what is very, very clear, it’s ‘Guys, you know, this is a moment when we need you, as a country, to invest massively in clean, green renewables, in the stuff that is going to make a difference to people’s energy prices’.

What we don’t want to do is make the same mistakes as previous governments … as I’ve just been saying – fail to invest in our energy supply. So that’s the message that we’re giving to the big energy companies.

And it’s frankly better for them to take that cash, put it into wind farms, put it into hydrogen, put it into stuff that will make a big difference to our ability to cope with the global energy price spike, and above all make sure that this country is protected in the future so that we have more long-term energy security.

Updated at 07.57 EDT

Johnson says results have been ‘mixed’ for Tories, but that in some places they’ve had ‘remarkable gains’

Boris Johnson has recorded a clip for broadcasters about the results. He started by paying tribute to Conservative councillors, and said the result were “mixed”.

In some parts of the country it had been “tough”, he said.

But in other areas there were “quite remarkable gains in places that have not voted Conservative for a long time, if ever”.

He said that the message he drew from the results was that people want him to get on with “the big issues that matter to them”.

UPDATE: Johnson said:

It is mid-term. It’s certainly a mixed set of results.

We had a tough night in some parts of the country but on the other hand in other parts of the country you are still seeing Conservatives going forward and making quite remarkable gains in places that haven’t voted Conservative for a long time, if ever …

The big lesson from this is that this is a message from voters that what they want us to do above all – one, two and three – is focus on the big issues that matter to them, taking the country forward, making sure we fix the post-Covid aftershock, get us all through the economic aftershocks in the way we got through Covid, fix the energy supply issues, that’s where the inflationary spike is coming, and keep going with our agenda of high wage, high skill jobs. That is what we are focused on.

Boris Johnson Photograph: Sky News

Updated at 07.55 EDT

Momentum says results outside London ‘disintinctly underwhelming’ for Labour

When Jeremy Corbyn was Labour leader, centrists in the party often seemed quite pleased when the party did badly in elections because those results vindicated their criticisms of him. Now Keir Starmer is in charge the dynamic applies in reverse, and Momentum, the Labour group set up to defend the Corbyn agenda, claims the results show that Starmer’s approach is failing. The official Labour line is that the results are a “turning point” (see 8.26am), but Momentum says the elections were a lost opportunity.

It has issued this statement from Mish Rahman, a member of the Momentum executive who also sits on Labour’s national executive committee.

From Partygate to the Tory cost-of-living crisis, these local elections were a golden opportunity for Labour. We’re delighted by gains in London, where Momentum members played a key role on the ground and as candidates. But these first results from the rest of England are distinctly underwhelming.

While millions looked for an alternative to Tory ruin, they largely opted for the Lib Dems and Greens. Labour actually went backwards from Corbyn’s 2018 performance, a result which should bury Keir Starmer’s deeply flawed idea that punching left is a vote-winner. Instead, we should look to places like Preston, where a Labour administration is delivering a radical economic alternative – and getting rewarded at the ballot box.

Updated at 07.10 EDT

No official results yet in Northern Ireland’s assembly election but a few straws in the wind suggest it will be a grim day for the Democratic Unionist party and a breakthrough for Sinn Féin.

Early tallies suggest a strong showing for the Traditional Unionist Voice, a rightwing rival that has excoriated the DUP over the post-Brexit trade border in the Irish Sea.

Would a good day for the TUV definitionally mean a bad day for Jeffrey Donaldson’s DUP, I asked Nicholas Whyte, a psephologist and authority on Northern Ireland elections. “Yes,” he said.

In which case, Sinn Féin could afford to lose a seat or two and still emerge bigger than the DUP and any other party, and thus claim the right to nominate the region’s first nationalist first minister in the Stormont power-sharing executive.

Big caveat: it’s extremely early in the count and vote transfers are unpredictable.

Asked about the prospect of an emboldened Sinn Féin pushing for a referendum on Irish unity, Oliver Dowden, the Conservative party chairman, told Sky News:

I’m confident that we will be able to make the case for Northern Ireland remaining in the United Kingdom should that that arise, but I don’t think we’re at that stage. Ballot papers being counted in Belfast this morning. Photograph: Peter Morrison/AP

Updated at 06.58 EDT

Boris Johnson has been spending the morning on a visit to a primary school in his Uxbridge and South Ruislip constituency, where he has painted a picture of the Queen. We have not had words from him yet, but the first pictures are available.

