Previewing the four council by-elections of 18th July 2024
“All the right votes, but not necessarily in the right order”
Four by-elections on 18th July 2024:
Beckton; and
Little Ilford
Newham council, London; caused respectively by the resignations of Labour councillors James Asser and Elizabeth Booker.
Well. Things Have Happened since the last edition of Andrew’s Previews two weeks ago. We now have a Labour government in place under Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, with a massive majority and the unfettered power that the Westminster political system provides. The Conservatives, after fourteen years in government, find themselves shattered and irrelevant. The Liberal Democrats are back as the third party in Parliament after nine years in the wilderness, the Scottish National Party now look to be in serious political trouble ahead of the 2026 Holyrood elections, Reform UK broke through into the Commons, the Green Party gained all their target seats, Plaid Cymru dominated the most Welsh-speaking constituencies, and Northern Ireland did its own thing as it always does.
Those of you who were following Britain Elects’ output over the last few years will have seen all the clues to this result even if you didn’t realise it at the time. Our genial host Ben Walker staked his reputation on his Britain Predicts model, to the extent that he suffered the equivalent of the Agony of Gethsemane on the eve of polling as his map laid out predictions that looked unbelievable even to him. But after the dust had settled and the unbelievable had happened, Britain Predicts was closer to the final seat tally than any other model with the sole exception of the Exit Poll — which, it has to be said, had a bit of an advantage. Ben can be very proud of himself.
And if you were reading the rather less scientific output of Andrew’s Previews, you will have seen some other clues to the final result. My roundups of the 2022, 2023 and 2024 local elections all pointed out just how badly the Conservatives were performing, particularly in the Home Counties — where they lost seats by the bucketload. The Scottish National Party have now gone well over a year without winning a single local by-election — and they lost seats by the bucketload. This column covered local by-election gains for the Green Party in all sorts of places — including in their target seats of Bristol Central and Waveney Valley, both of which were gained. Those Parliamentary Specials over the last year or two which saw massive swings to Labour were predictive. Even if you didn’t recognise them or chose to ignore them, all the clues were there.
With one glaring exception. The main aspect of the 2024 general election which this column couldn’t get a handle on was the level and pattern of support for Reform UK, because that is a party which has no ground game to speak of. You need a grassroots organisation in order to do well in local elections, and Reform doesn’t have anything like that. Reform UK’s first ever local by-election win came on the undercard of the 2024 general election in the East Riding, and they beat the Conservatives in four of the five by-elections (out of 60) which they contested.
All this was going on at the same time as Labour was losing enough of its Muslim vote to actually cost the party seats. The biggest indication that this was coming was, of course, the débâcle of the Labour defence of the Rochdale by-election back in March. In May’s local elections the party lost a lot of seats in Muslim wards in the Pennine towns, whether to independents campaigning for Gaza or indeed to anyone else who looked plausible, and Labour went on to lose two such constituencies — Blackburn, and Dewsbury and Batley — to independent candidates in the general election. The party’s worst performance of all came in the city of Leicester, where Leicester South was lost to an independent candidate and Leicester East to the Conservatives; this column has been covering local by-elections in Leicester for some years now which have been excellent for the Conservatives and worse than dire for Labour. Even in the many seats with a significant Muslim population which returned Labour MPs, majorities were sharply down.
Let’s take as a case study the London Borough of Newham, which has seen significant population growth over the first quarter of this century and accordingly went up from two MPs to two-and-a-half at this election. In the new cross-border seat of Stratford and Bow the Labour vote was down from a notional 70% to 44% with the Greens second; in West Ham and Beckton down from 71% to 45% with a localist independent candidate second; and in East Ham long-serving Labour MP Stephen Timms — whose political career started when he won a 1984 by-election to Newham council in Little Ilford ward, gaining his seat from the Liberals — was re-elected with a vote share down from 78% to 52% with a localist independent in second.
For much of this century Newham council was 100% Labour councillors, but the redwash was broken in 2022 when the Green Party gained the brand-new (in every sense) ward of Stratford Olympic Park. In 2023 Labour went on to lose two by-elections to localist and/or Gaza independent candidates, in Boleyn ward and Plaistow North ward; the Plaistow North by-election winner, Sophia Naqvi, was the second-placed independent in West Ham and Beckton two weeks ago. Again, readers of this column will have seen (even if they did not heed) the warning signs for some time about how Labour are performing in their safest areas. There were two undercard by-elections in Newham two weeks ago, both of which were Labour holds with the Newham Independents — now organised and registered as a political party — in a respectable second place.
