Previewing the council by-elections of 26th May 2022

18 min readMay 26, 2022

“All the right votes, but not necessarily in the right order”

There are six polls of varying types on 26th May 2022, four of which are in that London. By coincidence, your columnist is going there over the weekend. So let’s start in the capital:

Aldersgate;
Cordwainer; and
Cornhill

City of London Court of Aldermen; caused respectively by the resignation of Nicholas Anstee, the death of Roger Gifford and the resignation of Robert Howard.

A couple of months ago Andrew’s Previews covered the general election of the UK’s oldest and most unusual local government unit. The City of London Corporation has been going for so long that nobody knows quite how long London has had democratic self-government for. The Corporation has two classes of elected membership. At the lower level is the Court of Common Council, whose 100 members were renewed at an election last March. The higher level is the Court of Aldermen.

The Aldermen of London (the City uses this word as a non-binary term) are the senior councillors who get to wear nice scarlet robes and have the chance to serve in the City’s top ceremonial jobs. Every year two aldermen are elected as Sheriffs of the City of London, and an alderman who has previously served as a sheriff is elected as Lord Mayor of London. There are 25 aldermen of the City, one for each of its ancient wards.

The Lord Mayor and Sheriffs have some judicial duties by virtue of their offices. The serving Lord Mayor and Sheriffs are justices of the Old Bailey, and the Sheriffs are officially resident in the Old Bailey during their year of office. Until the rules were changed earlier this year judges, magistrates and other legal officers in the UK were required to retire at the age of 70, and to match this Aldermen of the City were expected to retire at that age. The recent passing of the Public Service Pensions and Judicial Offices Act 2022 has increased the judicial retirement age to 75, but it remains to be seen whether the City will revise its expectations accordingly.

And “expectation” is the key word here. The City’s Aldermen are expected to retire at 70 and to seek re-election every six years, but they are in fact technically elected for life. This technicality has proven useful over the last two years, when the “work from home” pandemic advice prevented the City from putting together a workable electoral register.

To be clear, this difficulty was not because the City Corporation’s employees were working from home — it was because everybody else was. Two centuries ago the Square Mile of London was one of the most highly-populated and overcrowded cities in the world, and it returned four Members of Parliament; but the city’s residential population has declined as office and business space has taken over. There has been a revival in the City’s population in recent years, but its residential electorate is 10,000 or less and most of those are packed into four “residential” wards. For the other 21 wards the vast majority of the voters in City elections are people who work within the ward boundaries, either as sole traders or nominated by businesses. The work-from-home advice was simply not compatible with those rules.

One of the four “residential” wards is Aldersgate ward, which in November 2019 was the scene of the last by-election to the Court of Common Council before the pandemic hit (Andrew’s Previews 2019, page 357). This covers the western half of the modernist Barbican Estate, a series of Brutalist flats built by the City Corporation between 1965 and 1976 to house affluent City professionals. Social housing this is not. Barbican underground station serves the ward from just over the boundary, while since Tuesday passengers on the new Elizabeth Line have passed underneath.

The outgoing Alderman for Aldersgate ward is Nicholas Anstee, a chartered accountant who served as Lord Mayor in 2009–10. Lord Mayors of London customarily receive an honour once their year of office is over, but Anstee was the first Lord Mayor of modern times to refuse that: he reportedly thought he was worth more than the CBE he was offered. Anstee was last re-elected in 2017, and he has chosen to retire after 35 years of service to Aldersgate ward (he was first elected here as a Common Councilman in 1987).

There are two candidates looking to succeed Anstee, both of whom live in the Barbican estate: Melissa Collett takes on Christopher Makin. City elections tend to be run on a non-partisan basis as befits a body with the population of a large parish council, and all nine candidates in the City elections today are independents: Labour have started running candidates in City elections, and they topped the poll in Aldersgate ward two months ago, but there is no Labour candidate for the ward’s Alderman today.

The other two Aldermanic elections today take place in business-dominated wards on opposite sides of the large road junction outside the Bank of England, which passengers can now again reach on the Northern line from its shiny new platform at Bank station. Facing this junction from the west is the striking postmodern biulding of No 1 Poultry, which was completed in 1997 and is one of the UK’s youngest listed buildings. This forms the north-eastern corner of Cordwainer ward. Named after its former shoemaking industry, Cordwainer is a rectangular ward bordered by Poultry and Cheapside to the north, Bread Stree to the west, Cannon Street to the south and Walbrook to the east.

