The Lib Dems gained more councillors than any other party in elections across England yesterday.
Tim Farron, the Liberal Democrat leader, said that the “fight was back on” as his party took seats off the Conservatives, who fared worse than expected. The Tories were on course to lose more than 35 seats although they gained Peterborough council from no overall control.
Jeremy Corbyn presided over the worst performance by any opposition party for 30 years, but Labour still did a lot better than expected. It lost fewer than 30 seats and hung on to all but one of a string of vulnerable councils.
Crucially Labour clung on to authorities in the south that many experts thought it would lose such as Crawley, Exeter and Southampton. It also shed only one assembly seat in Wales, where the party is likely to run a minority administration.
Ukip consolidated its position by picking up at least 26 council seats.
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Senior Labour councillors had been planning to launch a co-ordinated attack on Mr Corbyn’s leadership if he lost badly and some could not contain their anger, even with better results than expected.
John Ferrett, the leader of the Labour group in Portsmouth city council, claimed that Mr Corbyn was “incapable of giving the leadership we need”. He said it was clear that Ukip was gaining votes in Portsmouth. “People just see the Labour party leadership as incompetent. They don’t feel they can be trusted, not least on defence, and that is really hurting us.”
By yesterday evening the party had lost control of Dudley but had hung on to all its big cities and its handful of councils in the south.
Election analysts had predicted that Labour could lose up to 150 seats as well as five or six councils. However, they also pointed out that in the past 30 years no party in opposition had lost even one seat in a council election apart from a general election year.
A new opposition leader would normally have been expected to win hundreds of seats in his first year after a general election.
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The Liberal Democrats turned the corner in England yesterday but in Scotland they were beaten into fifth place by the Greens and in Wales their leader, Kirsty Williams, resigned after bad results.
The party, which has recorded poor council performances for the past seven years, gained about 40 council seats, and Watford council, and doubled its share of the vote since last year to 15 per cent.
Mr Farron said: “We still have a long way to go, but the centre ground in British politics is a vast space and we have now regained the credibility to fill it.”
A spokesman said that seats had been gained from both Labour and the Tories and advances had been made in Portsmouth, Cambridge and Burnley. The party had also made inroads into areas that were previously no-go areas for the Liberal Democrats such as Sunderland, Manchester and Knowsley. However, it lost majority control of Stockport.
In the elections for police and crime commissioners, independent candidates were the main casualties as the Conservatives reasserted their grip in rural areas. The number of independents had fallen from 11 to six with 18 of the 40 seats declared.
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The Conservatives took Warwickshire, Kent, West Mercia, Lincolnshire and Surrey from independents and won Bedfordshire from Labour. Labour took Leicestershire and Humberside from the Tories.