Labour will suffer devastating losses of more than 75% of the council seats the party is defending at next week’s local elections, a polling guru has predicted.

Lord Robert Hayward said Sir Keir Starmer‘s party will lose some 1,850 seats in councils across England, with the Tories down 600.

Reform UK is expected to gain 1,550 seats from both Labour and the Conservatives, while the Greens are set to take 500.

Nightmare for Keir Starmer as Pollster Makes Devastating Election Prediction

Keir Starmer faced one of the most difficult political periods of his premiership in the spring of 2026, when senior polling figures warned that his prospects of leading Labour into the next general election were becoming increasingly uncertain.

One of the strongest assessments came from Professor Sir John Curtice, Britain’s best-known election analyst, who told The Independent in May that the probability of Starmer still leading Labour at the next general election was “very low indeed”. Curtice said the question was becoming one of “when and how”, rather than whether Starmer would eventually leave office.

At the time, the warning represented a serious challenge to Starmer’s position.

However, political circumstances subsequently changed dramatically. Starmer resigned as Labour leader and prime minister later in 2026, clearing the way for Andy Burnham to take over the leadership of the government.

That means Curtice’s earlier assessment is now best understood as an analysis of the political pressures that contributed to the end of Starmer’s premiership, rather than a current prediction about whether Starmer will lead Labour at the next election.

Curtice’s warning

Curtice’s intervention came just before the May 2026 local elections, when Labour was facing the possibility of substantial losses.

Speaking to The Independent, he said there was no guarantee Starmer would immediately resign following the elections because Labour lacked an obvious successor.

But he argued that the longer-term outlook was much more difficult.

According to Curtice, the likelihood of Starmer remaining Labour leader until the next general election was “very low indeed”.

The significance of the comment was that Curtice was not simply describing Labour’s position in one opinion poll.

He was assessing the political consequences of a broader pattern of electoral pressure.

Labour had won a large parliamentary majority at the 2024 general election, but by 2026 the party was facing competition from multiple directions.

Reform UK was attracting voters on the right, while the Green Party was taking support from Labour on the left. The Conservatives were also attempting to rebuild.

The result was a much more fragmented political environment than the two-party contests that had traditionally dominated British politics.

The local election test

The May elections became an important test of public opinion.

Ahead of the vote, polling analyst Robert Hayward warned that Labour could lose more than 75 per cent of the council seats it was defending in England.

His assessment suggested Labour could lose around 1,850 seats, while Reform UK was projected to gain around 1,550 and the Greens around 500.

Those figures were projections rather than established results.

But the scale of the potential losses illustrated why Labour MPs were becoming increasingly concerned about Starmer’s leadership.

The eventual election results confirmed that Labour suffered significant losses, while Reform made major gains.

Reuters reported that Reform gained more than 1,000 council seats in England, while Labour experienced heavy losses across England, Scotland and Wales.

The elections therefore became an important turning point in Labour’s internal political debate.

Reform’s rise

A major part of the problem for Labour was the growth of Reform UK.

Nigel Farage’s party had become an increasingly significant force in British politics, attracting support from voters who had previously backed both the Conservatives and Labour.

The May results reinforced that development.

Reform’s gains were particularly significant in areas that had historically supported Labour but had also voted heavily for Brexit.

Curtice told The Independent that Reform’s strongest opportunities were likely to come in heavily pro-Leave parts of northern England.

That represented a particularly difficult challenge for Labour because many of those constituencies had become central to the party’s electoral coalition.

Labour could not simply assume that traditional working-class voters would remain loyal.

At the same time, the party was also facing competition from the Greens among younger, metropolitan and more left-leaning voters.

A fragmented political map

The changing political landscape meant that Labour’s problems could not be reduced to Reform alone.

The Green Party had also expanded its influence.

Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrats remained important in parts of southern England and other areas where they had established local strength.

The Conservatives, despite their severe losses in the 2024 general election and subsequent local difficulties, remained a major national party.

This created a four- or five-party contest in many parts of Britain.

YouGov’s modelling ahead of the 2026 London local elections demonstrated just how fragmented the political landscape had become.

Its model, based on more than 4,500 London adults surveyed between 27 March and 21 April, projected major gains for both Reform and the Greens while Labour was expected to lose support across the capital.

The model projected Labour to have the largest vote share in 15 London boroughs, compared with 21 in 2022, while the Greens were projected to lead in four and Reform in three.

Importantly, YouGov warned that close vote shares did not necessarily translate directly into council control because of the electoral system.