The second-placed independent in East Ham two weeks ago was Tahir Mirza, who contested the 2022 Newham council elections as an independent candidate for Little Ilford ward and finished in a rather distant second place behind the Labour slate: the 2022 shares of the vote were 52% for Labour, 16% for Mirza and 12% for the Liberal Democrats. Little Ilford ward lies directly opposite Ilford on the west side of the River Roding and the North Circular Road. Its southern section is mostly Victorian and Edwardian terraces along Little Ilford Road as far as the eye can see, plus an estate of high-rise tower blocks next to the Romford Road and the North Circular.
The housing comes to an end at the Great Eastern railway line, whose local trains are now a branch of the Elizabeth Line. There is no Elizabeth Line station within Little Ilford ward, but there is a massive building next to the railway which houses the Tunnelling and Underground Construction Academy, a legacy of the Crossrail construction which continues to train the next generation of tunnel engineers. It’s a boring job, but someone’s got to do it.
Beyond the railway is the open space of the City of London Cemetery and Crematorium, a massive necropolis run by the City Corporation where many people who were originally buried in the City’s churches have been reinterred: reputedly among their number is the seventeenth-century scientist Robert Hooke, whose original grave in St Helen’s Bishopsgate has been lost. With nearly a million people having been laid to rest here since the cemetery opened for business in 1856, we can clearly see that Little Ilford is a ward where the dead outnumber the living. Hopefully Newham council and/or the City Corporation have a contingency plan in place for when the zombie apocalypse arrives.
Little Ilford is a ward which is majority-Asian (57%) and majority-Muslim (52%), with other religions thrown in for good measure: a Sikh gurdwara lurks among the terraces in the south of the ward, the impressive Sri Murugan temple — serving London’s Tamil Hindu community — is just outside the ward boundary, and the parish church of St Mary the Virgin has been here since the twelfth century when this was all fields. The ward makes the top 100 in England and Wales for the two categories above and also for those born in the Middle East or Asia (29.5%), those looking after home or family (13.1%) and those who have never worked or are long-term unemployed (19.5%). This is exactly the sort of demographic which Labour are struggling with right now, and when Labour councillor Elizabeth Booker handed in her resignation the party will no doubt have wanted to time this by-election for the undercard of the general election; but, for whatever reason, the deadline for organising that was missed.
As happened with our other by-election today in Beckton ward, a mile or two to the south beyond East Ham town centre. This is the first entry in what will become a theme of this column for the rest of this year, because the outgoing councillor is James Asser who was elected two weeks ago as the Labour MP for West Ham and Beckton. Asser has represented Beckton ward since 2018, and he was the chairman of Labour’s National Executive Committee before getting the gig as a Labour parliamentary candidate at the last moment.
Beckton is a very different area from Little Ilford, because this low-lying ground by the Thames was once a centre of heavy industry. The story really begins in the 1860s when Joseph Bazalgette built a network of deep-level sewers for London, with those north of the Thames all converging on Beckton where they feed what is claimed to be Europe’s largest sewage works. Unlike the bad old days, Thames Water don’t let all the wastewater go straight into the river. Next to this was Europe’s largest gasworks, erected in the 1860s by the Gas Light and Coke Company. Its governor, Simon Beck, was the Beck after whom Beckton was named.
Beckton Gas Works closed in 1969, and after a time as a decaying film set (amazingly, most of the Vietnam War scenes of Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket were filmed here) the area has been comprehensively redeveloped under the auspices of the London Docklands Development Corporation, resulting in the mostly rather nice-looking private 1980s/1990s housing that dominates the ward and which, some decades on from its construction, is slowly subsiding into the soft ground. The only vestige of the gasworks that still exists is a large spoil heap, the so-called “Beckton Alp”, which was once used as a dry ski slope. Cycle paths have been built on top of the sewers, while much of the former gasworks site has been turned into out-of-town retail parks and the major depot for the Docklands Light Railway, whose Beckton, Gallions Reach, Cyprus and Beckton Park stations all lie within the ward. (The curious name of Cyprus station comes from fact that the local housing was first built at the time that Britain nabbed Cyprus off the Ottoman Empire.)
