Steerpike

Back to London for the city’s mayoral elections – and the verdict is in. In a win for Labour, Sadiq Khan has been hailed as victor for an unprecedented third term with an increased vote share of 44 per cent, while the Conservative’s Susan Hall has been relegated to second place with a 33 per cent vote share. While Tory MP and former aspiring mayoral candidate Paul Scully criticises his party for running an 'incredibly underwhelming' and 'anti-Khan' campaign, the Labour mayor will be feeling rather smug today with a swing from the Conservatives to Labour of 3.2 per cent. Will Khan's third win mark the beginning of a new dawn for London? Call Steerpike a cynic, but the city's rather long list of problems seems to have only grown longer under the Labour mayor’s tenure.

The fighting talk continues over at Reform HQ as local election results continue to drip out. The Farage-founded party’s right-wing campaign has seen leader Richard Tice proclaim Reform UK is ‘rapidly becoming the real opposition to the Labour party in the North of England’. Tory defector Lee Anderson has even gone so far as to suggest he has a better chance of keeping his seat as a Reform MP than a Tory. But is the red wall Rottweiler all bark and no bite? The results of the East Midlands mayoral election would suggest so... Six local candidates stood for the mayoralty, with the vote taking place in Anderson’s own Ashfield constituency. In first place – by a margin of 1,500 – was Labour candidate Margaret Ward, with over 7,000 votes.

With millions of voters heading to the polls today, how many will forget to bring along suitable photo ID? One of the more noteworthy, it seems, is, er, Boris Johnson who was reportedly turned away from a polling station earlier today after failing to bring acceptable identification. According to Sky News, which broke the story: Polling station staff were forced to turn the former prime minister away after he initially failed to comply with legislation he introduced while he was in Downing Street. Mr Johnson, who introduced the Elections Act requiring photo ID in 2022, was attempting to cast his ballot in South Oxfordshire, where a police and crime commissioner for the Thames Valley is being selected.

News just in: Scotland's Crown Office has still not received a report from Police Scotland about the SNP's former chief executive Peter Murrell — almost a fortnight after he was rearrested and charged with embezzlement. Talk about taking things slowly... The husband of former first minister Nicola Sturgeon was taken into police custody for the second time on 18 April as part of the police probe into SNP finances — and charged with embezzling funds from his own party. Yet two weeks on, there has been little sign of the case progressing. Shortly after the police force announced that it had charged the former SNP chief, it transpired that Murrell had also resigned his party membership.

To the Commons, where Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer this afternoon gave a ministerial statement on the future of the Telegraph Media Group. It follows this morning’s news that the Abu Dhabi-backed company RedBird IMI will put the Daily Telegraph and Spectator titles back up for sale, after parliament moved to block foreign state ownership of UK newspapers and magazines. Frazer gave the House a brief outline of the government’s unchanged stance and then it was the turn of Labour’s Thangam Debbonaire to demand some answers.

A First Minister on the ropes, facing questions about his judgement? No, it's not hapless Hamza Yousaf this time. Instead, the latest legislator in the firing line is none other than Vaughan Gething, the recently-selected head of the Welsh government at Cardiff Bay. Gething has been in the job for less than six weeks but is already facing a storm of criticism about the way in which he got it. The former economy minister narrowly triumphed in last month's Labour leadership contest by 51.7 per cent of the vote to Jeremy Miles' 48.3 per cent. But Gething's subsequent tenure has been dominated by questions about the £200,000 his campaign accepted from a company whose owner was twice convicted of environmental offences.