On the final day the House of Commons sat before the election, the view from the back of the chamber said it all.
As Theresa May – in her familiar flame red suit – left the chamber after a speech by Ben Wallace, the Tory benches were packed, Labour’s almost deserted.
MPs were taking part in a “Valedictory Debate”, an unprecedented and hastily convened piece of parliamentary business for departing MPs to say their farewells.
And while the debate was going on, an historic milestone was reached: the number of Conservatives standing down exceeded the number in 1997 after 18 years of Tory rule.
With an announcement by the 74-year-old Bexleyheath and Crayford MP Sir David Evennett, the total number of MPs retiring or quitting had reached 76 – one more than the 75 in 1997.
And by the time parliament prorogued at 8.25pm, the number had reached 78, after two shock announcements, first from Michael Gove and then former cabinet minister Andrea Leadsom.
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In a moment of pure parliamentary theatre, the news of Mr Gove’s departure was broken to stunned MPs in the Commons by Matt Hancock, who’d earlier made an emotional farewell speech.
Then while the prorogation ceremony was taking place came the bombshell announcement from Dame Andrea, now a junior health minister, that she’s quitting too. And with a barb at Rishi Sunak too!
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“I will continue to support the Conservative Party…” she declared pointedly in her letter to Mr Sunak. Most resignation letters from departing ministers offer personal support for the prime minister. Ouch!
So at prorogation the total number of MPs standing down had reached 121, four more than 1997, though still short of the 149 who stood down in 2010, after 13 years of Labour government.
Inside the chamber, the debate had been emotional. There were tears as well as laughs. There were anecdotes and gushing tributes. And even, from one departing MP, bitterness, anger and allegations.
Many of those quitting on both sides of the Commons are distinguished ex-ministers, or prime minister in Mrs May’s case. But many are much younger and in many cases surprise departures.
Image: Dehenna Davison is one of the youngest MPs standing down. Pic: PA
One of the youngest, Dehenna Davison, told MPs: “I never thought I’d be speaking for the last time in this chamber, let alone at the age of 30.”
Some Tory MPs, it must be said, are leaving parliament after being embroiled in some form of scandal or facing misconduct allegations which resulted in them losing the party whip.
The MP making angry accusations, accusing a government whip of bullying and harassment, was Julian Knight, who faced allegations of serious sexual assault investigated then dropped by police.
Mr Hancock, health secretary during COVID, who lost the Tory whip for appearing on TV reality show I’m A Celebrity, talked in his emotional speech about the effects on his children.
“The impact of the scrutiny of politics, especially when people make mistakes, has a huge impact on them, and they have put up with a lot,” he said, close to tears.
There were tears too from former sports minister Dame Tracey Crouch during what she said was “one of the most emotional speeches I have ever made in parliament”.
Besides Mrs May, Mr Wallace, Mr Gove, Dame Andrea and Mr Hancock, 12 more current or former Tory cabinet ministers departing: Sajid Javid, George Eustice, Alister Jack, Dominic Raab, David Jones, Alok Sharma, Chris Grayling, Brandon Lewis, Nadhim Zahawi, Chris Heaton-Harris, Sir John Redwood and Greg Clark.
In her valedictory speech, with her husband Sir Philip watching on from the public gallery, Mrs May paid tribute to her “best canvasser-in-chief” who was there to “make the beans on toast and pour the whisky” on the difficult days in Downing Street.
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1:28
Theresa May urges Tories ‘to go out and fight’
And at the end of the debate, there were tributes to Craig Mackinlay, who made a triumphant, defiant and emotional return to the Commons this week after sepsis but now acknowledges he won’t be fit enough to fight the campaign.
Also going is the inscrutable but always cheerful Sir Graham Brady, who’s chaired the 1922 Committee almost interrupted since 2010 alongside five Tory prime ministers.
Two deputy speakers, the dames Eleanor Laing and Rosie Winterton, and Tory backbench grandees Sir Charles Walker and Sir Bill Cash are departing.
And on the Labour side, the distinguished Dame Margarets, Beckett and Hodge, along with the Mother of the House Dame Harriet Harman, who told MPs Rishi Sunak was two when she was first elected, are leaving.
From the smaller parties, the former SNP Westminster leader Ian Blackford and the Green Party’s Caroline Lucas are off too.
