{"id":31833,"date":"2026-05-08T18:34:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-08T18:34:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/31833\/"},"modified":"2026-05-08T18:34:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-08T18:34:08","slug":"uk-elections-2026-5-takeaways-from-labours-drubbing-politico","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/31833\/","title":{"rendered":"UK elections 2026: 5 takeaways from Labour\u2019s drubbing \u2013 POLITICO"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>4. A trickle of calls for Starmer to go \u2026 but the dam hasn\u2019t broken (yet)<\/p>\n<p>As of Friday evening, more than 10 Labour MPs had either called for Starmer to either outright go, or demand his departure unless there\u2019s urgent overhaul of the government.<\/p>\n<p>Louise Haigh, the influential co-chair of the soft-left Tribune caucus, was first to make the veiled call for Starmer to go.<\/p>\n<p>That was couched in the language of being necessary unless there is \u201csignificant and urgent change,\u201d a phrasing echoed by Anneliese Midgley to POLITICO.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>So far no ministers have publicly called for a change of leadership and with numbers being as low as they are right now Downing Street will be hoping this doesn\u2019t represent the breaking of the dam.<\/p>\n<p>5. Reform triumphs \u2014 but the Tories aren\u2019t dead<\/p>\n<p>For all of Reform\u2019s successes and Nigel Farage\u2019s cries of a \u201ctruly historic shift in British politics,\u201d this was no runaway victory for his party.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/news.sky.com\/story\/english-council-elections-what-the-results-so-far-are-telling-us-in-maps-and-charts-13541348\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">Sky News\u2019 extrapolation from the results<\/a> to estimate national share actually projected Reform\u2019s support as being down on last year.<\/p>\n<p>Farage has long threatened to replace the Conservatives. But that hasn\u2019t quite happened yet. Kemi Badenoch\u2019s party \u2014 still the official opposition in the U.K. \u2014 won Westminster council from Labour, nudged the party out of control in Wandsworth and managed to hold onto the Fareham area represented by one of Farage\u2019s most high-profile defectors from the Tories, Suella Braverman.<\/p>\n<p>There\u2019s no doubt that Farage is the big winner of the day, but his opponents shouldn\u2019t believe all is lost.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"4. A trickle of calls for Starmer to go \u2026 but the dam hasn\u2019t broken (yet) As of&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":31834,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[497,173,94,186,95,1143,5,6,38],"class_list":{"0":"post-31833","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uk","8":"tag-british-politics","9":"tag-england","10":"tag-keir-starmer","11":"tag-kemi-badenoch","12":"tag-nigel-farage","13":"tag-scotland","14":"tag-uk","15":"tag-united-kingdom","16":"tag-wales"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@UnitedKingdom\/116540398795258529","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31833","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31833"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31833\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/31834"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}