Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots. I'm Lucy Dunn and today I'm joined by Isabel Hardman and Moorn Common Polster Luke Trill.

It's been an incredibly eventful day and a half watching the results of the local elections across England come in.

Nigel Farage's Reform Party celebrating momentous gains across the country, taking control of councils, winning two new

mayors and of course clinching the victory in the Runcorn and Halesby by-election. The Greens

and Liberal Democrats have also made gains, but both Labour and the Conservatives fared pretty

badly. Look, considering what the expectations were going into these elections, which party do you think had the

worst night? Well, look, if you look at the performance of both the Conservatives and Labour,

they were both right at the bottom end, in fact, surpassing the bottom end for bad projection.

So they certainly both had a bad night. But I think you've got to

say that if you have to pick between the two, it is the Conservatives who had the worst night.

And that is simply because these elections were being fought on true blue territory. You know,

these are the Tory counties and shires, you know, places like Kent,

Buckingham, Northumberland, you know, real bastions of conservative strength.

Staffordshire, where they went from having, I think it's 57 of the 62 seats to seeing reform take control.

And I think the reason it's bad is, A, it's bad in of itself, you know, losing all of those seats.

But it also, because it was their heartland area, means an erosion of that conservative infrastructure. So it's bad

in of itself, but it's also going to be harder for them to recover as well. And I suppose,

is about thinking about looking at how, you know, reform have made gains in traditional labour areas.

So, you know, for example, taking control of Durham County Council, you know, a council that

hosts the miners gala.

It suggests that Labour Heartlands no longer feel much loyalty towards Stormers' party and that actually their working class voters are turning against them.

Do you think that we're looking at the end of Labour as the party of the working class?

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