Donald Trump’s latest beautification plan for Washington DC – the restoration of the 2,000ft-long reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial – has met been with claims that a $6.9m contract to carry out the project was hastily handed out to a company that renovated a swimming pool at the president’s Virginia golf course.

The New York Times reported that the no-bid contract for the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool was given to Atlantic Industrial Coatings, based in New Canton, Virginia, on 3 April – despite company records’ showing it has not previously been awarded a federal contract.

One of the company’s owners, Curtis Wood, declined to comment on the contract to the Times.

Maintaining clarity in the pool for it to reflect has been a problem since it was constructed in 1922. It is between 18in and 30in deep, holds about 6.75m gallons of water and has no natural flow. In Washington’s hot, humid summer, the pool turns green with algae.

Barack Obama’s presidential administration spent more than $35m attempting to fix the algae issue, but the problem persisted. Joe Biden’s administration elected to simply drain and refill it each year. In addition to the algae issue, the pool annually leaks 16m gallons of water, which the National Park Service (NPS) – and ultimately taxpayers – are obliged to replace.

There are signs that the clarity of the pool has become a fixation for Trump, alongside other projects on which the president is keen, including the construction of a vast White House ballroom and a “freedom arch” to rival or exceed the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, ahead of the US’s 250th anniversary celebrations in the summer.

“You’re going to end up with a beautiful, beautiful reflecting pool, the way it’s supposed to be,” Trump said in April. “Much better than it ever was, actually.”

Trump also hinted that he knew a man who could help. “I have a guy who’s unbelievable at doing swimming pools,” Trump said. “He looked at it. He called me up. He said, ‘Sir, we can do something on it.’”

Trump said he suggested making the pool turquoise “like in the Bahamas” but had settled on the contractor’s suggestion of “American-flag blue”.

The president recently posted an AI-generated image of himself in a gold inflatable pool chair and his vice-president, JD Vance; his secretary of state, Marco Rubio; his interior secretary, Doug Burgum; and an unidentified woman in a checkered bikini relaxing in a clear-blue version of the reflecting pool.

Trump earlier in the spring said he decided to paint the reflecting pool blue. The Times found that the administration had used a federal contract exemption designed for use to avoid “serious injury, financial or other, to the government” to award the contract without seeking competing bids.

“This project is now being completed at ‘Trump speed’ to ensure the iconic landmark is totally restored ahead of the 250th [US anniversary] celebrations,” a White House spokesperson, Taylor Rogers, said in a statement to the Times.

Beside riding roughshod over planning regulations by paving over the Rose Garden and tearing down the East Wing to make way for his ballroom, and erecting a statue of Christopher Columbus on White House grounds, Trump has attracted criticism for his pool project.

Tim Whitehouse, the executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, told the Times that the renovations and changes had “become a secretive project where the friends and business associates of the president are being rewarded with no public scrutiny”.

However, it is not certain that painting the pool blue will fix its major issue: a filtration system that’s not up to the job. The pool may turn green with or without a blue bottom.

“Painting is not going to solve that problem,” Aquatic Council chairperson Tim Auerhahn told the Times. Auerhahn also said that Trump’s decision to visit the pool by motorcade recently may have exacerbated the leaks.

“If it were my project, I’d require an immediate inspection,” Auerhahn added.

By Friday night, Keir Starmer and much of the Westminster Labour group were quietly relieved that the local election results in England hadn’t been quite as bad as feared. In Wales, however, Labour’s collapse in the Senedd was even more total than the most pessimistic predictions.

For more than 100 years, Welsh Labour was the democratic world’s most successful election-winning machine, but the political behemoth limped into third place this week with just nine seats in a 96-seat parliament. A new chapter in Wales’s political and cultural history has opened: pro-independence Plaid Cymru is set to form a minority government.

“For those of us who’ve only known Labour domination … the fact that it could collapse with such dramatic completeness – it’s quite hard to convey the shock. It was just astonishing. Labour was absolutely mullered,” said Richard Wyn Jones, the director of the Wales Governance Centre at Cardiff University.

“We’ve known Labour was in deep trouble in the post-industrial valleys … but the fact that Plaid could win half of the 12 seats in Cardiff? Genuinely everywhere you look, it’s hard to identify any solid territory they can actually rebuild on.”

In an extraordinary admission of defeat before a single constituency result was declared, Labour released a statement saying it expected to return just 10 MSs out of 96 available seats in the newly expanded Senedd chamber. The party previously never held fewer than 26 seats in a 60-seat chamber.

The first minister, Labour’s Eluned Morgan, cut a tragic figure as the results were announced at the count in her west Wales constituency of Ceredigion Penfro. Three of the six seats available went to Plaid Cymru, two to Reform and one to the Conservatives, making Morgan the first ever leader of a government in the UK to lose their seat while in office.

She immediately resigned in a concession speech. The party announced on Saturday that Ken Skates, MS for Fflint Wrecsam and former cabinet secretary for transport, would serve as interim leader.

“I am proud of what Welsh Labour has achieved for this nation over so many years … But the people of Wales have rejected us and we owe it to the people of Wales to listen. To understand. And to rebuild,” she said.

Morgan received lengthy applause from the room. The successful candidates expressed admiration for the Cardiff-born first minister’s energetic campaign, and praised her career in public service.

But nothing Morgan could do would have been enough to stop the haemorrhage. Support for the party was already ebbing before she took over in 2024 after the disastrous, short-lived tenure of her predecessor, Vaughan Gething.