Boris Johnson poses with the portrait he painted of the Queen during a drawing session with children as part of a visit at the Field End Infant school in South Ruislip this morning. Photograph: Daniel Leal/AFP/Getty Images

Updated at 06.58 EDT

One of the more niche if most bitterly contested subplots of the local elections was the fate of candidates who explicitly opposed the schemes known as low-traffic neighbourhoods, or LTNs – and if early results are anything to go by, they do not seem to have fared especially well.

LTNs, which seek to encourage cycling and walking by using filters or bollards to block through-motor traffic on some smaller residential streets, while allowing pedestrians and cyclists to pass, have proved a controversial innovation in a series of areas including London, Oxford and Birmingham.

A series of dedicated anti-LTN independent candidates stood, while in some places, notably in a series of London boroughs, Conservative and even Lib Dem candidates promised to remove them.

While the results are, of course, shaped by a series of other national and local factors, it does seem that anti-LTN sentiment was less strong than might appear from coverage of the issue in some newspapers.

So far, no anti-LTN independents have won – although one, standing in Oxford, finished a reasonably close second to Labour – and campaigners’ hopes to unseat pro-LTN Labour candidates in London boroughs like Southwark came to nothing.

One potential exception is Enfield, another hotbed of the debate, where the Tories gained eight seats from Labour.

Updated at 07.00 EDT

Davey claims election results amount to ‘almighty shockwave’ that will bring Tory government ‘tumbling down’

Ed Davey, the Lib Dem leader, claims these election results amount to “an almighty shockwave that will bring this Conservative government tumbling down”. Speaking to reporters in Wimbledon, he said:

What began as a tremor in Chesham and Amersham, became an earthquake in North Shropshire, and is now an almighty shockwave that will bring this Conservative government tumbling down.

It is the movement of millions of people who are saying loud and clear: “We have had enough.”

Enough of seeing our energy bills go up, our tax bills go up, and our standard of living go down. Enough of filthy sewage pouring into our local rivers. Enough of waiting hours for an ambulance or weeks to see a GP. Enough of being ignored and taken for granted by this Conservative government.

And enough of a prime minister who breaks the law and lies about it.

The tectonic plates of British politics are shifting beneath Boris Johnson’s feet. And now it’s time for Conservative MPs to plunge him into the abyss.

In Wimbledon, the Lib Dems gained 12 seats on Merton council. They have also gained Hull city council from Labour, won another nine seats on Richmond council and also made gains in Cheadle (Stockport), Witney (West Oxfordshire) and Eastleigh.

The Richmond result is particularly striking. The Conservatives ran the council until 2018. But now there are 48 Lib Dems on the council, five Greens and just one Tory.

Ed Davey. Photograph: BBC News

Updated at 07.00 EDT

One Tory source has been piloting a novel spin on the election results with Lucy Fisher from Times Radio.

This is not a line that we have heard (yet?) from any senior Conservative politicians speaking on the record, and perhaps we never will. When Boris Johnson won the 2019 general election, he said he wanted to unite the country, and so for his party to effectively go to war with London (the city he used to represent as mayor) would be reckless. But it is interesting that some in the party are saying things like this privately.

Fisher says the remark has provoked a backlash.

Although today’s results do not suggest Labour is on course to win the next election with a majority, as John Rentoul argues in a column for the Independent, Keir Starmer does not necessarily need a majority to become prime minister. Rentoul explains:

Two immediate reactions to these results can both be true. One, these are good results for Keir Starmer. Two, they are not the kind of results that presage a Labour majority at the next general election. However, Labour does not have to win a majority for Starmer to be prime minister, and these local elections are consistent with the Conservatives losing their majority in parliament.

What matters in a two-party system is the difference in share of the vote between the two largest parties. The English local election results suggest that Labour is doing a little less well than the national opinion polls suggest, but would still be ahead of the Conservatives if people had been voting everywhere.

In fact, Labour would not even have to be ahead of the Conservatives in terms of share of the vote at the next general election to deprive Boris Johnson of his majority. This is well illustrated by this chart from The British general election of 2019, the indispensable guide to that contest by Robert Ford, Tim Bale, Will Jennings and Paula Surridge published last year. It shows that, because of the way the system is currently skewed against Labour (essentially Labour stacks up too many of its votes in the same seats), Labour would need a massive lead over the Conservatives to secure a slender overall majority. But it also shows how the Tory majority vanishes once their national lead falls below around five points.

How Tory/Labour vote shares would affect Commons majority figures under the voting system. Photograph: British General Election of 2019

Updated at 06.21 EDT