Jim Pickard

Lucy, how dare you?

It was 3am.

So the theme is pretty much what we've been anticipating for months, but seeing it crystallise in front of our eyes is obviously fascinating.

As of lunchtime on Friday, reform is over 400 seats up, Conservatives around 200 down, Labour down 3%.

somewhere over 250.

And the Greens have got modest gains, but then the Greens are still waiting for the inner city London seats to come through.

And the Lib Dems have had a sort of okay-ish performance.

But what this basically is, it is the reality on the ground and local government catching up with opinion polls, which have been telling us for over a year that reform is relatively much more popular than

than the other political parties.

And therefore, it's come from almost nowhere.

Remember, Nigel Farage only set the party up five years ago.

It's coming from nowhere.

It's going to end the week, I suspect, a couple of thousand seats up.

Now, the only glimmer of hopes for the Labour Party, and of course, the tension is already turning to what is the mood in the parliamentary Labour Party?

Are they going to try and depose Sir Keir Starmer?

Have they got the foggiest idea inside number 10 and outside number 10 where they should be going?

The two glimmers of hope they've got is that, firstly, the expectation management on this from academia was quite positive from Labour's perspective because you had very respected political professors saying that the Labour Party could lose 1,800, 1,900 seats.

And now, as the results are coming through, they're suggesting that it might be

closer to 1200, 1300.

We obviously don't know.