Wales embarked on devolution more cautiously than Scotland and Northern Ireland, and initially very limited powers hampered Cardiff Bay administrations. Supporters insist the party held the line against 14 years of Conservative government in Westminster, protecting public services from the impact of austerity, Brexit and the Covid pandemic.

Welsh Labour partly had an incumbency issue – but it had also to contend with the growing criticism of its track record in office, much of it justified. After nearly 30 years of Labour management of public services, Wales has fallen behind the other UK nations, particularly in poverty, education and the NHS, which is underperforming despite significant spending increases.

Starmer’s election was expected to strengthen Welsh Labour as a “partnership in power” in Cardiff and London, but Starmer’s unpopularity dragged it down instead – and left the Cardiff Bay administration unable to blame the Conservatives for perceived failings.

Starmer did not appear to have much interest in how the Welsh wing of the party fared, warning his cabinet against “overly deferential relations” with the devolved governments.

Last year, 11 Labour Senedd members took the extraordinary step of writing to the prime minister claiming his administration had been either “deeply insensitive” to Wales or guilty of “constitutional outrage” by failing to deliver on devolution promises, including justice, policing and the crown estate.

Alun Davies, a long-serving Labour member of the Senedd who lost his seat in Blaenau Gwent, told Channel 4 News that the party’s defeat was “manufactured in Downing Street” by Starmer’s “disregard” for Wales.

“This is not simply midterm blues or a protest vote. This is a very deep turning away from a party that people have felt almost a cultural attachment to for more than a century,” he said.

Another Labour source said: “This result has been a long time coming. On the doors, people felt let down by the Welsh government’s handling of the NHS and education. We have to take responsibility for that. People also haven’t felt the changes of a UK Labour government fast enough. It’s on all of us to rebuild the party in Wales.”

Welsh Labour will elect a new leader in the coming weeks, but the contest will reflect the scale of its defeat. There are only nine people to choose from, since the leader must be a Senedd member – and nominees need the backing of 20% of MSs.

The party must be “more muscular about its Welshness” if it wants to survive, said Laura McAllister, a professor of public policy at Cardiff University.

“There’s a steady increase in the number of people who see themselves as Welsh only, or Welsh first and British second. If [Labour] want to capture that group, they need to show again that they are different to UK Labour, with their own identity and agenda, as in the early days of devolution and the ‘clear red water’,” she added.

You would expect most political candidates who pull off a shock win to celebrate their victory, maybe with a glass of bubbly and excitement for the challenges of elected office ahead. But on Friday, as thousands of new councillors celebrated their triumphs, some surprise victors were less than pleased.

Green party handlers apologised to one newly elected councillor in Finsbury Park, north London, put down as a “paper candidate”, who pulled off an unexpected win. “You’re going to be great, we’ll support you,” they said, according to the Islington Tribune.

A paper candidate is someone who is fielded on the understanding that they are highly unlikely to win, to enable a party to appear on the ballot paper in as many places as possible. Reform UK were so keen to enlist candidates across the country that the party cold called members of the public – including a Guardian journalist – asking them to run. But this year’s local elections, which saw Labour’s worst results on record, meant many new candidates were elected.

In Camden, a byelection is already on the cards after a secondary-school teacher who was elected for the Greens immediately quit as councillor because he is not allowed to hold the post while also teaching in the borough.

So, what is it like to pull off a surprise win? Tyrone Scott has been a member of the Green party for 12 years. Four years ago, he was tantalisingly close to power, losing his race to become a Hackney councillor by 27 votes. “It was quite devastating at the time,” the 34-year-old said. Months later, he ran for deputy leader of the party but came second to Zack Polanski, who has since become leader.

He retreated from politics to take a job at a charity. “It looked like it was difficult for me to run again, I had quite a lot of work commitments,” he said. He still wanted to run so as a compromise, opted for an area where there was “less likelihood we were going to win”. He was selected in Hackney Wick, where the Labour party sailed to victory last time the seat was contested in 2022. Nonetheless, he called himself a “cardboard candidate” rather than a paper one, because the party thought victory was possible everywhere in the borough.

Activists “did a very small amount of canvassing” in Hackney Wick compared with the rest of the borough where it had run year-long campaigns.

The first indication that things might be better than expected was the large pile of votes for his ward at the verification on Thursday. “I had a little feeling but, even then, I didn’t really believe it,” Scott said. Things crystallised at the count when the Greens pulled of win after win early on. “The first nine or 10 seats rolled through as all Green, including a couple of unexpected ones,” he said.

In a seismic day for the Greens in London, the party won a majority on Hackney council, ousting Labour as the controlling party for the first time since 2002, winning 42 of the 57 seats up for grabs. Zoë Garbett became the borough’s first Green mayor, loosening Labour’s 24-year grip on the post.

When the results of his ward were announced and all three councillors elected were Greens, Scott said it was a “mix of emotions”, including some “nervous excitement”.

“I thought there was a minor chance but not at all to have got three across the board,” he said. “It felt quite surreal and we were very elated. I think all of us are having a moment of, ‘Oh, wait, this is real now’.”

Scott works as head of campaigns for an anti-poverty charity. He told his bosses about his intention to stand, who said he could “go for it” on the “understanding that I was less likely to get in”. In the event he did win, his workplace said they could work around it. “I’m sure now they’re thinking: ‘Oh actually, it’s real’, and we’ll have a conversation when I get back to work on Monday,” he said.

Scott hopes the Greens can rebuild “community cohesion” in Hackney and show that, especially in light of Reform UK’s gains across the country, “we can be a shining example of how to build hope rather than hate”.