Previewing the five by-elections of 29th June 2023
“All the right votes, but not necessarily in the right order”
Five by-elections on 29th June 2023, with Labour defending three and the Conservatives and Lib Dems one each. Let’s start with the Conservative defence:
Wyboston
Bedford council; caused by the election of Conservative councillor Tom Wootton as Mayor of Bedford.
We have now dealt with all of the unfinished business of the 4th May local elections. With that file closed, let’s now open the folder with the heading “matters arising”.
Which takes to one of the few remaining councils which has never previously had the Andrew’s Previews treatment. We’ve come to the boundary between Bedfordshire and Cambridgeshire. On the Cambridgeshire side is the town of St Neots, which this column has visited fairly recently; on the Bedfordshire side is a ward of eight rural parishes to the south and west of St Neots. In the 2021 census this ward, Wyboston, made the top 50 in England and Wales for the 45–64 age bracket (34.7%) and the top 30 for households with three or more cars or vans (28.1%). Boundary changes for the 2023 election probably haven’t changed that much.
The largest of these eight parishes is Wyboston itself, which is located off the A1 road not far south of St Neots. To the east of Wyboston lies the River Great Ouse, and to the east of that is the parish of Little Barford through which the East Coast railway line passes. It would not be accurate to describe this as an area where many pass through but few stop, because just to the south of Wyboston is the location of the Black Cat Roundabout, a notorious traffic blackspot on the A1.
This roundabout was enlarged in 2014–15 with the opening of a new dual-carriageway road to Bedford and the M1 beyond. Less than a decade later the bulldozers are coming back, because National Highways are about to start construction on a further new road running east from here towards Cambourne; this will involve upgrading the Black Cat to a three-level junction, finally allowing A1 traffic to flow freely. Once this road is completed and open to traffic in 2027, there will be continuous dual carriageway from Milton Keynes to Cambridge.
Although we are on the edge of St Neots here, the major town in this area is Bedford and the Black Cat Roundabout is administered as part of Bedford borough. Since 2007 the local councillor here had been the Conservatives’ Tom Wootton, who was originally elected for Roxton ward (which covered a similar area) and transferred to Wyboston ward following boundary changes for the 2011 election. In May 2023, on further revised boundaries, he had the best individual result of any Bedford councillor, polling 75% of the vote against Lib Dem and Labour opposition.
Perhaps it helped that Wootton was also the Conservative candidate that year for the Bedford mayoralty. This post has been going since 2002, when Bedford was still a second-tier district under the now-abolished Bedfordshire county council. The borough’s first mayor was localist independent Frank Branston, who died in office in 2009; the by-election was won by the Liberal Democrats’ Dave Hodgson, who held the post until 2023.
Hodgson’s loss can be put down mostly to a government amendment moved at committee stage of the bill which became the Elections Act 2022. The effect of this amendment was to change the electoral system for elected mayors, and for police and crime commissioners, to first-past-the-post and to remove the Supplementary Vote system which had previously been used. It is important to note that this electoral system change is not a reversion to previous practice: all elected mayor elections had previously used SV, and the Conservative-led coalition government legislated for the use of SV when it set up elected police and crime commissioners just over a decade ago. This is a full-blown electoral system change, which wasn’t even done with a second-reading debate in Parliament never mind a referendum. The precedent is clear: should a future government wish to change the electoral system for local government or for parliament, a referendum will not be necessary.
The point of the Supplementary Vote was to ensure that candidates were not elected on minority votes, which is certainly an issue in boroughs like Bedford which have significant levels of support for all three of the main parties. Labour do well in Bedford town (they hold the Bedford parliamentary seat), the Conservatives do well in the surrounding rural areas (they hold the North East Bedfordshire parliamentary seat, which includes Wyboston ward and is to be redrawn as North Bedfordshire at the next general election), and the Liberal Democrats also have a significant vote in Bedford local elections. In the five Bedford mayoral polls since Bedford became a unitary council in 2009, the record first-preference score is 38% for the Lib Dems in 2011.
With first-past-the-post in place, the potential was there for a mayor to be elected by a minority thanks to a freak vote split: and that mayor is the Conservatives’ Tom Wootton. Last month Wootton and the outgoing Lib Dem mayor Dave Hodgson both polled 33% of the vote, with Labour on 24% in third place; Wootton polled 15,747 votes against 15,602 for Hodgson, so Wootton was declared the winner by a margin of 145 votes.
