LIVE: Greens beat Labour to Hackney mayoralty as Reform win in Essex

Take a look at our live-updating maps and charts produced by the Daily Mail’s Deep Dive team for the latest election results across England, Wales and Scotland.

Mail on Sunday columnist Dan Hodges says he understands Angela Rayner is ‘preparing an intervention’ but won’t challenge Sir Keir Starmer for the leadership.

It is being reported no Labour ministers will join some backbenchers by calling on Sir Keir to stand down.

Ms Rayner is understood to be one of the frontrunners in the event of a leadership contest.

John Swinney has said it is clear the SNP will emerge as the largest party in the Scottish Parliament, as he was re-elected in his Perthshire North constituency.

Scotland’s First Minister said his party’s results were a ‘moment of enormous, enormous significance for me’, thanking his supporters.

He won with 16,414 votes, a majority of just over 6,000.

Giving his victory speech at the election count in Perth, he said:

I express my warmest thanks to my constituents who supported me so emphatically in this election today.

We are at the very early stages of the election count across the country. But it is becoming clear that the Scottish National Party is going to emerge as the largest party in this election campaign. That is, for me, something incredibly precious

Reform’s leader in Wales said it was ‘too early to say’ what the outcome of the Senedd elections could be.

Dan Thomas declined to say whether he would be Wales’s next first minister, also telling reporters at the Casnewydd Islwyn count in Newport: ‘I’m not going to go into speculation and hypothetical questions. It’s too early.

‘We all know that Labour are finished, we know that after 27 years of failure, letting the people of Wales down. We know that much.

‘But apart from that, I think it’s too early to say.’

Scottish Labour is ‘hurting’ after the party ‘didn’t win the argument’ in the Holyrood election, the party’s leader Anas Sarwar has said.

Speaking as he entered the Emirates Arena in Glasgow for the election count, the party leader claimed ‘those who seek to divide us and use people with frustrations to divide us are going to win the day today’.

But Mr Sarwar hinted that he would not step down from his post, telling journalists: ‘My party is hurting – we’re disappointed, we advocate for change, we didn’t win that argument, but it’s my job to hold us together and that’s a job I intend to do’.

Reform MP and business spokesman Richard Tice visited the Birmingham City Council count and said the party had ‘absolutely smashed it’ in other areas of the West Midlands, including Newcastle-under-Lyme and Tamworth.

The Boston and Skegness MP said it was too early to gauge the extent of his party’s success in Birmingham.

Citing Reform UK’s strong showing in parts of Staffordshire, a year after it won control of the county council, he added: ‘Voters are doubling down and saying thank you very much Reform councils for what you’ve done so far.’

He added that the results already in in the region amounted to voters saying ‘yes, we are going to give you an extra chance to do even better’.

In the last hour, Reform are now in control of Suffolk County Council, their fourth win in the local elections.

Here’s the current state of play at 2pm:

Nigel Farage’s party has so far 380 seats plus council wins in Newcastle-under-Lyme, Havering, Essex and Suffolk

Lost 232 seats and control of Blackburn and Darwen, Exeter, Hartlepool, Oxford, Redditch, Southampton, Tameside, Tamworth, Wandsworth, Westminster

• Conservatives

Lost 118 seats and control of Essex and Newcastl-under-Lyme but gains Westminster from Labour

• Liberal Democrats

Gained 28 seats and won control of Portsmouth and Stockport councils

Gained 19 seats Won Hackney mayoralty

Baroness Eluned Morgan, the Welsh First Minister, is expected to lose her seat in Ceredigion Penfro, sources have told the BBC.

The Welsh Labour leader has led the party in Wales since 2024.

Welsh Labour expect to be reduced from 30 to around 10 members in the Senedd, with a party spokesperson saying they are ‘deeply disappointed’ they will not lead the government.

Reform UK have taken control of Suffolk County Council from the Tories.

A Green candidate in the Hackney council election has said his party is hopeful it will get a majority on the local authority, which has historically been a Labour stronghold.

Jacob Cable, standing for the Greens in Stoke Newington, said Zoe Garbett’s decisive victory over the Labour mayor in Hackney has ‘given us an indication that change is on its way’.

‘We have a wonderful, diverse borough that is calling out for change, that needs better action on housing, on child poverty and on community space, and I think it’s going to come,’ Mr Cable told the Press Association.

Asked whether he thought a Green majority was on the cards for Hackney council, which has been a Labour-led since 2002, Mr Cable said: ‘We’re taking nothing for granted. Every vote counts. But I think given the decisive victory for Zoe today, we’re really hopeful that we’ll have a majority.’

A Labour source said they feared speculation that it faced a ‘bin fire’ in its battle to retain a significant number of seats on Birmingham City Council would prove to be accurate.

The source tipped Reform UK, Green and independent candidates to prosper.

As the first three seats to declare resulted in a Tory hold and Green and Reform UK gains, both from Labour, the Labour source said:

Let’s just say I haven’t seen anyone looking even remotely happy. The mood is worse than bad. It’s bleak.

by Quentin Letts, Parliamentary Sketchwriter

Sir Keir Starmer, open-collared, stony-eyed, insisted he was ‘not going to walk away and plunge the country into chaos’. Four times he said it as the extent of Labour’s losses became horribly clear.

Interviewer Beth Rigby from Sky News was too kind to say the country was already in chaotic decline thanks to Sir Keir’s ineptitude.

The Prime Minister, up before 9am to get his media torture out of the way early, was doing that computer-speak thing where he keeps repeating a message, no matter what the question. In addition to the ‘I’m not going to walk away’ line he kept saying the results were ‘tough’, as if they were a slice of bad beef.

Reporter Rigby pressed quite hard on whether or not the PM understood how stinkingly unpopular he was. The AI-programmed premier did not recognise this scenario. ‘I’m not going to walk away and plunge the country into chaos,’ repeated Sir Keir.

Read Quentin’s full sketch here: