Ipsos Puts Reform Six Points Clear of Labour and the Tories With 15 Days to May 7 — Farage’s Party Holds 25%, Labour Sinks Into a Four-Way Middle, and the Mandelson Scandal Lands on a Field Already Tilted Against Every Westminster Incumbent

Ipsos’s April poll for the Evening Standard puts Reform UK on 25%, the Conservatives on 19%, Labour on 19%, the Greens on 14% and the Liberal Democrats on 12%. Reform’s six-point lead is down from twelve in March but still the biggest single-party advantage any pollster has recorded in Britain since Boris Johnson’s 2019 landslide week. Farage’s personal net satisfaction is -30. Starmer’s is -47. The governing party goes into the May 7 local elections fourth or joint-second by every measure, and the Mandelson scandal has not yet been priced into voting intention.

The poll internals

Ipsos fielded 12–15 April, sample 1,138 British adults, weighted to referendum recall, age, gender and region. Reform 25% (-6 since March), Conservative 19% (+2), Labour 19% (+1), Green 14% (-1), Liberal Democrat 12% (+3). “Your Party,” the Muslim-vote movement, polls 4% nationally but reaches double digits in three dozen wards. The net satisfaction numbers tell the deeper story: Farage -30, Starmer -47, Badenoch -29, Ed Davey -12, Carla Denyer +3. The most popular political figure in Britain today, on net satisfaction, is the co-leader of the Green Party.

Cross-tabs hold up. Reform leads in the North-East, North-West, Yorkshire, East Midlands, East of England, and the South-West. The Tories lead only in the South-East. Labour holds Scotland, Wales and London — and Scotland only on a 23% vote share, with the SNP at 38%. Under-35s split Green 21%, Reform 19%, Labour 17%, Lib Dem 16%, Con 11%. Over-65s split Reform 31%, Con 28%, Lab 14%, LD 12%. The age and region maps both say the two traditional parties of government have fragmented at the same time.

The local election translation

Electoral Calculus’s projection based on the Ipsos numbers has Reform gaining 2,800-plus council seats on May 7 across 136 councils. Labour is projected to lose 1,900 seats. The Conservatives 1,010. The Liberal Democrats gain perhaps 450. The Greens gain 320. The result is a complete redrawing of English local government south of the Border. Reform takes outright control of Essex, Norfolk, Suffolk, Lincolnshire, Kent, and Hampshire county councils. Labour loses control of Sunderland, Wigan, Barnsley and Rotherham. Six of the 21 Tier-1 authorities change hands.

The cautionary note on the projection is that Ipsos and YouGov diverge on Reform’s support by four points. YouGov’s 12–13 April poll had Reform at 24%. Find Out Now on 17 April had Reform at 26%. Techne had Reform at 22%. Averaging the four recent pollsters gives Reform at 24.25%, still clear of both establishment parties. The projection uncertainty narrows as polling day approaches; the direction is not in dispute.

The Mandelson overlay

The Ipsos fieldwork closed on 15 April. That is before Robbins’s testimony Tuesday morning, before Starmer’s Tuesday lunchtime emergency debate, before Anderson and Sultana were ejected from the Commons, and before the Privileges Committee referral was added to the Thursday order paper. The scandal is still pricing in. Polls fielded after 20 April will test whether it compresses the Labour vote further or energises the latent anti-establishment vote across Reform, Greens and Your Party.

The internal Labour polling reviewed by this newsroom suggests the Mandelson story is costing the party perhaps three points of support, split roughly evenly between the Liberal Democrats and the Greens. That is less than Labour strategists had feared when the story broke on 16 April, but enough to put seats in Leeds, Manchester and Bristol into play that were not in play a fortnight ago. Labour’s internal model puts the party’s May 7 projected losses at 2,100 seats, against the 1,900 in Ipsos’s external model. The party campaign organisation is preparing for losses on the higher end.

What Farage is doing

Reform’s campaign operation has been spending on targeted digital in 48 councils — not the national TV ad buy that Labour has rolled out, not the mass leafleting of the Tory marginals. Farage is speaking at rallies in Thurrock, Corby, and Southend. His team is fielding candidates in 3,200 wards, up from 660 in 2024. Seventeen former Conservative councillors have defected to Reform in the past month. Three former Labour councillors have done the same. The party’s ground machine is not yet a match for the Conservatives’ or Labour’s, but it is the first time Reform has had one at all.

The cost has been the fraying of the top of the Reform ticket. Zia Yusuf’s exit from the Chairmanship in March, the HQ staff turnover in April, and the public spat between Farage and Richard Tice over the Manston council deselection have all hit Reform’s internal satisfaction numbers. Farage’s own net satisfaction fell nine points between February and April. The party is leading the field because the other parties have collapsed, not because Farage himself has become more popular. The voting intention is a wave of negative partisanship. The leader is just standing where it is breaking.

What the numbers mean for Starmer

A Labour Prime Minister heading into the biggest round of local elections of his premiership at 19% in the polls, with net satisfaction of -47, amid an active vetting scandal, with the Privileges Committee preparing a contempt referral, with Rayner running an undeclared leadership campaign and Streeting’s bid collapsing under the weight of unpublished text messages, is the worst position any incumbent has faced since John Major in the spring of 1996. Labour lost 1,900 seats to the Tories and Lib Dems across the 1995–96 local elections. The projection for 2026 is worse. Starmer’s strategists are now telling the lobby that survival, not recovery, is the Q2 goal.

Farage, for his part, is telling every interview he can get that his target is not to win Reform councils for the sake of headlines but to build the local infrastructure for a general election run in 2027 or 2028. The Ipsos numbers are the licence for that plan. They are the reason the party is fielding 3,200 candidates this month. May 7 is no longer a referendum on Labour or the Conservatives. It is the test of whether Reform can convert a lead in the national polls into the council majorities that make it a party of government.