As stated, on the same day Tom Wootton was also re-elected as Bedford councillor for Wyboston ward. He can’t be a mayor and councillor simultaneously, so under the rules his council seat was automatically vacated and this by-election is the result. He may have some trouble governing the borough though, because Bedford council is an almost perfect three-way split: the May 2023 elections returned just 14 Conservative councillors against 14 Labour, 13 Lib Dems, 3 Greens and two independents. The opposition councillors have the two-thirds majority necessary to block the mayoral budget, so deals will need to be done if Mayor Wootton is to get his programme through.
The Conservatives need to hold this by-election to remain as the joint largest party on Bedford council, and given the result here last month that shouldn’t be too much of an ask for their defending candidate Julie Cox. She lives in Roxton, a village next to the Black Cat Roundabout, where she is a parish councillor. Her opposition comes from the two defeated candidates here last month, who are both back for another go: they are Thomas Townsend for the Lib Dems and Ian Nicholls for Labour.
Parliamentary constituency: North East Bedfordshire
Parliamentary constituency (from next general election): North Bedfordshire
ONS Travel to Work Area: Bedford
Postcode districts: MK44, PE19
Julie Cox (C)
Ian Nicholls (Lab)
Thomas Townsend (LD)
May 2023 result C 878 LD 167 Lab 121
Previous results in detail
Out with the old, in with the new
You might have noticed an innovation in the fact file from the previous section: a listing for parliamentary constituencies as of the next general election. The four Parliamentary Boundary Commissions have now submitted their respective reports on new parliamentary boundaries which are sorely needed: the current boundaries in England were drawn up based on the December 2000 electoral register, were first used at the 2010 general election (or 2005 in the case of Scotland), and were starting to become sorely out of shape. Only a handful of local government districts in England have wards based on electoral registers which are older than that, and that number should dwindle down to nothing in the next few years as the Local Government Boundary Commission for England does its work. Wales had a complete redrawing of its ward map last year, while since 2000 Scotland has changed its electoral system for local government and Northern Ireland has reorganised its councils.
This is the third go at the Boundary Commissions’ Sixth Periodical Reviews. The review which was due to report in 2013 was kaiboshed by politicking within the Coalition government; the 2018 review did report, but its recommendations were never put to a vote in Parliament because the May administration thought it had better things to worry about. Which is a source of regret for your columnist: the 2018 review process accepted my suggestion for better constituency boundaries in Greater Manchester, but the 2023 review didn’t.
Reforms to the process introduced by the Johnson government mean that this parliamentary boundary review should finally go through. The requirement for approval by the Lords and Commons has been removed, so once the legal order to introduce the constituencies has been drafted it will then go to the Privy Council without further ado for the King to sign off. The new boundaries will then come into force at the next general election; any by-elections between now and then will be on the old lines.
Watchers of politics will hear a lot over the next 12 months or so about “notional” results. Returning officers in the UK don’t break down general election results by ward or in any other way, which makes the task of transposing the 2019 Westminster votes from the old lines to the new rather difficult. The usual method is to estimate a new result using some combination of recent local election results and demographic information from the census. The main TV news organisations — the BBC, ITN and Sky — traditionally commission Professors Rallings and Thrasher to produce a set of notional results based on these principles, which will then be used by the media on election night. Other people on Twitter will be putting together their own set of estimates using slightly different assumptions and producing slightly different numbers. Because of the way our election counts work, we’ll never know which particular estimate is closest to the truth.
This is because the Association of Electoral Administrators, the professional body for returning officers, has better things to worry about than producing stats for election watchers. Their members deserve a huge amount of credit for delivering the 2023 English local elections without them turning into an administrative farce. Nonetheless the AEA’s report on those elections (link) lays bare their concerns for the future while calling for a number of reforms. The May 2023 polls were the first with mandatory voter ID; interim data published last week by the Electoral Commission, which is preparing its own report on how voter ID works, reckons that 14,000 intended voters were turned away from polling stations for lack of or incorrect ID and didn’t come back. One wonders how many people were caught by this bizarre trap set by the Voter ID rules, for which I quote paragraph 3.48 of the AEA report:
There are also examples of a London-centric view of travelcards. The Merseytravel Over 60s pass has similar application checks as an Oyster 60+ card, but was omitted from the list of valid ID.
This week’s set of local by-elections are themselves London-centric, so it’s time to head to the capital.
Hermitage and Gardens
Haringey council, London; caused by the death of Labour councillor Julie Davies.
