Suella Braverman says Conservative party will be lucky to have any MPs unless it adopts harder line on immigration and rights

Rishi Sunak will face pressure to adopt hard rightwing policies such as an immigration cap and scrapping European human rights law this week, with Suella Braverman saying he needs to “own and fix” a disastrous set of local election results .

Sunak’s allies were on Sunday insisting he wanted to stick to his current plan and that it was working, as plotters against his leadership accepted they did not have the support to challenge him.

Party has gained 768 seats, Labour 545 and the Greens 480, while the Conservatives has lost 1,783

The Lib Dems have added more council seats than any other party over the last parliament, gaining more than 750 in the last five years, largely in the south-west and south of England.

As Ed Davey’s party won more seats than the Conservatives in the local elections last week, the Lib Dems said Tories would be “looking over their shoulder terrified” as the general election approached.

In the first of our Politics Weekly Westminster episodes, the Guardian’s political editor Pippa Crerar and political correspondent Kiran Stacey go over the big wins and losses from the local and mayoral elections

In the first of our Politics Weekly Westminster episodes, the Guardian’s political editor Pippa Crerar and political correspondent Kiran Stacey go over the big wins and losses from the local and mayoral elections

Come to Thurrock, where the Tory council went bankrupt, services are depleted and costs are up. People feel victims of a terrible injustice

Late last Monday, I got home from a long day of political reporting to find a political leaflet produced by the Conservative party. It had nothing do with the local elections; where I live, the only contest was the rather underwhelming vote on a new police and crime commissioner. Instead, what it said looked ahead to the general election.

“Inflation down, wages up, taxes being cut – let’s stick with the plan that’s working,” it read. There were pithy paragraphs about “ensuring high-quality education and childcare for all children”, and “better transport for our community”. As with a lot of what we now hear from the ruling party, I read it as a sign that the government’s pitch to voters had decisively tipped into brazen self-satire. Its implied portrait of everyday life seemed to describe another country. Each promise and boast only highlighted yet another unmentioned failure.

Last week, Conservative campaigning gave a chilling indication of the depths to which they will sink to retain power

In the psychedelic 60s stop-frame animation children’s television series Trumpton , all the characters have identifying proper names – the fireman Captain Flack, the state stormtrooper Police Constable Potter, and the mysterious dungeon-dwelling economist Gideon Pencils Osborne. The mayor of Trumpton, however, was known only as The Mayor, and neither his actual name nor his political affiliations were ever revealed, though he smelt of pubs and Wormwood Scrubs and too many rightwing meetings.

All over the land last week, Tory mayors dreamed of similar anonymity, hoping that if no one knew anything about them, and their campaign literature didn’t reveal they belonged to the Tory party, people might at least vote for them by accident, thinking they were someone else. “Oh! Andy Street was the West Midlands’ Tory mayor candidate? I thought I was voting for the glamorous, and now deceased, Welsh wrestler Adrian Street. I liked it when he pulled out Jimmy Savile’s hair in 1971.”

Stewart Lee’s new live show, Stewart Lee vs the Man-Wulf , opens in London in December before a national tour

West Midlands mayor had been expected to hold on but was defeated by Labour by 1,508 votes to cap awful results for Tories

• Full mayoral and council results for England

Good morning. The local elections are over, all but three results (one council, and two police and crime commissioner posts) are now in, and they have been just about as dire for Rishi Sunak and the Conservatives as the national opinion poll figures implied they would be. On the plus side for Sunak, the rebels in his party who were hoping that terrible results would provide the springboard for a no confidence motion seem to have accepted that they don’t have the numbers, and the notional “coup” has been called off. But that won’t stop Tory MPs being pitched into a difficult debate about their future, and last night Andy Street made a defiant intervention, telling his party not to drift to the right.

Street had been expected to hold on as mayor of the West Midlands. He was defeated by Labour by just 1,508 votes, and in an interview with Sky News afterwards he said the message for his party from his campaign was that it should not give up on moderate conservatism. He said:

The thing everyone should take from Birmingham and the West Midlands tonight is this brand of moderative, inclusive, tolerant conservatism, that gets on and delivered, has come within an ace of beating the Labour party in what they considered to be their backyard - that’s the message from here tonight.

I would definitely not advise that drift.

The psychology here is really very straightforward isn’t it: this is the youngest, most diverse, one of the most urban places in Britain and we’ve done, many would say, extremely well over a consistent period.

The public are not rushing to vote for Sir Keir, though they feel sorely let down by us. They want a reason to vote Conservative, but we are failing to provide them with one. We need to be frank about this if we are to have any chance of fixing the problem.

On tax, migration, the small boats and law and order, we need to demonstrate strong leadership, not managerialism. Make a big and bold offer on tax cuts, rather than tweaking as we saw in the Budget. Place a cap on legal migration once and for all. Leave the ECHR to stop the boats. Tangible improvement to our NHS and tougher sentences for criminals. Start holding failing police chiefs to account so that antisocial behaviour, shoplifting and knife crime are actually sorted out. Take back control of our streets from the extremists. And instead of paying lip service in guidance on transgender ideology in schools, let’s actually change the law to ban the abuse of our children.

Running as a ‘pseudo-independent’ in a region in which Labour faced its own hurdles was not enough to keep Tory mayor in office

After a nail-biting finale, Andy Street has become the most high-profile victim of tanking Tory support in May’s elections.

With the Conservatives shedding seats across the country on Friday, all eyes were on the West Midlands on Saturday to see if he could cling on by sheer will of personality – or “Brand Andy” as he calls it.