There were 8,000 seats up for grabs in the 2023 local elections that took place on Thursday.

Around 70% of the English electorate was eligible to cast a ballot, and it gave us a real indication of what we might see at the next general election.

Here are the performance benchmarks - and how each party actually did:

Conservatives

The benchmarks were:

What was the result?

The Conservatives lost 1,064 seats - so it was worse than a "very bad night". The Conservatives lost over a third of the seats they were defending.

The government is trying to sell it as mid-term blues, and culture secretary Lucy Frazer claimed that Tories are "gaining the trust" of the British people, and that Rishi Sunak is "getting the country back on track" (see 9.17 post).

But our political editor, Beth Rigby, discovered that 1,000 losses as worst case scenario was just their PR spin - 700 losses was internally viewed as the worst case.

So to spin these results as any other than catastrophic for the Conservatives would be a very difficult sell.

Labour

The benchmarks were:

What was the result?

Labour gained 528 seats and are now the largest party in local government.

Sir Keir Starmer and his shadow cabinet members have claimed that this shows that they are "on course" to form a majority government after the next general election (see 8.52 post).

There is no doubt that it was a very good night for Labour, particularly considering how their support had cratered at the last general election.

That said, the Sky News projection by Professor Michael Thrasher shows that, based on these results, Labour would get 298 seats at a general election - its highest since the winning 2005 general election - but 28 short of a majority.

So it was certainly Labour's most successful night in a long time, but is it enough to get them into government?