Sadiq Khan has joined MPs celebrating Donald Trump’s setback in the overnight US midterm elections.

Republicans suffered heavy defeats across the contests, with Democrats taking control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate.

Even traditionally Republican states such as Texas turned against the president’s party, leaving Mr Trump weakened during the final two years of his White House term.

The London Mayor, who has been locked in a long-running feud with Mr Trump, took to social media this morning to celebrate the result.

‘Congratulations to Democrats on a huge victory last night,’ Lord Khan wrote. 

‘With a focus on hope, unity and supporting families with the cost of living – their campaign was a true rejection of the damaging and divisive politics of Donald Trump.’

A number of Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs also expressed their satisfaction as the early results came in.

Speaking across broadcast studios this morning, health minister James Frith said the results appeared to represent ‘an enormous night for American democracy and for the Democrats’.

‘We will see where the final numbers end up, but it looks like a seismic shift in domestic politics for the Americans,’ he said.

However, he maintained that the result would not alter Andy Burnham’s relationship with the Trump White House.

He told Times Radio: ‘The change of emphasis of power in the States is frequent. But the mainstay of the relationship with the UK Government, as its closest ally, is unwavering and unchanging.

‘So I don’t expect it to change the nature of the relationship at all, it remains very strong.’

As Republicans absorbed the heavy losses, Mr Trump responded on his Truth Social platform: ‘I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!’

Democrats needed a net gain of four seats in the 100-member Senate to secure a majority. In the 435-seat House, they needed to gain three seats.

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Speaking to Fox News, Mr Trump acknowledged that the election results had caught him off guard.

‘I thought they’d do better, we had tremendous rallies,’ he said.

He also congratulated the Democrats and said: ‘They did a good job. They worked very hard.’

But while offering to work with opponents, he had also posted a picture of a red baseball cap emblazoned with the word ‘Veto’, suggesting he would block legislation they sought to take through Congress.

In Texas, Democratic newcomer James Talarico defeated Trump-backed Republican Ken Paxton, while South Carolina elected a Democrat senator for the first time since 1998.

Most remarkably of all, Kansas sent a Democrat to the US Senate, which it had not done since 1932 during the Great Depression.

There were further stunning Democrat Senate victories in Iowa and Ohio, states Trump won by more than 10 points in the presidential election in 2024.

In one of the most-watched races left-wing Democrat Abdul El-Sayed declared victory over Republican Mike Rogers in Michigan, making him the first Muslim elected to the Senate.

Jubilant Democrats described the results as a ‘blue tsunami’ or a ‘Bluenami.’

Voters appeared to have passed a damning judgment on Trump’s inability to bring down the cost of living for ordinary Americans.

The results, reflecting a huge shift in Trump’s once impressive MAGA base, will also cast a cloud over any ambitions Vice President JD Vance has for a 2028 run.

Losing both chambers of Congress will mean Trump entering lame duck territory in his final two years in office.

He will face Democrat-led corruption investigations into himself, his allies and family, and could even be impeached for a third time.

A Canadian family has been left heartbroken after a mother and daughter died in what authorities believe was a grizzly bear attack during a “casual walk” on a familiar nearby trail.

Jennifer Balcarras, 48, was found dead on the Snooka West Trail in Bella Coola on Monday. Evidence at the scene indicated that she may have been killed by a bear, according to the British Columbia Conservation Officer Service (BCCOS).

Her 20-year-old daughter, Selah Reed, was discovered dead on Tuesday afternoon after an extensive search involving conservation officers and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Vancouver Sun reports.

Relatives had been in contact with Balcarras on Saturday, but became alarmed when she failed to join an online meeting that evening. Her brother Matthew told the outlet that the family grew increasingly worried when they could not reach her.

The family asked the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to carry out a wellness check on Sunday morning. Officers later located Balcarras’ vehicle at a nearby trailhead.

“It’s surreal. It doesn’t seem real. It feels like a dream,” Josh Balcarras, one of the mother-of-four’s other brothers, told the CBC.

“The way it starts is a few hours of not hearing from them. That turns into a day and then a night, then a second night comes and it becomes a real thing.”

He said Balcarras and Reed knew the Snooka West Trail well. The route was only about a five-minute drive from their home and, he emphasized, was “not in a remote area.”

“It was just a casual walk,” the grieving brother said.

Balcarras’ two younger brothers remembered her as an art therapist who loved books and spent her time playing guitar, singing, painting and enjoying the outdoors.