Our other four by-elections this week fall into two pairs, with two in London and two in Dorset. We’ll start in the capital by considering one of those wards which deliver rather less than their name promises. The Gardens of this name are a series of six residential streets whose names end in “Gardens”; these are effectively an eastern extension of the terraced streets to the north of Finsbury Park known as the Harringay Ladder. The Hermitage refers to Hermitage Road, which in the mid-Victorian period was a location for country retreats for wealthy Londoners; but this area then became seriously industrial. It’s now picked out on maps as the Harringay Warehouse District.
Until the 1990s the Harringay Warehouse District was still a centre for work and play rather than rest. Play came in the form of the Harringay Stadium, which hosted greyhound racing until 1987, and the Harringay Arena which hosted basketball and wrestling matches in the 1948 Olympics but became best-known for boxing. Five world title fights were held here before the Arena closed in 1958, and the first boxing match to be televised live was hosted here in 1938: Len Harvey beat Jock McAvoy on points over 15 rounds to win the British light-heavyweight title. The Arena was a location for the first-ever edition of the BBC’s long-running Grandstand programme, hosting the Horse of the Year Show.
Work came in the form of a lot of manufacturing. Local firm Frederick Sage and Company were kept busy in the late 1940s with the refurbishment contract for the bombed-out House of Commons; they supplied a lot of the furniture and fittings for the Commons division lobbies and the Central Lobby, including the door which Black Rod bangs on at the State Opening of Parliament — that door was made here in Harringay. Until 1998, the Harringay Warehouse District was also home to the factory that made Maynard’s Wine Gums.
Hermitage Road is divided from the Gardens area by the Gospel Oak to Barking line of the London Overground, on which can be found Harringay Green Lanes railway station. The Gardens back on to St Ann’s Hospital which covers a large section of this ward. St Ann’s primarily focuses on mental health treatment, although one of its buildings is used by Moorfields Eye Hospital as an outpatient unit.
Hermitage and Gardens ward was created in 2022 and has no predecessor. The Gardens and the hospital were previously part of St Ann’s ward, which was profiled by this column in 2016 (Andrew’s Previews 2016, page 223); while the Harringay Warehouse District was covered by Seven Sisters ward. The 2021 census was taken on the basis of the new ward lines, and St Ann’s makes several England and Wales top 100 lists: 33rd for those born in European non-EU countries (6.2%), 34th for those born in Cyprus or Malta (1.7%), 43rd for the White Other ethnic group (28.6%), 63rd for those born in the EU-14 (12.5%), 69th for those born in the Americas or Caribbean (8.5%), 76th for the 30–44 age bracket (30.6%).
On the basis of the 2022 Haringey council elections, Hermitage and Gardens is a safe-Labour ward like the wards it was drawn from: Labour led the Greens here by 63–24 last year. The ward is part of the Tottenham parliamentary seat which has been represented since 2000 by David Lammy, the Shadow Foreign Secretary. Labour’s lock on all the council seats in Lammy’s constituency gives them a secure majority on Haringey council, which currently stands at 48 Labour plus this vacancy against 7 Lib Dems and an independent.
This by-election follows the death in April of Labour councillor Julie Davies, who topped the poll here in 2022 and had previously represented St Ann’s ward since 2018. Before joining the council Davies had worked in local schools as an English teacher and NUT branch secretary; at the time of her death she was the council’s cabinet member for communities and civic life.
Defending for Labour is Anna Lawton: away from politics she is a doula, a person who provides support and guidance to mothers giving birth. The Green Party have reselected Alfred Jahn who stood here last year. Also standing in this by-election are Paul Dennison for the Lib Dems, Chris Brosnan for the Conservatives and Amelia Allao for the Christian Peoples Alliance.
Parliamentary constituency: Tottenham
Parliamentary constituency (from next general election): Tottenham
ONS Travel to Work Area: London
Postcode districts: N4, N15
Amelia Allao (CPA)
Chris Brosnan (C)
Paul Dennison (LD)
Alfred Jahn (Grn)
Anna Lawton (Lab)
May 2022 result Lab 1318/1187 Grn 493/252 LD 145/145 C 129/127
Previous results in detail
Newington
Southwark council, London; caused by the resignation of Labour councillor Alice Macdonald.
For our other London by-election it’s time to go south of the river — yes, even at this time of night. Less than an hour’s walk east from the Palace of Westminster will take you to Newington, which lies on the Roman Road towards Chichester: this is now the A3 road, known here as Kennington Park Road or Newington Butts. The latter road was home to a theatre in Shakespeare’s day, and was the birthplace of the scientist Michael Faraday in 1791.