Here can be found some of the most extensive remains of Roman London in the form of the London Mithraeum, a temple dedicated to Mithras located off the modern street of Walbrook. Excavation works in the waterlogged ground here have revealed London’s oldest financial transaction, a wooden writing tablet dated to AD 57. Two millennia on, finance is still a major topic of conversation on this site: the Mithraeum can now be visited underneath the European headquarters of Bloomberg. Religion of a later kind is still celebrated in the church of St Mary-le-Bow on Cheapside, the sound of whose bells features in the traditional definition of a Cockney. Sadly, the “great bell of Bow” no longer speaks as it did in the nursery rhyme Oranges and Lemons: it was destroyed by a German air-raid in 1941.

The Cordwainer election is to succeed another former Lord Mayor, Sir Roger Gifford, who died last year at the age of 65. Yesterday’s Wardmote, which officially kicked off the election process, took place on the first anniversary of his death. Sir Roger was Lord Mayor in 2012–13, representing the City at the funeral of Margaret Thatcher which was held in St Paul’s Cathedral during his mayoral year. His career had been spent in international banking and finance, and he was also prominent in the arts as a founder of the City Music Foundation, a charity which supports professional musicians.

This post has attracted the most interest of the three Aldermanic elections today with five candidates coming forward, two of whom are apparently notable enough for Wikipedia. The one to beat may well be Alexander Barr, a financier formerly with Aberdeen Asset Management, who was re-elected as a Common Councilman for this ward in March at the top of the poll. Miranda Brawn is an investment banker, lawyer and philanthropist who started her career as, in her own words, “one of the first women of colour on the trading floor”. Charlotte Crosswell’s contribution to the financial services sector was recognised in 2021 when she was appointed OBE. Unlike the previous three candidates James Keeley is not connected with the financial services industry: he is a barrister at the Temple, specialising in serious criminal cases. Completing the Cordwainer ballot paper is Angelika Wagner.

Facing No 1 Poultry from the far side of the Bank junction is the Royal Exchange, which is the western corner of Cornhill ward. This is a long and thin ward which runs north-east to the old London Wall between Old Broad Street and Bishopsgate. It is dominated by the banking industry and a number of large banks are based here. Within this ward can be found what was once the City’s first skyscraper and the UK’s tallest building, completed in 1980 for NatWest Bank. NatWest moved out of their eponymous tower in the 1990s after the building was extensively damaged by an IRA bombing, and the tower’s new owners — who clearly saw it as the answer to life, the universe and everything — renamed it as “Tower 42”, after the number of floors it has. If you are ever in the City and fancy a drink, this column recommends the Counting House, located within Cornhill ward on Cornhill itself.

Since 2015 Cornhill’s Alderman has been Robert Howard, a senior compliance officer in the financial/stockbroking sector. He is seeking re-election after seven years in office. City Aldermen who seek re-election aren’t always challenged, but one candidate has come forward against Howard: Camilia Kaerts stood in the City elections two months ago in the neighbouring Aldgate ward, finishing as a rather distant runner-up.

Previous aldermanic elections since 2010 for these and the other 22 wards of the City can be found at the Local Elections Archive Project.

Aldersgate

Parliamentary constituency: Cities of London and Westminster
ONS Travel to Work Area: London
Postcode districts: EC1A, EC2V, EC2Y

Melissa Collett (Ind)
Christopher Makin (Ind)

Cordwainer

Parliamentary constituency: Cities of London and Westminster
ONS Travel to Work Area: London
Postcode districts: EC2R, EC2V, EC4M, EC4N

Alexander Barr (Ind)
Miranda Brawn (Ind)
Charlotte Crosswell (Ind)
James Keeley (Ind)
Angelika Wagner (Ind)

Cornhill

Parliamentary constituency: Cities of London and Westminster
ONS Travel to Work Area: London
Postcode districts: EC2M, EC2N, EC2R, EC3V

Robert Howard (Ind)
Camilia Kaerts (Ind)

Mayfield

Redbridge council, London; postponed from 5th May following the death of Iqbal Singh, who had been nominated as a Conservative candidate.

For the second time in two months Andrew’s Preview comes to a ward called Mayfield, and in the month of May at that. At the end of March this column discussed Mayfield ward in Whitby; this time we’re off to outer London.

