Reform UK squeaked home after a recount in yesterday’s Runcorn and Helsby by-election by just six votes – the closest by-election result since 1892 – overturning Labour’s 14,696 majority in a big upset for Keir Starmer. With most local election results in England still coming in, Nigel Farage’s party has also won its first mayoral election, in Greater Lincolnshire, and is making significant gains in council seats, with a vote share of about 38%. Donald Trump has sacked Mike Waltz as national security advisor a month after he accidentally added a journalist to a Signal group chat in which top officials discussed war plans. The US president says he will nominate Waltz, the first big cheese to lose his job in the second Trump administration, as US ambassador to the UN. A new competition will award an aspiring author £75,000 to write their book, based only on its first three pages. Applications for The Next Big Story, organised by online fiction writing school The Novelry, cost £15 apiece and must be submitted by 31 July. Try your luck here.

Farage’s breakthrough moment

While most local election results will come in this afternoon, says Ross Clark in The Spectator, the picture is already pretty clear: “Reform UK had a very good night, Labour a poor one and the Conservatives a disastrous one.” Perhaps the most illuminating comment on Reform’s stunning victory in the Runcorn by-election came from a Labour campaigner, who said all people wanted to talk about on the doorstep was the government’s cuts to PIP disability benefits and the winter fuel payment. That suggests the good people of Runcorn flocked to Reform because “they found both Labour and the Tories insufficiently left-wing”. It’s testament to the canny political judgement of Nigel Farage, who has made a point of shifting his party left on economic issues.

Keir Starmer fully deserves his rebuke from voters, says Daniel Finkelstein in The Times. Labour won last year’s election as the “change party” without an actual programme for change. Its position was effectively: “Britain is broken, let’s do nothing about it.” The result in Runcorn was a sign of how quickly this has caught up with them – and it’s still not clear what they plan to do about it. But it’s worth noting that Reform also won by overwhelming the Tories. For a long time, the Conservative Party has argued that backing Reform is a “wasted vote” which just splits the right. Runcorn has exploded that argument, as Farage won’t be shy of reminding voters. More broadly, the results are a sign of just how unpredictable British politics is about to become. “We now have a multi-party contest in a two-party electoral system.”