Newington Butts has changed out of all recognition since then. It’s located just to the south of the Elephant and Castle, which has been the scene of massive redevelopment in recent years. The Newington ward runs south from here between the A3 and the railway line as far as Kennington Park (which is over the borough boundary in Lambeth) and the Camberwell New Road. The open space of Pasley Park, at the centre of the ward, forms what’s left of the Surrey Zoological Gardens before they were redeveloped for housing in the 19th century. Kennington underground station, a major junction between the Charing Cross, City, Morden and Battersea Power Station branches of the Northern line, lies on the western boundary of Newington ward.
Newington makes a lot of the England and Wales census Top 100 lists. It ranks 19th for social renting (57.4% of households), 20th for residents born in Africa (15.1%), 27th for Black ethnicity (34.7%), 69th for households with no car (66.6%), and 78th for residents born in the Americans or Caribbean (8.2%). We can see here that this is a poor district of London.
It says a lot for just how densely this area was once built up that, until the Second World War, the modern Newington ward formed about half of a parliamentary seat: that constituency was known as Newington West from 1885 to 1918 and then as Southwark Central until 1950. The latter constituency was the first area represented in Parliament by Roy Jenkins, who won a by-election here in 1948 and described the seat as “postage-stamp sized”. The old Southwark metropolitan borough became hugely depopulated during the Second World War, partly as a result of wartime bombing, and as a result it was cut from three MPs to just one in 1950. The modern parliamentary seat covering almost all of this ward is Bermondsey and Old Southwark, whose MP Neil Coyle was recently reinstated to the Labour whip.
Coyle now has a large majority in his seat, which he gained from the Lib Dems in 2015; however, he won’t be representing this area after the next general election, because Newington ward is to be transferred into a new constituency based on the current seat of Vauxhall, with the name of Vauxhall and Camberwell Green. Labour also have a large majority on Southwark council, which stands at 51 Labour councillors plus this vacancy against 11 Lib Dems. Newington is very much part of that Labour majority: in last year’s London borough elections Labour had a 63–15 lead over the Green Party here.
The current boundaries of Newington ward date from 2018, so we can also turn to something which used to be a staple of this column in previewing London wards: the ward-level breakdown from the 2021 London Mayor and Assembly elections. With the caveat that these figures exclude postal voters because those were tallied at borough level, we see that Labour’s Sadiq Khan carried Newington ward with 51% of the first preferences, against 20% for the Conservatives’ newly-ennobled Shaun Bailey and 12% for the Greens’ Siân Berry; the London Members ballot, which had a rather wider choice of parties than you tend to get in council elections, gave 52% to Labour, 15% to the Greens and 13% to the Conservatives. As we saw earlier in Haringey, most London boroughs had ward boundary changes in 2022 which makes the GLA results from the previous year non-comparable; as we saw earlier in Bedford, next year’s London mayoral election will be first-past-the-post, so it seems doubtful that the GLA’s returning officer will keep the electronic counting system which has been used to handle the transfer of preferences in the previous six mayor and assembly elections. If a decision is indeed made to start hand-counting London’s mayor and assembly votes, then it is unlikely that we will get a ward-level breakdown of the figures in 2024 and future elections — which would be a loss for psephology. Mind, as I said above, the Association of Electoral Administrators has better things to worry about.
The outgoing Labour councillor here is Alice Macdonald, who was previously a Southwark cabinet member for equalities, neighbourhoods and leisure. She is originally from Norfolk, where her mother Irene was once leader of King’s Lynn and West Norfolk council. Last year Alice Macdonald was selected as the prospective Labour parliamentary candidate for the key marginal seat of Norwich North, and she has now stood down from Southwark council to concentrate on her parliamentary campaign in Norfolk.
Defending for Labour is Youcef Hassaine; he is originally from Birmingham, and works in diversity and inclusion. The Greens have gone for youth in selecting 19-year-old Ruben Buendia, who came to south London in 2018 from his native Canary Islands; he is a student and teaching assistant. Also standing are Vikas Aggarwal for the Lib Dems and Lewis Jones for the Conservatives.