As stated above, your columnist is off to London this weekend to meet some friends of mine, but not in South Park. That’s South Park in Ilford, which was opened by Ilford Council in 1902 and has been well preserved by that council’s successor, the London Borough of Redbridge. South Park can be found within the Mayfield ward, located to the east of Ilford and the north-east of Barking.

In the 2011 census Mayfield ward was majority-Asian with all the major subcontinental religions strongly represented (35% Muslim, 12% Sikh, 11% Hindu). This level of immigration has caused Ilford to swing a mile to the left over the last few decades. The Ilford South constituency, which covers this ward, was a key marginal for most of the late 20th century: Labour’s Mike Gapes gained the seat in 1992 by just 402 votes. 30 years on, his successor Sam Tarry is sitting on a majority of over 24,000 from December 2019 — and that was despite Gapes saving his deposit that year, as he sought re-election for the Independent Group for Change or whatever they were called that week.

Redbridge council has taken a similar trajectory: it had a Conservative majority continuously from 1964 to 1994, and the 2014 election was the first time Labour had a majority on the council. Eight years on, the 2022 Redbridge council elections resulted in a 55–5 lead for Labour on the council, with the three seats in Mayfield ward yet to poll: the 5th May election there was postponed after Iqbal Singh, who was one of the Conservative candidates for the ward, died during the campaign. May and June editions of Andrew’s Previews always feature some unfinished business from the May ordinary elections, and this is the first such item on this year’s agenda.

Mayfield is a very safe Labour ward. In 2018, the only previous result on these boundaries, the Labour slate polled 79% of the vote in a straight fight with the Conservatives. There was a wider choice for the electors in the London mayor and assembly elections last year: Sadiq Khan beat the Conservatives’ Shaun Bailey 46–34, but he ran quite a long way behind the Labour list in the London Members ballot which had a 58–27 lead over the Conservatives. Third place in the 2021 mayoral ballot here went to the YouTuber Niko Omilana, who polled 6%.

Of the three outgoing Labour councillors, one is seeking re-election: that’s Jas Athwal, who has been leader of the Labour group on the council since 2011 and Leader of Redbridge Council since 2014. Redbridge’s full council meeting and mayor-making, which was originally due to take place last week, has been postponed to 30th May to allow Athwal time to be re-elected to the council; should he secure re-election, he is likely to get a third term as council leader. Athwal had attracted some controversy during his previous term, as he was suspended from the Labour party in 2019–20 while allegations of sexual harassment were investigated: he was cleared of wrongdoing, but lost the chance to be selected as Labour candidate for Ilford South in the 2019 general election. Joining Athwal on the Labour slate are Tanweer Khan and Vanisha Solanki. The Conservatives have selected Masood Khushi Pasha to replace the late Iqbal Singh, and he joins Maria Begum and Carol Corbin on the Tory slate. If the 5th May election had gone ahead here it would have been another straight fight, but the delay to the poll has allowed two other parties to stand candidates: Majad Hussain has the nomination of the Independent Network, while the other late entrant is Sufia Khanam for the Liberal Democrats.

Parliamentary constituency: Ilford South
London Assembly constituency: Havering and Redbridge
ONS Travel to Work Area: London
Postcode districts: IG1, IG3, IG11

Jas Athwal (Lab)
Maria Begum ©
Carol Corbin ©
Majad Hussain (Ind Network)
Sufia Khanam (LD)
Tanweer Khan (Lab)
Masood Khushi Pasha ©
Vanisha Solanki (Lab)

May 2018 result Lab 2717/2602/2523 C 774/761/619
Previous results in detail

May 2021 GLA results (excludes postal voters)
Mayor: Lab 1347 C 997 Omilana 182 Grn 124 London Real 42 LD 30 Animal Welfare 25 Let London Live 24 Reclaim 21 Rejoin EU 20 Farah London 20 Obunge 19 Renew 15 Heritage Party 12 UKIP 11 Count Binface 9 SDP 9 Women’s Equality 6 Fosh 4 Burning Pink 3
London Members: Lab 1783 C 840 Grn 157 LD 59 CPA 38 Rejoin EU 34 Animal Welfare 32 Women’s Equality 22 Heritage Party 15 Reform UK 15 UKIP 15 London Real 12 Let London Live 11 Comm 10 TUSC 10 Nat Lib 7 Londonpendence 6 SDP 5

Sleaford Quarrington and Mareham

North Kesteven council, Lincolnshire; caused by the resignation of Conservative councillor Mike Kent.

