Election results 2022: Prof Sir John Curtice on what they show so far

We now have a first indication of the verdict voters delivered in Thursday's local elections. Nearly half of the councils in England that held an election have counted their results overnight - the rest, along with all the councils in Scotland and Wales, are counting today, as is the Assembly in Northern Ireland.

These early results have produced the much-anticipated reverse in electoral fortunes for the Conservatives. The party's share of the vote in over 500 key wards where the BBC has collected the detailed voting figures is down by four points since 2018, when the seats were last up for grabs.

Meanwhile, their loss of support is as much as six points compared with last year's local election contests. These losses confirm that the party is now electorally weaker than at any point since Boris Johnson won his majority of 80 in 2019.

But as was also anticipated, this fall in support has not resulted in spectacular losses of seats. That reflects the fact that the Conservatives were defending many fewer wards than Labour. Even so, the loss of 120 seats as of 10.30 BST represents one in five of the seats the party was trying to defend.

Although it has so far only lost control of five councils, among those losses are the totemic councils of Wandsworth and Westminster, where hitherto the local Tories' low council tax policy had seemingly helped them keep control even when the national tide was running against their party. Labour have also wrestled Barnet from Conservative control.

Indeed, the results across England indicate that Tory councils with relatively low council tax rates did not perform better at the ballot box.

However, the loss of support for the Conservatives did not simply translate into Labour advance. A one-point advance in Labour's vote share in London was accompanied by a three-point fall in the north of England. Indeed, across England as a whole, Labour failed to advance in wards where it faced competition from both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats.

Although Labour have recorded a four-point improvement on what was a poor performance in last year's local elections, the party has not recorded the kind of consistent advance that demonstrates that it has now reached new levels of popularity.

The 33 net gains of seats it has registered so far (all of them in London) is a consequence of the decline in Conservative support rather than any electoral advance by Labour themselves since the seats were last fought in 2018, when Jeremy Corbyn was leader.

In fact, the Conservative decline has thus far helped the Liberal Democrats more than Labour. Coupled with the modest two point increase in Lib Dem support since 2018, the party has so far enjoyed a net gain of 58 seats and gained control of Kingston-upon-Hull from Labour.

Of particular note is the average increase of eight points in the Liberal Democrat vote across places where the party started off in second place to the Conservatives - a performance that the party will hope augurs well for winning so-called blue wall parliamentary seats where the party is breathing down the Conservatives' neck.

However, perhaps the least anticipated success of the night was that of the Greens in gaining 23 seats, enough to more than double the party's representation on the councils that have declared so far.

The party won an average of 12% - up four percentage points - in those wards that it fought, up four points on 2018, though not quite matching its previous best ever local election performance in 2019.

Although much concern was expressed before the election that the various recent scandals at Westminster would serve to depress turnout, in the event it was only down by a point or two on that at other recent local elections. There is no sign that particularly large falls in turnout were occasioned by Tory voters staying at home.

All in all, Boris Johnson might feel that the overnight news has not been as bad as he might have feared. He will doubtless argue that governments often lose ground in the middle of a parliamentary term, and in the past the damage has often been worse than this.

That said, these results illustrate the sharp decline in Conservative support over the last 12 months, not least in the wake of the recent "Partygate" scandal and the ongoing cost of living crisis. Tory MPs might be particularly concerned about the fact that party's vote fell most heavily in the south of England outside London where many of them have their seats.

On the other hand, they may feel comforted by Labour's failure not to make more progress than they did.

In any event, the question the party now has to address is how it thinks it can best regain the ground that it has lost before the next general election, a contest which now may be less than two years way.

This story was written together with the BBC's psephological team of Patrick English, Stephen Fisher, Robert Ford and Eilidh Macfarlane.