Boris Johnson has credited the UK’s Covid bounceback for Conservative successes in Thursday’s election, including capturing Hartlepool for the first time since the 1960s.

In his first public response to the elections, the prime minister hailed early results as “very encouraging”.

And he revealed that he is to visit Hartlepool later today to celebrate with the north-east seaside town’s new Tory MP Jill Mortimer.

Speaking during a visit to a Severn Trent training centre in Coventry, the PM said: “The results have been coming in since this morning and there’s clearly a lot more to go, and it’s early days, but it’s a very encouraging set of results so far.

“I think that’s really because we have been focusing, as a government, on our priorities, the people’s priorities, and bouncing back from the pandemic as much as we can and getting through it.”

Mr Johnson said that the 500 young trainees recruited by Severn Trent under the government’s Kickstart scheme were an example of “what everybody wants to see as we go through towards the end of the roadmap – really making sure that we’re getting people into work, getting the economy bouncing back very, very strongly in a way that I know it will”.