That caveat demonstrates why polling projections should not be treated as guaranteed election results.

Starmer’s leadership problem

For Starmer, however, the immediate issue was not simply how many council seats Labour might lose.

It was whether Labour MPs would continue to believe that he was the best person to lead the party into the next general election.

This was where the possibility of a leadership challenge became important.

Reports at the time identified several potential successors, including Andy Burnham, Wes Streeting and Angela Rayner.

But removing a sitting Labour leader is not straightforward.

A challenger needs substantial parliamentary support before a leadership contest can take place.

Curtice therefore identified the absence of an obvious successor as one reason Starmer could potentially survive an immediate post-election crisis.

That political calculation changed rapidly during the months that followed.

Andy Burnham enters the picture

Andy Burnham became increasingly important during the leadership crisis.

His victory in the Makerfield by-election provided Labour with evidence that the party could compete effectively against Reform in a difficult political environment.

Reuters reported Curtice as saying that Burnham’s performance provided evidence of his ability to develop an electoral strategy capable of challenging Reform.

The result mattered because one of Labour’s biggest concerns was not simply whether Starmer was unpopular, but whether Labour could find a leader capable of rebuilding support before the next general election.

Burnham increasingly became associated with that alternative.

Polling also indicated that the public viewed Burnham more favourably than Starmer.

Ipsos found in June that two-thirds of Britons believed Starmer should not lead Labour into the next general election. Thirty-eight per cent wanted him to leave immediately, while 29 per cent thought he should leave later. Burnham was the preferred potential replacement among those offered in the survey.

The change after Starmer

By July, the leadership question had been resolved.

Starmer resigned and Burnham became prime minister.

The political situation therefore moved beyond the prediction that had dominated coverage earlier in the year.

More recent polling has shown that the Labour position improved after the change of leadership, although Reform has remained a major competitor.

An Ipsos poll conducted in late June, shortly before Starmer’s departure, put Reform on 26 per cent and Labour on 24 per cent.

More recent research has shown a different picture under Burnham.

The Independent reported in September that Labour had moved ahead of Reform in several recent voting-intention polls, while cautioning that polling alone could not establish what would happen at a future general election.

This illustrates how quickly political predictions can become outdated.

What the prediction tells us

The most important lesson from Curtice’s warning is not that a particular election result was inevitable.

It is that political leadership can become vulnerable long before an election takes place.

Starmer had won a large majority in 2024, but that did not guarantee that he would remain Labour leader until the following election.

The combination of poor polling, local election losses, internal disagreements and the emergence of credible alternatives created pressure that eventually contributed to his departure.

At the same time, the subsequent improvement in Labour’s polling under Burnham demonstrates why predictions should always be treated as assessments based on information available at a particular moment.

The political environment can change rapidly.

The next electoral test

For Labour under Burnham, the central question is now different.

Rather than asking whether Starmer can survive until the next general election, attention has shifted to whether Burnham can maintain Labour’s recovery while competing against Reform, the Conservatives, the Greens and Liberal Democrats.

More in Common’s final MRP conducted under Starmer, published in July, projected that an election held at that time would produce a hung parliament, with Reform the largest party on 293 projected seats and Labour facing a difficult electoral map. The model also stressed that these were projections rather than certainties.

Later polling has suggested that the political picture is changing again.

YouGov’s September assessment found that Burnham was preferred to Farage in a hypothetical head-to-head question about who would make the better prime minister, although such questions measure public preference at the time of the survey and do not predict an actual election result.

From Starmer’s crisis to a new political era

The headline describing Curtice’s warning as a “devastating election prediction” captured the atmosphere surrounding Labour in May 2026.

At the time, the possibility of Starmer leading Labour into the next general election was genuinely under intense scrutiny.

But the subsequent events show why political predictions need to be placed firmly in their original context.

Starmer did eventually leave office, but the precise route was not determined simply by one poll or one election.

Labour’s local election losses, Reform’s gains, internal pressure and the emergence of Burnham all played roles in changing the political landscape.

The party now has a different leader and a different electoral strategy.

For Starmer, the prediction that his premiership was approaching an end ultimately proved relevant to the direction events took.

But the wider lesson is more important: opinion polls and expert assessments can identify political pressure, but they cannot establish future election outcomes with certainty.

Britain’s political landscape remains fragmented, volatile and highly competitive.

The next general election will ultimately be decided by voters, and the balance of public opinion can change considerably before polling day.