Nigel Farage (C), leader of the Reform UK party, celebrates the victory of Sarah Pochin, the party’s candidate, in the Runcorn & Helsby by-election at the DCBL Stadium in Widnes, north-west England, in the early hours of May 2, 2025.
Oli Scarff | Afp | Getty Images
Nigel Farage’s right-wing Reform UK party made early gains in local English election results on Friday and won a parliamentary by-election by the smallest ever margin in the first major electoral test since last year’s general election.
The populist Reform, led by the Brexit campaigner Farage, hopes a strong performance in English local elections to be announced through Friday will mark the start of the breakdown of Britain’s century-old two-party political system, dominated by the governing Labour Party and opposition Conservatives.
In the most closely watched contest for the parliamentary seat of Runcorn and Helsby, a full recount of votes was ordered because the result was so close.
Reform’s Sarah Pochin beat Labour’s candidate by just six votes. Labour won the seat in last summer’s national election with a majority of almost 15,000 votes.
The tight race in what was previously a safe Labour seat underlines the way Britain’s political landscape has fractured since the general election. Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer won one of the largest parliamentary majorities in British history last summer but has suffered the fastest decline in popularity of any newly elected government.
Starmer, a former lawyer before turning to politics, has seen his government suffer a steep fall in support after it raised taxes, cut benefits for the elderly, and got into a row over the use of donations, giving an opening to Farage, who is a friend of U.S. President Donald Trump.
Voters cast their ballots on Thursday for more than 1,600 seats on local authorities across England and six high-profile mayoral elections.
Runcorn and Helsby was the only parliamentary seat up for grabs after the Labour lawmaker quit following his conviction for punching one of his constituents.
The former Conservative minister Andrea Jenkyns, who lost her seat at the national election last year and defected to Reform, also won the race to become the first mayor of Greater Lincolnshire.
That makes her Reform’s most powerful elected position yet with responsibility for an area covering about a million people.
Reform also came close to toppling Labour in three other contests in North Tyneside, the West of England, and Doncaster.
