Nigel Farage's Reform UK has made big gains in English local elections, cementing it as a prime challenger to Britain's traditional main parties. It won 677 of around 1,600 seats contested on Thursday across a clutch of mainly Tory-held councils last contested in 2021.

Until now, Reform’s political impact had far outweighed its electoral impact. Mr Farage’s team had topped the polls on and off since the start of the year; the local elections on May 1st were a chance to show that this surge was not just an artefact of polling. The party took it.

The far-right party Reform UK led by Nigel Farage snatched a seat in Parliament from the governing Labour Party and won hundreds of local council seats from the opposition Conservatives in elections that Farage hailed Friday as a turning point towards ending the two parties' political dominance.