She was the mother of four, with Reed as her youngest child, and was also a grandmother.

“She painted murals in her own kids’ home, my home,” Matthew said. “She was very much a central person in our family.”

An online fundraiser for the mother and daughter’s funeral costs said Balcarras had recently moved to Bella Coola “to pursue a new career and begin a new chapter in her life.”

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“She was working toward building a future and had not yet had the opportunity to establish savings or put aside funds to help her family with unexpected expenses such as these,” the fundraiser said.

“Tragically, no one could have anticipated that her family would be faced with such an unimaginable loss.”

The fundraiser added that Reed “was just 20 years old, with her whole life ahead of her. She was only beginning her journey into adulthood, making this loss even more heartbreaking.”

Reed had worked as an educational assistant and was studying through Athabasca University’s online learning program.

Her grieving family now describes her as ‘a gentle, sweet, quiet soul’ who loved ballet, art and hiking.

‘She liked a lot of the same things Jenny liked,’ Josh said. ‘I think they got along really, really well.

‘They were two peas in a pod,’ he added. ‘When Jenny hiked, Selah was right there beside her.’

In an online statement, the BCCOS said it has a team investigating the suspected attack.

‘Our thoughts are with the families of the victims during this tragic time,’ Inspector Jeff Tyre said in a video posted online.

Trapping efforts are now underway, he said, but no bears have been captured.

Once any bears are eventually captured, BCCOS said it would work to determine their next steps.

‘If the bear is determined to be the bear responsible for the attack, it will be dispatched to ensure public safety, as per provincial human-wildlife conflict response guidelines,’ Tyre said. 

In the meantime, he urged people to stay away from the Snooka West Trail and to leave the search up to conservation officers.

‘We appreciate people’s concerns and the desire to assist, but it is critical the public stay out of the area – both due to the danger and to allow officers to do their work.’ 

Donald Trump never appeared downstairs.

As Cabinet officials, political advisers and MAGA allies gathered in the White House East Room on Tuesday night, plates of Cheesecake Factory snacks sat ready and television screens carried the election results. Trump, however, stayed in the private residence above them.

The President watched the growing Democratic surge alongside his formidable Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles, and Natalie Harp, the aide who has maintained unusually close access to him during his second term. The First Lady was not with them.

As the scale of the Republican losses became harder to ignore, even some of Trump’s most devoted allies began slipping away from the East Room election-night gathering.

Senior staff members left first, followed by several Cabinet officials. Secretary of State Marco Rubio had been present early in the evening, but later could no longer be seen.

Shortly before 10 p.m. Eastern, when Democrats were projected to win the House, the room was nearly deserted. Staff members were not simply abandoning the watch party; many were leaving the White House altogether, heading to a nearby Washington bar to drown their disappointment. The untouched Cheesecake Factory food remained scattered across the tables.

Two floors above, Trump was said to be seething.

‘It’s very, very dark in the residence,’ one senior official said of Trump’s mood. ‘It’s a dark scene.’

By 11 p.m., Trump had retreated into furious silence.

‘He’s watching Fox News, barely saying a word and paralyzed into silence,’ a source close to the President told the Daily Mail.

On Truth Social, though, Trump made no effort to conceal his anger.

‘Fox News bears responsibility for these losses,’ he wrote in one of several unusually harsh attacks on the conservative network during the night.

After Republicans lost the Senate, Trump also blamed Texas Governor Greg Abbott. ‘If Greg Abbott, the Governor of Texas, hadn’t become a RINO in the last six months of his Political Life, he wouldn’t have lost,’ he posted. Just hours earlier, Trump had praised Abbott as ‘strong’, ‘highly respected’ and ‘exceptional’.

Trump insisted, ‘We would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!’ before adding, ‘I wasn’t on the Ballot.’

That claim contrasted with his message in the weeks leading up to the election, when he urged MAGA supporters to treat the contests as if he himself were on the ballot.

Downstairs, the officials who remained were also beginning to lose their composure.

One senior Trump official said Jason Miller, the longtime Trump communications strategist, appeared to be sweating and panicking as the damaging results continued to roll across the television ticker.

At the same time, senior White House officials were already identifying the figures they believed could be held responsible for Tuesday’s defeat: Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

‘Tonight would have looked very different without the Iran War,’ one official told the Daily Mail. ‘I believe you’ll ultimately see POTUS hold Hegseth accountable.’