Our two remaining by-elections today are in the East Midlands, and we start off in Lincolnshire. Sleaford is one of Lincolnshire’s major centres, and from 1888 to 1974 it was the county town for the Parts of Kesteven. It’s an important railway junction, with lines from Peterborough to Lincoln and from Grantham to Skegness meeting here; while the Sleaford Navigation provided an earlier link to the outside world for the town’s industry and the local agricultural produce.

Quarrington and Mareham is Sleaford’s southern ward, taking in the Quarrington and New Quarrington areas on the southern fringe of the town. Also here is Greylees, a large and very new housing development on the site of a former asylum next to Rauceby railway station. This station, which was built primarily to serve the former hospital, was where the former Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg proposed to his wife Miriam while they were waiting for a train to Sleaford.

Not that there’s much sign of Liberalism in the area’s local election results: the Lib Dems haven’t stood a candidate here since the ward was created in 2007 and they haven’t bothered in this by-election either. Sleaford Quarrington and Mareham has instead generally been a fight between Conservatives and independent candidates in elections to North Kesteven council. The Conservatives won all three seats in 2007 but lost one in 2011 to independent candidate Ian Dolby.

Dolby resigned from the council in 2014. A look in the Councillors Behaving Badly file reveals that Andrew’s Previews reported at the time that he resigned “ostensibly to spend more time on his accountancy firm, although he has also been a controversial figure; [in 2013] a judge ordered him to repay over £3,000 which he had withheld from a business client, and he was arrested in December 2013 on suspicion of possessing indecent images of children (he is currently on bail)”. Dolby was subsequently sentenced in 2017 to two years’ imprisonment for those indecent images, and in 2020 he was back before Lincoln magistrates who fined him for breaching a sexual harm prevention order.

The resulting by-election featured a candidate who had only just become eligible to seek elected office following a criminal conviction which had disqualified him. Nigel Gresham was the chairman of the committee which had revived Sleaford’s carnival, and your columnist remembers reading a press interview with him at the time which described him as the father of seven children and gave their ages. There was a large age gap after the third child which seemed unusual, and a bit more digging revealed that he had in fact had four more children in the interim. To cope with this growing family Gresham had modified his car in such a way that it was an accident waiting to happen: the eventual accident involved the car spinning off the road and plunging into a river. His four youngest children died. Gresham, who was driving the car at the time, was sentenced in January 2009 to two years imprisonment for causing death by dangerous driving. He finished a poor third in the June 2014 Sleaford Quarrington and Mareham by-election, which was won by the Lincolnshire Independents with a narrow majority of 50 votes over the Conservatives.

Since then Sleaford Quarrington and Mareham has had a split of two Conservative councillors and one independent, although there was a clearout at the 2019 election with three new councillors elected. Independent candidate Bozena Allen topped the poll with 43% of the vote, the Conservative slate polled 33% to hold the other two seats, and the Labour candidate scored 23%. North Kesteven council as a whole returned a majority of independent councillors in 2019, but the Conservatives managed to retain control of the council with the support of some of the independents. The area is strongly Conservative at other levels of government: the Sleaford and North Hykeham parliamentary seat is one of the safest Tory seats in the country, and the Conservatives had a large majority last year in the Sleaford Rural division of Lincolnshire county council which covers this ward.

This by-election is to replace Conservative councillor Mike Kent, who resigned last month as he was moving away from the area. Defending for the party is Mark Smith, a former RAF officer who won this ward last year in a by-election to Sleaford town council. The Lincolnshire Independents, who won the 2014 by-election here, have selected another former RAF figure in Bob Oldershaw. Completing the ballot paper for Labour is Sleaford town councillor Paul Edwards-Shea, who returns from the 2019 election.

Parliamentary constituency: Sleaford and North Hykeham
Lincolnshire county council division: Sleaford Rural
ONS Travel to Work Area: Lincoln
Postcode district: NG34

May 2019 result Ind 827 C 640/614/581 Lab 447
May 2015 result C 1884/1625 Lincs Ind 1585/1547/1505
June 2014 by-election Lincs Ind 527 C 477 Ind 178
May 2011 result C 1014/863/813 Ind 941/698 Lincs Ind 611
May 2007 result C 910/820/795 LD 624 Ind 623/169
Previous results in detail

Gedling

Gedling council, Nottinghamshire; caused by the resignation of Labour councillor Jennifer Hemingway.