Parliamentary constituency: Bermondsey and Old Southwark (most), Camberwell and Peckham (small part)
Parliamentary constituency (from next general election): Vauxhall and Camberwell Green
ONS Travel to Work Area: London
Postcode districts: SE5, SE11, SE17
Vikas Aggarwal (LD)
Ruben Buendia (Grn)
Youcef Hassaine (Lab)
Lewis Jones (C)
May 2022 result Lab 2051/2011/1955 Grn 494/453/371 LD 408/368/350 C 311/297/233
May 2018 result Lab 2137/2082/1997 LD 457/420/406 Grn 429/354/337 C 275/257/243
May 2021 GLA results (excludes postal voters)
Mayor: Lab 1209 C 482 Grn 281 LD 95 Omilana 44 Reclaim 38 London Real 31 Count Binface 28 Let London Live 27 Women’s Equality 23 SDP 15 Heritage 15 UKIP 13 Obunge 13 Rejoin EU 12 Animal Welfare 12 Burning Pink 11 Farah London 11 Fosh 9 Renew 2
London Members: Lab 1281 Grn 378 C 328 LD 165 Women’s Equality 41 CPA 40 Animal Welfare 34 Rejoin EU 29 UKIP 25 Let London Live 22 Reform UK 22 TUSC 22 Heritage 20 London Real 20 SDP 14 Communist 8 Londonpendence 7 National Liberal 3
Previous results in detail
Sherborne West
Dorset council; caused by the resignation of Liberal Democrat councillor Matt Hall.
And now for something completely different, as we come to what the Dorset tourist board unambiguously describes as “a picture perfect town” and “without doubt one of the most beautiful towns in England”. Clearly I’m going to have to put this on the list of places that I need to visit after writing about them in the Previews.
We’ve come to Sherborne, a market town in northern Dorset located a few miles to the east of Yeovil, on the railway line from Salisbury to Exeter. It was once a city because Sherborne had a bishop from 705 until 1075, when the see was moved to Old Sarum and the church became a Benedictine monastery. In pre-Conquest times the town had major associations with the Wessex royal family: the first Bishop of Sherborne, St Aldhelm, was the grandson of a king of Wessex; King Æthelbald and his brother King Æthelberht were both buried in Sherborne in the 860s; and their younger brother Alfred the Great moved Wessex’ seat of government here for a time after the Danes had sacked Winchester.
The church of Sherborne Abbey substantially survives as the local parish church, while after the dissolution of the monasteries many of the old monastic buildings were taken over by one of the UK’s oldest educational institutions. Sherborne School was originally founded in 705 by St Aldhelm and was refounded in 1550 by Edward VI; it is one of four remaining boys’ full boarding schools in the UK, the other three being Eton, Harrow and Radley. (Winchester used to be in this category until it started admitting girls in this academic year.) The list of notable Old Shirburnians is a long one as you might expect: in politics I’ll highlight two current heads of state (the Emir of Qatar and the King of Swaziland), the political journalists Tom Bradby and Peter Oborne, and Boris Johnson’s father Stanley. The presence of Sherborne School and its sister institution, Sherborne School for Girls, means that Sherborne West ward ranks 12th in England and Wales for residents aged 16 or 17 (7.0% of the population) and 13th for those educated to GCSE or equivalent level but not (yet) higher (19.1%).
Sherborne returns two members of the modern Dorset council, which was created in 2019 when the district councils underneath it were abolished. Dorset council has only had one ordinary election to date: it’s transitioning to the county council election cycle, so the councillors elected in May 2019 had a five-year term as will the winners of the next Dorset council election in May 2024. This makes Dorset the only remaining UK council whose members were last elected in the Theresa May era.
The current boundaries of Sherborne West ward were drawn up in 2015 when it was a ward of the former West Dorset council, then returning two councillors. In 2015 it split its two seats between the Lib Dems and the Conservatives. Unitarisation in 2019 reduced the ward to one councillor and meant that the electors had to make a choice; in the end the Liberal Democrat district councillor Matt Hall was elected to the new council with a 54–38 margin over the Conservatives. As stated, there have been no local elections here since.
Since his election in 2019 Hall has qualified as a planning officer, and he has moved to Devon for work. In the May 2023 local elections he was elected to East Devon council as a Liberal Democrat councillor for Exmouth Withycombe Raleigh ward; Hall has stood down from Dorset council to focus on his new democratic duties in East Devon. On his resignation he was quoted in the local press as being elected unexpectedly having “agreed to stand as a paper candidate in Exmouth”, which seems implausible given that at the previous East Devon elections in 2019 the Lib Dems had won both seats in Exmouth Withycombe Raleigh unopposed; Hall must have known that there was a good chance he was going to win election to his new council, as he duly did.
Defending for the Liberal Democrats is Richard Crabb, a Sherborne town councillor who runs a telecoms company. The Conservatives have reselected Becky Burns, who was the runner-up here in 2019. Also standing is Nick Boothroyd for Labour.
