Badenoch apologises as Tories suffer heavy local election defeat

Kemi Badenoch apologised to Conservative candidates as her party suffered a local election drubbing.

The Tory leader conceded the public was “still not yet ready to trust us” after losing hundreds of councillors in a Reform UK surge.

Speaking to supporters in Peterborough, she said: “Protest parties are doing well today, I know that, it is disappointing.

“And I have a message for all of those Conservative councillors who lost their seats, how sincerely sorry I am for your loss, because I know how hard you worked, but we are going to win those seats back.”

Peterborough represented the one bright spot for the Conservatives on Friday, as former MP Paul Bristow won the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough mayoralty with a majority of more than 10,500 over Reform.

The result saw the Tories regain the post that they held from 2017 until 2021, when they lost it to Labour.

Anna Smith, the Labour candidate, slipped into third place, some 7,000 votes behind Reform’s Ryan Coogan.

But elsewhere in the country, the Conservatives suffered at the hands of Reform and were squeezed by the Liberal Democrats in their traditional heartlands.

Having gone into the election holding 15 of the councils up for election, the Conservatives ended Friday controlling none of them.

Mrs Badenoch said: “What I saw everywhere I campaigned was that people are fed up with the Labour Government.

“They were angry about winter fuel payments. They were angry about the jobs tax, but they are still not yet ready to trust us.

“We have a big job to do to rebuild trust with the public.

“That’s the job the Conservative Party has given me and I am going to make sure that we get ourselves back to the place where we are seen as the credible alternative to Labour.”

The Tory leader had previously warned the local elections would be tough, as the last time most of the seats up for grabs were contested was in spring 2021 when Boris Johnson’s government was boosted by the Covid vaccine rollout.

Nigel Farage said Reform UK had had “wiped out” the Conservatives in parts of England as local election results rolled in.

The elections mark “the end of two-party politics” and the “beginning of the end of the Conservative Party”, he said.