The results of last Thursday’s elections may have been broadly in line with predictions but that doesn’t make them any less spectacular.

A complete transformation of the party-political system is now entering its final stages. It may be unclear what exact new equilibrium we will end up with, but we can now be certain we will not be returning to the two (or two and a half) party system of Tory versus Labour (with a side order of Liberals) which has prevailed since the end of the Second World War.

To start with the clear winners, Reform had an immensely successful night topping the poll, with ease, both in terms of council seats won and in terms of votes cast. The story of the opinion polls (Reform consistently and typically measurably ahead of the rest of the pack) was replicated by real ballot papers cast in real ballot boxes.

As things presently stand, Reform is the only political party in Britain which can reasonably aspire to winning the next election outright. In rough and ready terms, Nigel Farage has – ten years on – reconstructed the coalition who voted for Brexit. I haven’t punched every single result from Thursday’s poll into a spreadsheet,  but I can say with absolute confidence that if you map Reform results onto Leave results you will find an almost perfect correlation. Given that nearly two-thirds of Parliamentary constituencies voted Leave, you can quite easily map Nigel Farage’s pathway to Downing Street.

All that said, Reform are some way from sealing the deal. Projecting last week’s results onto a General Election would yield about 280 Reformers in the House of Commons, far ahead of any other party but measurably short of an overall majority (and enormously short of a working majority).

The conundrum for Reform is where do they think they can get an additional 5-10% of the national vote from? Do they try and attract new voters through a strategy of reassurance or by doubling down on boldness? Their ability to successfully solve this puzzle – especially given that Reform’s poll ratings have edged down a few points in recent months – will determine whether they can win in 2029 or fall short.

My sense, though, is that more than any other party leader, Nigel Farage holds his destiny in his own hands.

Interpreting what the results mean for the Conservatives is rather trickier. I have found the reaction of some senior Conservatives to be almost completely detached from the actual outcome of the election. The Tories lost 40% of their seats (perhaps a tad better than the 50% many pundits predicted but still a dismal showing for an official opposition party mid-term against a monumentally unpopular government). There were some results that went the way of the Conservatives – including Westminster and Wandsworth (which in the minds of the mainstream media are by far and away the two most important local authorities in the land).

However, the Conservatives were only really meeting with any sort of success in areas which voted Remain, are very affluent and have a recent history of voting Conservative. There just aren’t anything like enough of these sort of places to trigger a meaningful revival. In once-true-blue Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk, the turquoise tide eviscerated the Tories.

As I discussed with both my PopCon colleagues (here) and with David Starkey (here), the Conservatives seem to be celebrating that this year’s round of elections wasn’t quite as bad as last year’s. Having shed three pints of blood in 2025, the party only lost two pints this year – but this still ultimately amounts to bleeding to death.

One can perhaps detect one plausible strand of hope for the Conservative Party. After truly finding her feet as party leader, Kemi Badenoch’s personal ratings are enormously more impressive than those of her party. The Tories did improve from a 15% national equivalent vote share in 2025 to 19% this time round. The thinking might be that Kemi’s ratings will begin to filter through to a higher party vote share, but that there’s a measurable time lag and patience is the required virtue. Maybe.

But it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the Conservatives are now relying on Farage and Reform to implode and that unlike the other main party on the Right, they no longer hold their destiny in their own hands.

There are, however, two matters that the Conservatives could attend to themselves and on which they have thus far been found wanting.

Simply saying “We are under new management and acknowledge the mistakes in our last period in office” is nowhere near enough to reboot the party in the way – or on the scale - that is needed. On the Sunday morning media rounds, James Cleverly (comfortably one of the party’s best media performers) tried to argue that the Tories were still the principal force on the right of politics and supported “reducing taxes, protecting borders, funding the armed forces and making sure we liberate business.”

This invites the rather obvious question as to why, when given the chance, the Tories did the exact opposite of these things? Tory spokesmen become all fingers and thumbs when attempting to deal with that question, thereby causing swathes of voters to ask why it would be any different next time.

The answer, of course, is that the Conservatives completely failed to overhaul the Blairite government machinery and legal system they inherited and should make this their first and overriding priority if ever given another chance.

Second, there has been no serious overhaul of the party’s own structures or its overall brand – even if there has been some minimal surgery on the edges. I suspect membership now stands at under 100,000 and is still falling. That doesn’t provide a credible platform for electoral victory.

In the wake of Brexit and following the 2019 Boris landslide, the Conservatives had the opportunity to lead a new coalition of voters – patriotic, pro-enterprise and opposed to “wokery”. Instead, having more or less “got Brexit done”, the party embraced Greta Thunberg, raised tax, increased spending, decided we needed yet more red tape and regulation, pondered what a woman is and locked down the entire country far harder and for far longer than could possibly be justified.

Having squandered that opportunity back then, the Conservatives have been rather timid in attempting to move onto that ground now. This means, although nothing is yet definitive, that the present score on the right of British politics is “Advantage Farage”.

Keep the flag of freedom flying!