Local Election Results 2026: Morgan McSweeney’s ‘Blue Labour’ Legacy Lives On

IMPACT UPDATE: Byline Times investigations have forced the suspension of two Conservative local election candidates after revealing their far-right extremist posts, and our investigation into Reform’s connections to THE COMPANY JCB cited by the Guardian. 05/05/26

Nigel Farage’s beaming face is already featuring heavily in the coverage of today’s local elections results, but the truth is that the real architect of Reform UK’s big gains across England is a man whose face is only rarely seen in public.

Keir Starmer’s former chief of staff Morgan McSweeney was forced out of office earlier this year following revelations about his role in appointing the disgraced peer Peter Mandelson as ambassador to the US.

Yet despite having already departed Westminster, McSweeney’s legacy lives on this morning in a truly disastrous set of local election results for Labour across England.

It was McSweeney who devised Starmer’s ‘Blue Labour’ strategy of focusing on what he described as Reform-sympathetic “hero voters” in the Northern “red wall”, whilst spurning Labour’s younger, more liberal, metropolitan core vote in cities like London.

The result this morning is a complete fracturing of Labour’s support, handing Reform massive gains in Labour’s former Northern heartlands, whilst ensuring a similar surge in support for Zack Polanski’s Green Party in the South.

Not only did McSweeney’s strategy achieve the complete opposite of its stated aim in winning over Reform voters, but the collapse of a big chunk of Labour’s support to the Greens has also actively helped to hand Reform a series of stunning gains across the country.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the seats which McSweeney prioritised. In Wigan, where the Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy won an almost 10,000 vote majority at the last general election, Reform won 24 out of the 25 seats up for grabs. If repeated at a general election, Labour would be out of office, with big Cabinet hitters like Nandy, Angela Rayner and Ed Miliband all losing their seats. 

For McSweeney’s diehard supporters, Reform’s gains in these areas will be taken as a reason for doubling down on their strategy of talking up culturally conservative issues like immigration. When all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail.

However, as the elections guru John Curtice set out this morning, the reality is quite different.

As he told the BBC: “A sharp fall in Labour’s performance is accompanied more often by an above average Green performance than it is by a strong Reform performance…”

“Labour may often lose seats to Reform because it is losing votes to the Greens, while the Conservatives are losing votes to Reform. The net effect can be that Labour end up losing a seat to Reform”.

In other words Labour may be losing seats to Reform, but that is mostly because they are losing actual votes to the Greens. In the party’s former Northern heartlands this fact is helping Reform, yet in other parts of the country it is helping the Greens. In all cases it is Labour that is losing out as a direct result of McSweeney’s strategy.

The impact on the Greens is not yet clear. With much of London still to be declared, it remains to be seen whether the Greens will get the sort of breakthrough in the capital that was predicted. However, council areas like Hackney in East London and Lewisham in South East London are likely to swing heavily towards the Greens, with a similar picture already emerging in other southern cities like Oxford and Reading.

All of this was the entirely predictable result of McSweeney’s ‘Blue Labour’ strategy. Indeed this is the very outcome that Byline Times has long predicted on these pages.

Yet for years McSweeney was talked up by his media supporters as some kind of strategic genius. Even after his departure from office, political journalists whose scoops relied heavily on McSweeney’s generous briefings, were talking up his “relentless focus on winning”.

Yet the truth is that far from being focused on winning, McSweeney’s strategy has ensured that Labour is waking up to the biggest set of local defeats since the Conservative Government prior to Tony Blair’s landslide in 1997.

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Conservatives Down But Not Out

A major part of Reform’s gains in these elections is a collapse in support for Kemi Badenoch’s Conservative party. Despite her performance being talked up by Conservative-supporting papers in recent months, it is already clear that these are set to be the worst set of local election results for any recent official opposition post-losing office.

Ironically for a party that has done more than almost any other to signal its contempt for the capital city, it is London that contains the few bright spots for the Conservatives. In both Wandsworth and Westminster the party looks set to win the councils from Labour. Reform’s big London target seat of Bexley also looks set to be held comfortably by the Tories.

Yet these gains look to be more about a fall in support for Labour than any great enthusiasm for what Badenoch is offering in the capital. That this is the case can be seen in Sutton, South London, where her party lost every single one of the 20 seats it held, almost all of which to the Lib Dems.

The truth is that despite a few bright spots, these are a truly dreadful set of results for the Conservatives, who look even further from returning to office than they did two years ago when Badenoch took over.

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Will Starmer Survive?

Despite briefings that the Environment Secretary Ed Miliband has privately called on Starmer to set out his timetable for standing down, there is little sign of him intending to do so.

Starmer’s allies were across the broadcast rounds this morning insisting that he will stumble on, with the Prime Minister himself telling journalists that “when voters send a message like this we must reflect and we must respond.”

It remains unclear exactly what that response will be, although some briefings suggest that he now understands that McSweeney’s “hero voter” strategy must be ditched.

As the I Paper reported this week, “the belief within Downing Street is that focus on ‘hero voters’ – those that had abandoned Labour in 2019 – that served the party so well in 2024 was no longer fit for purpose. Instead, the strategy will be on the ‘progressive block’.”

“’The view is that whichever party can can unite the progressive voting block, or the right voting block, most effectively will be the one that wins the next general election,’ a government source said.”

In some respects this is true. It is the fracturing of Labour’s ‘progressive block’ which is the main trigger for these results. Yet the cause of that fracturing is not just about McSweeney’s Reform-lite messaging, but about a broader failure to deliver for Labour’s own voters on the issues that really matter.

As exclusive polling for Byline Times showed this week, those issues are the economy and NHS, with immigration now falling down the list of decisive factors in voters’ choices. And as the pollster Luke Tryl recently told this paper, it is Starmer’s failure to demonstrate a clear sense of direction on these that is really behind the decline in support for his party.

It was telling that on the doorsteps during these elections, it was issues like Labour’s early cut to winter fuel allowance that still dominated voter concerns, despite long ago being abandoned by the Government. The sense that Labour is simply not on voters’ side whether they are politically on the left, right, or centre is the key factor on the party’s collapse in support.

That sense is also as much to do with more abstract issues like leadership, as it is to do with ideology or policy. As Tryl explained “It’s less the people who really hate him that I think should really worry Starmer than the group of people who would have been fans 18 months ago, but now think he just doesn’t have it and he’s too weak. And I think once you get that, that is killer.”

In some ways today’s results are the worst possible outcome for those hoping for a Labour revival. Bad enough to point towards a disastrous outcome at the next general election for the party, but not so bad as to demand Starmer’s immediate replacement.

For now the party as a whole seems determined to wait for the potential return of Andy Burnham to Westminster – something those in Downing Street still appear determined to prevent.

Whether they will still have the strength to be able to do so, given the scale of Starmer’s defeat in these elections, could decide whether or not Labour’s historic collapse this morning turns out to be temporary, or terminal.