And besides Mr Knight, several MPs who’ve lost their party whip, Tories Crispin Blunt, William Wragg, Mark Menzies and Mr Knight and Labour’s Nick Brown and Conor McGinn, are going, along with the former DUP leader Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, who’s accused of sex offences.
Why are so many Tory MPs going? Is it because they read the opinion polls and believe their party’s time is up and they don’t fancy the hard slog and often unrewarding grind of opposition?
There’s a famous quote attributed to James Callaghan, during the 1979 general election campaign, shortly before Labour was swept from power by Margaret Thatcher.
“You know there are times, perhaps once every 30 years, when there is a sea-change in politics,” avuncular “Sunny Jim” observed shrewdly to his close aide Bernard Donoughue.
“It then doesn’t matter what you say or do. There’s a shift in what the public wants and what it approves of. I suspect there is now such a sea-change – and it is for Mrs Thatcher.”
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In 2024, Tory ministers and loyalist backbenchers won’t admit publicly that there’s a sea change for Labour and Sir Keir Starmer. But privately, many believe defeat is inevitable.
And that’s almost certainly why so many Conservative MPs are quitting.
Cryptocurrency services platform Nexo announced that it is reentering the US market after facing previous regulatory challenges.
According to an April 28 announcement, Nexo’s reentry event featured Donald Trump Jr., who said that he thinks “crypto is the future of finance,” adding:
“We see the opportunity for the financial sector and want to ensure we bring that back to the US.”
Trump Jr. also emphasized the need for a regulatory environment that supports the cryptocurrency industry. He said that “the key to everything crypto is going to be the regulatory framework.”
Nexo left the US at the end of 2022, citing a lack of regulatory clarity as the reason behind the decision. At the beginning of 2023, the firm agreed to pay a $45 million settlement to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) over its failure to register the offer and sale of securities of its interest-earning product.
A month after settling with US regulators, Nexo also decided to shut down its interest-earning product to US-based customers. The product allowed users to earn daily compounding yields on certain cryptocurrencies by loaning them to Nexo.
In late 2022, the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation also filed a desist and refrain order against the same interest-earning product managed by Nexo. The regulator claimed that the product was an unqualified security, meaning a security that the government has not approved for sale in the form of an investment contract.
Coinbase has urged the US Office of Government Ethics to remove a rule banning Securities and Exchange Commission staff from holding crypto.
SEC staff need to use crypto to better understand how it works and the best way to regulate it, Coinbase chief legal officer Paul Grewal argued in open letters sent to OGE acting director Jamieson Greer and newly sworn-in SEC Chair Paul Atkins, which he shared to X on April 25.
“To regulate technology, you need to understand it. To understand technology, you need to use it,” Grewal said in the letter to Greer.
“Permitting commission staff to hold crypto is essential to them developing the knowledge necessary to propose and adopt workable regulatory frameworks for digital securities activity,” he added.
Legal Advisory 22-04, issued on July 4, 2022, by the OGE, prohibits SEC staff from buying, selling, or otherwise using crypto and stablecoins because they are not “publicly traded securities” and don’t qualify for an exception, unlike stocks.
SEC needs waivers for staff
Grewal said US President Donald Trump directed the SEC and other agencies to submit recommendations for crypto regulations due in around 90 days, and SEC “staff still cannot use the technology on which they are making recommendations.”
In his letter to Atkins and SEC commissioner Hester Peirce, he echoed a similar sentiment, arguing that the inability to hold crypto is a roadblock for the agency’s Crypto Task Force in creating a regulatory framework.
While it’s up to OGE to rescind the advisory, the SEC should take its own action, Grewal said.
“For example, issuing waivers to crypto task force members and other staff actively working on task force matters would be consistent with measures already taken in commensurate advisory situations,” he said.
Grewal added that a waiver would allow SEC staff on the Crypto Task Force responsible for creating crypto regulations to use crypto and “evaluate the underlying digital asset technology.”
Former SEC Chair Gary Gensler, who took office in 2021, was known for his hardline stance on crypto regulation. He resigned on Jan. 20 after spearheading an aggressive regulatory stance toward crypto, bringing upward of 100 regulatory actions against firms.
Following Gensler’s exit, the SEC opted out of a swathe of lawsuits against crypto firms, including Coinbase, on Feb. 27 and, in a more recent April 24 walkback, flagged plans to drop its enforcement against blockchain firm Dragonchain.
