Jen Williams

So that means that all the councillors are up, which means that it could flip entirely from Labour to reform.

So although not all of these councils are going to change hands overnight, you can very much see which direction things are going in.

And I think the other thing, just to add on some of the results here that haven't yet come through, we haven't seen the northern cities yet.

And in northern cities...

Like Manchester and Leeds, Labour are defending seats both from reform and from the Greens.

The early signs from Salford, which has seats right on the border of Manchester city centre last night, it was the Greens are getting purchased in those sort of urban professional wards.

So here it couldn't so far have been an awful lot worse.

Well, I think the trend was sufficiently pronounced that late afternoon I was getting messages from people saying,

out campaigning and following this in councils in different parts of the country saying, turnout is definitely up.

So it was something that was kind of clocked relatively early doors.

And for Labour in many places, I think that then led to further jitters because what reform have proved very good at doing previously is turnout voters who don't habitually vote, people who may be sat on their hands in 2024, in some cases haven't voted since the EU referendum.

And there is some suggestion that is partly what was going on here, but it's a little bit early until you know how that played out in different places to actually know what turnout was driving what in what location.

But certainly Professor John Curtis was saying last night that there was every reason to think, certainly in some places, as a result of that knack that reform have got to get

non-voters to turn out to vote for them that should be good for them but that's not to say that in places with different makeups that it couldn't benefit the Greens for example or that there may be a sort of in some places a sort of stop reform vote going on as well and there were definitely kind of differing views I think among experts overnight as to exactly what it is that's going on

I think a lot of the psychologically important results he had to come through today, certainly up here,

In the cities where, as in London, they are trying to take Labour's vote in middle-class areas, in Muslim areas, in young professional areas, just from younger areas in general, those results are really going to start to serve us today.

And I mentioned Manchester earlier on, where what has traditionally been an extremely effective party machine is fighting on both fronts.

There were signs last night in some of those Salford wards that the Greens have made progress.

And that was one of the immediate concerns that came out of the Gorton, the Denton by-election result, was that councils in this neck of the woods, in the sort of urban councils in that kind of general vicinity, looked at the result there and thought there could be implications here.

for us.