A second top official laid it on Rubio’s state department.

And a top Republican Party donor agreed: ‘Rubio is over. Though that’s maybe also true for all Republicans who touched Trump’s foreign policy.’

The war in Iran has cost taxpayers at least $47 billion. Gas costs $4.15 per gallon. The vast majority of Americans consistently say the conflict has been a mistake.

Another well-placed White House source raised a grim specter: ‘If the boss is smart he’ll purge everyone tomorrow to save his legacy.’

But perhaps the most damaging account of the night came from a source who said that Trump’s chief of staff had been promising a win right up to the end.

As recently as September, the source said, Wiles was telling people directly that Republicans were going to take the midterms.

The source also described weekly Thursday briefings at which veteran GOP political consultant Chris LaCivita, a key Wiles ally, would promise the President that the win was his.

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On Tuesday morning, staffers in the West Wing were still talking about picking up seats in both chambers.

‘Delusional,’ the source said. ‘They were delusional right until the very end.’

Three streets from the White House, as mid-level staffers were working through the whiskey, some floated the idea of calling out sick in the morning, trading rumours about who would and wouldn’t survive the week.

‘Maybe that’s the booze talking,’ one senior official at the bar told the Daily Mail.

Talk also turned to who they’d rather have running the White House if Wiles now finally leaves.

Several said they wanted John McEntee, who ran Trump’s personnel operation in the first term, brought back. Someone joked the President should send Marine One for him overnight. What they wanted, more than anything, was Wiles gone.

But the problem facing anyone hoping for a clean purge is that there may be nobody beneath her to offer up.

‘The thing to remember is Susie took over the entire Trump apparatus,’ a senior administration official said of Wiles, who ran Trump’s re-election campaign in 2024 and has been his chief of staff ever since.

‘The Republican National Committee chair is hers [Wiles and Joe Gruters are longtime allies], people running the PACs are hers, senate candidates are her friends, the Cabinet is hers. She’s the conductor of this orchestra. Anyone she would try to scapegoat would be a person she brought in.’

A former administration official turned his fire instead on Wiles’ deputy, James Blair, the primary architect of the nationwide mid-decade redistricting push, including the Indiana effort that collapsed when the state’s own Republican senators refused to pass it.

‘Someone should reach out to James and ask him how he plans to redistrict his way out of this one, “Wonder Boy,”‘ the former official said. ‘The entire Cabinet is to blame, but JD [Vance] the least of them, and I’m not a sympathizer by any stretch of the imagination.’

The Iran theory was not confined to the building. ‘Republicans should stop letting [columnists] Mark Levin and Marc Thiessen dictate our foreign policy,’ a veteran GOP operative involved in the elections said. ‘This is 100% downstream from Iran.’

Two sources said Sergio Gor, the President’s former personnel chief now serving as Ambassador to India, is now positioning for a move into the State Department.

One of those sources predicted he would be nominated as secretary of state should Rubio resign to run for president in 2028. A source who spoke to staff at last week’s G20 gathering of foreign ministers said Gor had been present in every one of Rubio’s meetings in Atlanta.

But a lot now comes down to what and who Trump choses to blame. 

If he concludes his political operation failed him, the blame surely runs to Wiles and stops there. If he concludes the war did it, the blame has nowhere to go but his own desk.

Not everyone could accept defeat. The mood, according to the official White House line, was ‘somewhat defiant’.

But really, across in DC, the panic had seeped through all of Republican Washington. 

At Butterworths, the Capitol Hill restaurant co-owned by GOP strategist Raheem Kassam, one of the loudest MAGA voices demanding Wiles’ removal in recent weeks, a watch party quickly soured as the numbers came in.

‘Wow, I’m about to lose my job,’ an aide to a Republican congressman said.

Over at the RNC headquarters, one source said you could hear a pin drop.

Trump has been here before. In 2022 he watched the midterms from his Mar-a-Lago resort with the press invited in to witness what his advisers expected to be a landslide. 

As the MAGA-aligned candidates fell, reporters were hustled out and the president turned on his staff.

Three weeks ago Politico reported he had been privately canvassing allies about replacing Wiles. Trump denied it on Truth Social, calling her his loyal and longest serving chief of staff and insisting she had his complete confidence.

On Tuesday night, she was upstairs and everyone else was gone, avoiding Trump and fretting about their survival in the coming days.

Images of King Charles and Queen Camilla meeting diplomatic representatives have flooded social media during their nine-day tour of the Caribbean.