We finish for the week with another ward in the East Midlands which this column visited in 2014, although in this case there have been major boundary changes since.

Ward and administrative names do tend to repeat each other from time to time, but this is a rather extreme case. We are in the Gedling ward, of the Gedling local government district, within the Gedling parliamentary seat — three units with the same name but with three different boundaries. The ward name is obvious: it comes from the village of Gedling, which now lies on the eastern edge of the Nottingham built-up area.

It may seem strange that a small place like Gedling could give its name to a lcoal government district, but this sort of thing did happen in the 1970s reorganisation. The main towns in the district, the Nottingham suburbs of Arnold and Carlton, are very similar in size, and calling the district “Arnold and Carlton” or “Carlton and Arnold” would have annoyed whichever town came second. A neutral name for the district was clearly seen as a better option.

And in the 1970s Gedling was an important place for the local economy thanks to the presence of Gedling Colliery. This was one of the UK’s largest coalmines at its height of production in the 1960s, employing 1,000 men and extracting over a million tons of coal per year. The colliery’s workforce was unusually multicultural, with around 10% of the miners in the 1960s being black Caribbean migrants to Nottingham. Gedling colliery eventually closed in 1991, and the pithead site is now a country park.

The politics of Gedling ward has also been of a diverse nature, as this ward has returned councillors from all three main parties in this century. It was safely Liberal Democrat until the Coalition led to the floor falling out of their vote: Labour gained two of the Lib Dem seats in 2011 and the other at a by-election in March 2014. The Labour monopoly was short-lived: in 2015 one of their seats disappeared in boundary changes and a second was lost to the Conservatives, giving the ward split representation again. The Conservatives fell back here badly in 2019 and lost their seat to Labour, who enjoyed a 54–26 majority in Gedling ward and have a strong overall majority on Gedling council.

The ward may look safe for Labour now, but it’s part of a highly marginal parliamentary seat which is close to the top of the Labour target list for the next general election. If you fancy having a go at reading the psephological tea leaves, the vote share changes in this by-election might give something of a clue. It’s difficult to read anything from the 2021 Nottinghamshire county elections here because Gedling ward is split between three different county divisions: Carlton West is safe Labour, Calverton is safe Conservative and Carlton East (which covers a small corner of the ward) was a narrow Conservative gain from Labour last year.

The two Labour councillors elected here in May 2019 were both called Jenny or Jennifer. Jenny Hollingsworth has represented the ward since 2011; Jennifer Thomas, as she then was, was a new face. Thomas has since changed her surname to Hemingway, and she resigned from the council in March as she was moving away from the area.

Defending this seat for Labour is Lynda Pearson, who was the winner of the 2014 by-election here but lost her seat to the Conservatives the following year. The Conservative candidate is Charlie Godwin, who is hoping to rise from the ashes of a fifth-place result in the neighbouring Phoenix ward at his last outing in 2019. Also standing are former Lib Dem councillor for this ward Maggie Dunkin, and Paul Sergent of the Green Party.

Parliamentary constituency: Gedling
Nottinghamshire county council division: Calverton (part), Carlton East (part), Carlton West (part)
ONS Travel to Work Area: Nottingham
Postcode district: NG4

May 2019 result Lab 917/792 C 447/444 LD 339/268
May 2015 result Lab 1176/927 C 994/693 LD 652/448 UKIP 381/375 Grn 203
Previous results in detail

Correction Corner

Before we finish this week, I regret that there is an entry for Correction Corner relating to a by-election which this column covered last December, in the Armitage with Handsacre ward of Lichfield council. Based on the previous result shown on the Lichfield council website, I reported that the previous election in 2019 had been a 61–39 win for the Conservatives. In fact the Lichfield council website is missing the result for an independent candidate who had also stood in 2019, and I did not discover this until processing the Lichfield results for the Local Elections Archive Project last week. The correct 2019 score should have been 47% for the Conservatives, 28% for Labour and 25% for the independent. My apologies for the error.

There are no by-elections next week because Thursday 2nd June is a bank holiday in honour of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee. Andrew’s Previews will now take a rest before returning on 9th June. See you then.

If you enjoyed these previews, there are many more like them — going back to 2016 — in the Andrew’s Previews books, which are available to buy now (link). You can also support future previews by donating to the Local Elections Archive Project (link).

Andrew Teale