This week’s set of elections across England will be a series of firsts: it will be the first big ballot box test of Sir Keir Starmer’s premiership and Kemi Badenoch’s leadership of the Conservative Party.
We will have the first by-election of this parliament in Labour-held Runcorn, the inaugural elections for the mayoralty of Hull and East Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, and our first chance to see if Reform’s surge in the polls since the general election can translate into seats.
Image: Former Runcorn and Helsby Labour MP Mike Amesbury leaves court. Pic: PA
And there is plenty at stake for the party leaders with all the upside in the hands of Nigel Farage, who has barely any council seats to defend and hundreds in his sights, as he looks to translate his poll leads into proper governing – be it through mayoral wins or council control.
Sir Keir is bracing for an early verdict on his leadership, with the Runcorn by-election a test of nerves for a Labour Party that will be loathed to lose a seat in the northwest of England to a surging Reform Party.
Image: Sir Keir Starmer in the House of Commons
For the Conservatives, the pressure is obvious and acute.
Of the 23 councils up for grabs, 16 are currently controlled by the Conservative Party and when they last fought these seats in 2021, the Conservatives were riding high on the back of a then popular Boris Johnson and COVID vaccine bounce.
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Back then, the party’s national equivalent vote share – an estimate of how the country would have voted if everywhere had had a local election – was at 40%, with Labour at 30%, the Lib Dems at 15%, and other parties at 15%.
Their support has collapsed since then, with current polling putting the Conservatives on 22% – an 18-point drop in vote share – while Reform, lumped in with ‘other parties’ in 2021, is now polling an average 25%.
So, expect to see the Conservatives lose control of councils and hundreds of seats as it haemorrhages support to Reform in a night that is set to be miserable for Kemi Badenoch and her party.
Image: Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch. Pic: PA
The Conservatives have majorities in 18 of the 23 councils up for grabs, and could even see the Lib Dems overtake them to become the second-biggest party in local government when it comes to council control. That would be a huge symbolic blow. The only glimmer of hope is whether the party can win the Cambridge and Peterborough mayoral race where a former Peterborough MP is looking to take the mayoralty from Labour.
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3:26
Labour and Reform face off in Runcorn
But like the Conservatives, there is little for Labour to cling on to in this set of elections as the party prepares for a lacklustre night at the ballot box, reflecting its steady drop in the polls following the autumn budget.
Support for Sir Keir’s government dipped below 30% last November and has continued on that trajectory, with Labour currently polling on average around 23%.
Labour has been haemorrhaging council seats in council by-elections since the national poll last July, and insiders are briefing that the party looks set to lose control of Doncaster Council, the only one it has control of in this set of elections, and perhaps the mayoralty of the city. Since last July, there have been by-elections in 95 vacant Labour council seats and Labour has lost 43 of them.
But the biggest race on the night for Labour will be the Runcorn by-election, where Reform is challenging to take a parliamentary seat that has long been part of Labour’s territory.
Image: Reform UK leader Nigel Farage
While Reform set out with the aim to destroy the Conservative Party, Labour insiders know how bad the Reform surge is for their own prospects, with the party coming in second to Labour in 89 constituencies in the 2024 General Election. The party is all too aware of the threat of Nigel Farage, as Reform taps into voters’ disillusionment.
“People voted for change in 2024,” explains one Labour insider. “We came in with the double whammy of public services on their knees and the economy facing big challenges, and we promised change. People will be judging us. There is change – waiting lists for the NHS are falling six months in a row – but do people notice it yet? Arguably not.”
Labour is preparing to intensify attacks against Reform. The party is already using remarks made by Mr Farage around re-examining the NHS’s funding model to launch a series of attack ads around the local elections and is likely to step this up ahead of polling day.
But the party is right to be worried by the Reform threat and to give you a bit of flavour of that, we ran a focus group of voters in Doncaster on the latest edition of the Electoral Dysfunction podcast to get a sense of the mood in a city about to re-elect its council and mayor.
‘The country is stuck in a doom loop’
Luke Tryl, director of More in Common, who carried out that focus group in Doncaster for us, told us that the group’s disillusionment with politics and the main political parties was a common refrain all around the country.