Yet amid the official photographs, online commentators have focused on one recurring detail: the monarch’s noticeably swollen-looking fingers.

The King’s so-called “sausage fingers” have been widely discussed since his accession in 2022, after viral images appeared to show his digits looking unusually puffy.

Interest intensified after a documentary aired in December 2023, when Charles himself described his hands as being “sausage-like.”

Now, fresh photographs taken during the past week have reignited online speculation about what the swelling could mean for the King’s health, with Twitter users examining images of his hands in detail.

Dr Stephanie de Giorgio, a GP from Kent, says concerns about swollen hands, fingers and feet are common in medical practices, particularly during periods of very hot or cold weather.

‘Patients come in puzzled and sometimes alarmed, describing puffy ankles, rings that suddenly won’t come off, or feet that seem larger by the end of the day,’ she says. ‘They often fear that something serious is happening. Thankfully, in most cases, it isn’t.

‘Even so, recognising what is harmless and knowing when medical advice is needed is important.’

In cold weather, the body works to conserve heat and protect its vital organs. Blood vessels in the fingers, toes, hands and feet narrow, helping to reduce heat loss.

Once a person moves indoors and begins to warm up, those vessels can widen quickly. The resulting surge of blood flow to the extremities may temporarily make the hands and feet look swollen.

The effect can be particularly noticeable in people with Raynaud’s phenomenon, whose blood vessels constrict more dramatically in response to cold before producing pronounced swelling as circulation returns.

Cold conditions can also change the way fluid moves between the bloodstream and surrounding tissues. This is especially relevant for older people and may lead to fluid collecting around the fingers and toes.

Another possible cause is chilblains, which affect around one in ten people in Britain during the colder months.

The condition can leave fingertips and toes swollen, painful and red or purple, often accompanied by a burning sensation. Symptoms may continue for several days or even weeks after exposure to cold weather.

Chilblains develop when blood vessels react abnormally to low temperatures and become overly restricted, making them more likely to occur in cold conditions.

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Dr de Giorgio also notes that women are generally more susceptible to retaining fluid than men.

‘The hormone progesterone encourages the body to retain water, which is why many women experience swollen ankles during the fortnight before their period. Women going through menopause may also be more affected because declining oestrogen can interfere with the body’s control of fluid levels.’

Limited movement is another factor that can contribute to swelling. Regular activity helps the body return blood from the lower limbs, so sitting still for long stretches—whether on a flight, at a desk or in a wheelchair—can make swelling more likely.

Carrying excess weight is also a risk factor, as the extra tissue places more pressure on the vessels, requiring the veins in the legs to work harder to return blood to the heart.

But there’s reassuring news – for the vast majority of people, cold-related swelling is harmless. 

‘If the swelling goes down overnight or when you lie flat that is a reassuring sign,’ says Dr de Giorgio.

‘However, swelling in the legs and feet can sometimes be the body’s way of signalling something more serious. Heart failure is one of the conditions I’d want to rule out, because when the heart isn’t pumping efficiently, fluid can back up and accumulate in the hands and legs.

‘Kidney problems can cause the body to retain excess fluid too – as they can no longer filter excess sodium and water out of the blood effectively so fluid builds up and leaks into surrounding tissues.’

She adds that, in this case, swelling tends to appear in the legs, ankles and feet (due to gravity) and also around the eyes. Kidney-related swelling doesn’t resolve overnight and tends to be persistent.

‘Seek medical attention if the swelling doesn’t resolve or keeps worsening,’ warns Dr de Giorgio. 

‘If you feel short of breath, particularly on exertion or when lying flat; if you notice you are producing much less urine than usual; or if the swelling is in only one leg rather than both.

‘One-sided leg swelling – particularly if it’s red, warm to the touch or painful – could indicate a deep vein thrombosis or blood clot, and needs to be assessed urgently.’

When temperature-related swelling affects the legs, an effective immediate remedy is to elevate your feet, she adds. 

‘Lie down and prop your legs up above the level of your heart and let gravity work in reverse.

‘Staying well hydrated matters too – it sounds counterintuitive when you’re already feeling puffy, but dehydration actually causes the body to retain more fluid as a protective response (releasing a hormone called vasopressin – also known as antidiuretic hormone – which instructs the kidneys to stop excreting water and reabsorb it instead). The body essentially goes into survival mode, hoarding whatever fluid it has.’