Starmer loses authority as Labour suffers shock local election defeats

Labour lost 1,496 councillors and control of 38 councils in the 7 May English local elections, while Reform UK won 1,454 council seats and took control of 14 councils. The contests covered 5,066 seats across 136 local authorities, plus six directly elected mayoral races, and they delivered the kind of result that strips a prime minister of authority in public and inside his own party.

The damage was not evenly spread. Labour was hit hardest in former industrial and northern areas, including Greater Manchester and the North West, where support fell sharply in places such as Wigan, Tameside and Hartlepool. In Wigan, Labour lost all 20 seats it was defending. Elsewhere the losses reached into Redditch, Tamworth and Exeter, underlining that the party’s problem was not confined to one region or one type of seat.

That scale of retreat matters because it speaks to governability, not just electoral bruising. Starmer’s problem now looks less like the fallout from a single policy mistake and more like the erosion of the practical authority needed to command Parliament, enforce party discipline and persuade voters that a government can still steer events. The comparison with Boris Johnson and Liz Truss is useful precisely because it is not about scandal alone. It is about a premiership that loses the capacity to govern.

The pressure hardened in mid-June, when Ipsos polling taken between 12 and 16 June found that two in three Britons thought Keir Starmer should not lead Labour into the next general election. Other June trackers placed his net approval rating in the mid-minus 40s, a level that leaves little room for recovery unless the party can show it still controls its own narrative and its own ranks.

Reform UK’s surge under Nigel Farage sharpened that sense of drift. Winning 1,454 seats and 14 councils, Reform turned the local election map into evidence that Labour’s old base is no longer secure and that protest is becoming organisation. For Starmer, the immediate problem is that Labour’s losses, the scale of Reform’s gains and the hostility in the polls now point in the same direction: weakened authority, fraying discipline and a leader whose grip looks increasingly difficult to restore.