“You know, people basically keep hitting the change button, right? You know, they did it in Brexit. They did in 2017 when [Jeremy] Corbyn does very well, Boris Johnson in 2019 was a sort of change and in 2024, change was literally the slogan of Keir Starmer’s 2024 campaign.
“And they keep hitting that change and thinking they’re not getting the change. And so actually it pervades right across the political spectrum. It’s not limited to just the Tories, Labour, Reform. It’s just this sense that something isn’t happening and the system isn’t responding to what we want,” Mr Tryl says.
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6:30
Local elections tips and predictions
The undertone of the focus group reflected this sentiment, as respondents honed in on very common top-three concerns across the country – cost of living, the NHS, immigration – but also the sense of mistrust in politicians of all hues.
“It’s not just that people think that the UK is in a bad state, you know, cost of living is bad, the NHS is bad, struggles with immigration, crime,” Mr Tryl said.
“It’s that they don’t have faith in our political class to find solutions. I said recently, I think the UK public moves in a bit of a doom loop at the moment and we can’t seem to find a way out of it and how that changes.”
This is helping Mr Farage’s Reform as voters, turned off by the Tories and disappointed in Labour, look to hit the change button again. “Britain is broken and needs Reform” is Mr Farage’s pitch.
That’s not to say that he was universally liked in our Doncaster focus group.
“It wasn’t actually massively effusive about Farage personally, and we’re starting to pick that up in a few more focus groups,” noted Mr Tryl.
“It’s rather more like, ‘I like what Reform is saying’ – people tend to particularly like what they say on immigration – but I’ve got a few questions about Farage and a word I’ve heard in other groups is baggage. He’s got a lot of baggage.”
He added: “What you’re hearing there is people are slightly willing to put that… we tried the Tories for 14 years. We’re not that happy with what we’ve had from Labour so far. So we may as well roll the dice on this guy. And I think that’s what you’re going to see next week is that rolling the dice.”
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Who has more to lose?
The Conservatives fared particularly badly with the Doncaster focus group, with just two out of the nine respondents even being able to name their leader Kemi Badenoch.
“If you’ve got no public image whatsoever, and also no trust, then you’re not going to pull any votes,” was the brutal verdict of one respondent as Mr Johnson was brought up as a politician they thought of as more likeable, relatable and capable of taking on Reform.
As for Labour, only one of the respondents seemed prepared to give the government more time to turn around the country and deliver on election promises, with others voicing criticism over the government’s handling of the winter fuel allowance cuts, high immigration levels and the lack of progress more broadly. Voters were also hostile to Sir Keir, who they believed to be out of touch, privileged and posh.
The best Sir Keir can hope for next week is, in the words of Mr Tryl is to “tread water” as we watch to see whether Reform can translate polling gains into real governing.
A YouGov poll on Friday suggested Reform is in pole position to win the Lincolnshire mayoralty, while the party is ahead in the Hull and East Yorkshire battle, according to the polling. Labour is also nervous about Reform in the Doncaster mayoral race.
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Expectations for Reform are high, with some pollsters predicting the party could make hundreds of gains in traditionally Conservative counties and have a chance of perhaps even gaining control of Labour-held Doncaster council or Durham, where Labour is the largest party. Reform now has over 100 councillors, most of whom have defected from other parties, and is not defending any seats from 2021, so the only way for Mr Farage is up.
Mr Tryl expects the Tories to lose 500 to 600 seats and Reform to pick up the same sort of numbers if it manages to organise its support and turn out the vote.
So this will be a moment to test whether the Reform momentum in the polls translates into real progress on the ground and sees it become a major electoral force capable of challenging the two main parties across the country. In the general election, the party clocked up votes, but didn’t manage to concentrate that support into concrete wins. Can Reform change that in 2025?
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This set of local elections is far smaller than normal when it comes to the number of councils being contested than normal (Labour’s restructuring of local government has left a number of elections postponed), while the 11 million eligible to vote in England are just a quarter of those who could cast a vote across the UK in last year’s general election.
But these polls are seriously consequential. This will be a moment when we are able to better observe if the two-party system, battered in the 2024 General Election, really is dying.
Last July, third parties secured more votes than ever and a record tally of seats as support for the two establishment parties hit a record low. These elections could be the moment that Reform tastes real power and the Liberal Democrats surge.
Voters keep saying they want real change. On 1 May, we’ll get a better sense of how serious they are in a set of elections that could point to a profoundly different future for British politics.