Parliamentary constituency: West Dorset
Parliamentary constituency (from next general election): West Dorset
ONS Travel to Work Area: Yeovil
Postcode district: DT9
Nick Boothroyd (Lab)
Becky Burns (C)
Richard Crabb (LD)
May 2019 result LD 759 C 538 Grn 119
May 2015 West Dorset council result LD 927/792 C 881/831 UKIP 410
Previous results in detail
East Cliff and Springbourne
Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole council, Dorset; caused by the resignation of Labour councillor Martin Bedford.
Saving the best till last, let’s finish with perhaps the most intriguing by-election of the week. It’s June and the weather’s warm so we’ve come to the seaside: specifically, to Bournemouth, which has grown from nothing in 1810 to become the largest town in Dorset. The East Cliff and Springbourne ward lies about a mile to the east of the town centre: the East Cliff overlooks Bournemouth’s wide and sandy beach, while Springbourne is a built-up area along the main road and railway line out of town towards London. Bournemouth railway station, where intercity trains from London and Manchester arrive in the town, is within the boundary of this ward.
The seaside and tourism legacy means that East Cliff and Springbourne ward just breaks into the top 100 wards in England and Wales for households which are privately rented (49.4%). It has an unusually diverse population for south-west England, with only 65.5% of residents being born in the UK.
Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole form the only major urban conurbation in England which has never returned a Labour MP, but the local constituency of Bournemouth East (represented since 2005 by the Defence select committee chair Tobias Ellwood) is on Labour’s target list for next time round. The three towns were merged into one council in 2019 and it’s fair to say that this move has not produced the Conservative-majority council the Tories might have expected. In fact, following the 2023 local elections, and a scandal over beach huts (of which there are quite a lot in this ward), the Tories are now in a rather poor second place on the council. The latest composition has the Lib Dems as the largest party on 28 seats; the Conservatives have 12 councillors left, Labour are on 10 plus this vacancy, the Christchurch Independents 8, various Poole localists 7, the Greens 5 and independents 5. A return of 11 Labour councillors is pretty impressive, given that eight years ago Labour didn’t win a single seat on any of the former Bournemouth, Christchurch or Poole councils. The council is now run by the “Three Towns Alliance”, a coalition of the Lib Dems and localist councillors from all three towns.
At local level Bournemouth is currently the strongest of the three towns for the Conservatives, and East Cliff and Springbourne returned a full slate of Conservative councillors at every election from 2003 to 2019. This didn’t last, and the ward was very close three ways in May: Labour topped the poll with 34% and gained two seats, the Cosnervatives finished second on 29% and held one seat, the Green Party finished third also on 29% and won nothing, with their lead candidate finishing as runner-up twelve votes behind the lead Conservative. Martin Bedford was elected as a Labour councillor at the top of the poll.
One wonders whether newly-elected councillor Bedford ever expected to win. He’s a Unison officer who has worked for the Probation Service for some years, and he previously had jobs on the railway and as a postman. Martin Bedford tendered his resignation from the council on 10th May, just five days after his election, citing ongoing health issues for his decision to stand down.
This creates a difficult defence for Labour in a three-way marginal ward. Their defending candidate is Declan Stones, who was the party’s unsuccessful candidate here in May; he works as a medical insurance broker. The Conservative candidate is David Kelsey, the mayor of Bournemouth in 2021–22, who represented this ward from 2007 until losing his seat here in May. In this Pride month, we should record that in 1982 Kelsey spent six months in a military prison before being kicked out of the Army and stripped of his Northern Ireland service medal for homosexuality; the court-martial and resulting criminal record meant that when he moved to Bournemouth he was unable to get a police job. It took until 2021 for a change in policy at the Ministry of Defence to mean that Kelsey got his medal back. The Green Party’s Sara Armstrong is back for another go after finishing twelve votes short of winning a seat here last month. Completing the ballot paper is Paul Radcliffe for the Lib Dems.
Parliamentary constituency: Bournemouth East
Parliamentary constituency (from next general election): Bournemouth East
ONS Travel to Work Area: Bournemouth
Postcode districts: BH1, BH2, BH5, BH7, BH8
Sara Armstrong (Grn)
David Kelsey (C)
Paul Radcliffe (LD)
Declan Stones (Lab)
May 2023 result Lab 965/881/757 C 842/797/772 Grn 830/666/658 LD 239/238/214
May 2019 result C 1016/971/861 Lab 715/691/663 Grn 639 LD 488/451/447 Ind 444
Previous results in detail
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
