John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, will be at the centre of Labour’s pitch to voters in the next four weeks as the party tries to win the public’s trust after a poor set of local council results.

The party had lost 321 council seats by early evening on Friday and intends to respond to the losses by showing more of the shadow chancellor, who will reveal more about his values and personal story in the coming days as the party seeks to underline its campaign message of a Britain run “for the many, not the few”.

The Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, acknowledged that there had been some “difficult” results but quickly switched to Labour’s core campaign message on Friday evening. “We will not be a government that presides over food bank Britain or asks teachers to go on the school gates and collect funds to pay the teachers’ wages,” he said.

The party could take consolation in comfortable victories for Steve Rotheram, who won the Liverpool metro mayoral race with 59% of the vote, and Andy Burnham, who won in Greater Manchester on 63%, as well as retaining control of Cardiff city council.

Rotheram told supporters after his win that voters had a “Marmite reaction” to Corbyn but were attracted to his policies. Speaking to the Guardian, Rotheram acknowledged the party faced an uphill struggle in a campaign the Tories are framing as a personality contest between party leaders. “I think you’ll see a narrowing of the polls as long as we’re able to argue on policy … If the contest is about May vs Corbyn, that’s a lot more challenging,” he said.



New Liverpool metro mayor Steve Rotheram with Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. Photograph: Richard Stonehouse/Getty Images

Privately, several Labour MPs in the last parliament said heavy losses in the local elections pointed to a convincing Conservative win on 8 June, but few were prepared to go on the record or criticise the party’s leader.

Hours after Burnham’s triumph, Corbyn went to Manchester for a victory rally. Several hundred activists joined him on the steps of Manchester Central, the conference centre where the result was announced, but there was no sign of the new mayor. Corbyn explained away Burnham’s absence by saying: “I have spoken to Andy and he is already working hard on behalf of the people of Greater Manchester region”.

A now-deleted tweet from George Newton, a member of Team Burnham, revealed that Burnham was, in fact, hard at work drinking champagne with his family and friends in what appeared to be the Refuge, one of Manchester’s hippest restaurants, described by the Guardian’s food critic as “a dropdead glamourpuss”.

Labour’s loss of the West Midlands mayoralty to the former John Lewis boss Andy Street in a close race was read by many in the party as another indication of the tough month ahead, even though there were rumours that the Tories had poured £1m into the fight



Jess Phillips, the MP for Birmingham Yardley, which falls within Street’s new patch, said it had been an “incredibly difficult day”. Labour’s vote had held up in her part of the city, she said, but she added: “People have got a bit of trust in Theresa May. I hear people mention her name on the doorstep more than I used to.”

Losing control of Glasgow council for the first time in 40 years and coming close to losing County Durham underlined the fact that Labour is coming under significant pressure deep into its home turf.

Jack McConnell, the Labour peer who was Scotland’s first minister from 2001 to 2007, warned that his party could be suffering a collapse south of the border to echo that seen in Scotland in the wake of the independence referendum.

“I think with the current drift at the top of the Labour party, it is not impossible that the decline that happened in Scotland over the last eight years could also happen in parts of England and Wales,” he said.

Ukip’s collapse ensured that it made no inroads into Labour’s traditional working-class base but the fall in its support benefited the Conservatives. MPs in Labour heartland seats where Ukip polled strongly in the 2015 general election watched the results anxiously. One MP in a northern seat said: “People are fastening their seatbelts and bracing themselves for the impact with voters in a few weeks’ time.”

Stewart Young, the leader of Labour’s group on Cumbria county council, which had been a Labour-Lib Dem administration but which fell to no overall control, said: “Some of the things that are happening I am sure will be the same as elsewhere: the Ukip vote seems to have collapsed. Quite a bit of that Ukip vote originally came from us, but it hasn’t come back to us; it’s gone to the Tories.”

Gillian Troughton, who lost the recent byelection in Copeland to the Tories and is now standing as Labour’s general election candidate, lost her county council seat. Young said Corbyn’s leadership had been “an issue, but not as much of an issue as you might expect” on the doorsteps.

Kevan Jones, the MP for North Durham, said it was not the popularity of the Conservatives, but a lack of confidence in Labour that was losing the party votes in his patch. “There’s an issue, and it’s national: it’s the national party affecting it,” he said. “They’re not Tories, these people; they’re Labour people but they’re not voting Labour.”

Labour MPs sceptical about Corbyn’s leadership have largely decided to remain quiet for the duration of the general election campaign, but many are preparing election literature without his picture and some are already thinking about the aftermath of what they believe will be a catastrophic defeat.

The Cardiff South and Penarth MP, Stephen Doughty, welcomed Labour’s better than expected performance in Wales, but said Welsh Labour’s separate identity, and the leadership of the first minister, Carwyn Jones, had been crucial. “I think we can be very proud of the distinctive Welsh Labour campaign we have run here,” he said.

Corbyn’s allies say the dissent in the party – which has seen the Labour leader facing two challenges from hostile MPs – had knocked 5 percentage points off their poll rating which they had been unable to recover.