Those stations aren’t necessarily near the ward’s housing, and Beckton’s location close to the A13 and A406 arterial roads results in an unusually high dependence on cars for an area within the North Circular. Beckton Park, thanks to its location in the middle of a roundabout with little in its immediate catchment area, has the dubious distinction of being the least-used station on the Docklands Light Railway.
Beckton also has a rather different demographic from Little Ilford, having been a centre for immigration from Eastern Europe in recent years. It ranks in the top 20 wards in England and Wales for those working in the construction sector (16.4%), in the top 40 for those born in Bulgaria or Romania (8.9%), and in the top 100 for those born in the 2004 eastern EU expansion countries (10.1%) and for the White Other ethnic group (25.5%). In the 2022 local elections there was no independent candidate here, and the Labour slate won with 48% of the vote against 30% for the Green Party and 15% for the Conservatives. The Green Party had a go at Beckton in that election, after the council controversially closed the Newham City Farm just outside the ward boundary — a decision which James Asser gave a full-throated defence of at the time.
The Labour nomination for the Beckton by-election has gone to Blossom Young — “living and loving East London”, according to her Twitter — who is fighting her first election campaign. The Green candidate is listed on the local party’s website as Justine Levoir but on the ballot paper as Levoir Justine, so presumably whoever filled her nomination papers in didn’t read the instructions: she is described as a local resident and community campaigner. The Tories’ Maria Clifford is running a petition to reopen the Newham City Farm. Completing the Beckton ballot paper are two candidates from parties which didn’t stand here in 2022, Shahzad Abbasi of the Newham Independents and James Alan-Rumsby for the Lib Dems.
We have a six-strong ballot in Little Ilford ward. The defending Labour candidate ia Akhtarul Alam, who has appeared in this column before: he was the defending Labour candidate who lost the Plaistow North by-election to Sophia Naqvi last November. Hoping to make it two losses from two for Alam is the Newham Independents candidate Tahir Mirza, who was runner-up in this ward two years ago and runner-up in the East Ham constituency two weeks ago; Mirza is a former Momentum figure who has previously chaired the East Ham branch of the Labour party. Another returning candidate is the Lib Dems’ Akm Mahibur Rahman, who was born in Bangladesh and whose statement on the Newham Lib Dems website is in both English and Bengali. Completing the ballot paper are Mohamadu Faheem for the Conservatives, Joe Oteng for the Green Party and independent candidate Vijay Parthiban, who is an educational consultant; he appears to be the only candidate for this by-election to be profiled by the Britain Tamil News YouTube channel.
Beckton
Parliamentary constituency: West Ham and Beckton
London Assembly constituency: City and East
ONS Travel to Work Area: London
Postcode districts: E6, E16, IG11
Shahzad Abbasi (Newham Ind)
James Alan-Rumsby (LD)
Maria Clifford (C)
Levoir Justine (Grn)
Blossom Young (Lab)
May 2022 result Lab 1386/1263/1103 Grn 873/826/797 C 423/400/363 CPA 182/123/115
Previous results in detail
Little Ilford
Parliamentary constituency: East Ham
London Assembly constituency: City and East
ONS Travel to Work Area: London
Postcode district: E12
Akhtarul Alam (Lab)
Mohamadu Faheem (C)
Tahir Mirza (Newham Ind)
Joe Oteng (Grn)
Vijay Parthiban (Ind)
Akm Mahibur Rahman (LD)
May 2022 result Lab 2200/2159/2089 Ind 667 LD 512/384 C 392/373/356 Grn 301/291/150 CPA 130/123/120
Previous results in detail
Marston
Oxford council; caused by the resignation of Green Party councillor Alistair Morris.
We continue the theme of Labour having trouble on its left flank by travelling to Oxford. Or not, as the case may be. Today’s remaining English by-election is in Marston ward, which covers two areas north-east of Oxford city centre to the east of the River Cherwell: the village of Marston itself just inside the city’s ring road, and the suburbia of New Marston to its south. Also here is quite a lot of open space immediately over the river from the University Parks, and a number of Oxford colleges have their sports grounds in this ward. Some of this open space forms the New Marston Meadows Site of Special Scientific Interest, with these low-lying grazing meadows on the Cherwell floodplain being noted for their variety of unusual and/or scarce plants.
