Jim Pickard

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.

And then the second glimmer of hope is that if the result lands in that area, it would be very similar to 1999.

We're going to hear that 1999 repeated over and over, which is when Tony Blair, two years into his first premiership, lost 1100 seats and then went on to win the 2001 general election.

I think it isn't the figure that Labour's currently losing about 70% of the seats that they held, whereas I think in 1999 that figure of 1,100 was only about 23%.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, I think Nigel Farage has every right to sound and feel triumphalist right now, because who wouldn't be impressed by a party that's gone from basically nothing to being ahead in the polls, taking a couple of thousand council seats.

We haven't got the Welsh results yet, but they'll probably become first or second in Wales.