Much of this ward forms the parish of Old Marston, which was incorporated into the city of Oxford as late as 1991 having previously been part of South Oxfordshire district. Oxford’s 1991 boundary changes brought in the parishes of Littlemore in the south of the city, Marston to the north, and Risinghurst and Sandhills to the east; together with other boundary changes, this increased Oxford’s population by around 14,000 and forced the creation of two new city wards. Littlemore became a ward of its own, while Old Marston and Risinghurst were combined into a new ward which, bizarrely, consisted of three detached parts: the two parishes are some distance away from each other, and earlier expansion of the city had left Risinghurst and Sandhills parish divided into two parts of its own.
That bizarre ward was replaced in 2002 by the present Marston ward, which survived a boundary review in 2021 unchanged. Marston returns two members of Oxford city council, and since 2002 one of them has been Labour former Lord Mayor Mary Clarkson who is apparently notable enough for a Wikipedia page. The other Marston seat has been more volatile: it went to Labour in 2002, the Lib Dems in 2004, Labour in 2008, independent candidate Mick Haines in 2012, 2016 and 2021, and to the Greens in 2022 after Haines retired.
The Greens couldn’t win the second seat in Marston ward in May as Labour’s Mary Clarkson was re-elected for her eighth term of office, polling 45% against 37% for the Greens and 15% for the Conservatives. Not a bad performance for Oxford Labour who generally did not have a good time in May’s city elections, with the party suffering defections on its left flank over Gaza (the Oxford Labour group split before the election, sending the council into No Overall Control) and losing four seats to the Independent Oxford Alliance (a localist group which is particularly unhappy about proposed “traffic filters” which are intended to address Oxford’s traffic problems by shifting as much traffic as possible onto the ring road). Oxford Labour currently run the city as a minority with 20 seats, against 11 independent councillors (who are split into four council groups), 9 Lib Dems, and 7 Greens plus this vacancy.
Following their local success the Independent Oxford Alliance subsequently contested the Oxford East constituency in July’s general election: they finished in fifth place, polled 6% and saved their deposit. The Oxford East seat has included Marston since 1983 — before Marston was part of the city proper. Two weeks ago Oxford East remained as a safe Labour seat, returning Anneliese Dodds for her third term of office; Dodds had been shadow chancellor in Starmer’s first shadow cabinet, but her first government job is at junior ministerial level with the development, women and equalities portfolios. The next scheduled poll in Marston after this by-election will be the May 2025 Oxfordshire county council elections, in which Marston and Northway is a safe Labour division.
Marston, on the other hand, is clearly a marginal ward. The Green Party are defending this by-election following the resignation of Alistair Morris last month on health grounds, and their defending candidate Kate Robinson is a librarian and chair of Marston Community Gardening. She was the Green candidate here in May. Labour have selected Charlotte Vinnicombe, who was their losing candidate here in 2022: Vinnicombe is an Old Marston parish councillor, and she is head of administration and finance at the University of Oxford Faculty of Law. Another Old Marston parish councillor back for another go at getting onto the city council is the parish council chairman Duncan Hatfield, who works as an administrator for a taxi firm; Hatfield is the ward’s regular Conservative candidate, and he has previously contested Marston ward eight times on these boundaries. The Independent Oxford Alliance didn’t stand here in May but they are having a go this time with tax advisor Nasreen Majeed; she completes the ballot paper along with Kathy Norman of the Lib Dems.
Parliamentary constituency: Oxford East
Oxfordshire county council division: Marston and Northway
ONS Travel to Work Area: Oxford
Postcode districts: OX2, OX3
Duncan Hatfield (C)
Nasreen Majeed (Ind Oxford Alliance)
Kathy Norman (LD)
Kate Robinson (Grn)
Charlotte Vinnicombe (Lab)
May 2024 result Lab 868 Grn 718 C 288 LD 69
May 2022 result Grn 1085 Lab 839 C 309 LD 74
May 2021 result Lab 1059/461 Ind 921 Grn 831/278 C 411 LD 123/82
Previous results in detail
Kintyre and the Islands
Argyll and Bute council, Scotland; caused by the death of Liberal Democrat councillor Robin Currie.
We finish up in one of the few remaining areas of Scotland represented in the Commons by the Scottish National Party. Since the SNP’s parliamentary delegation have been completely driven out of the Borders and the Central Belt, that means we must be in the Highlands and Islands.
Specifically, we’re going to Islay. The southernmost and one of the largest of the islands which make up the Inner Hebrides, Islay covers an area of 620 square kilometres and is home to over 3,000 people; the notice of poll for this by-election gives an electorate for Islay’s five polling districts of 2,670, almost exactly 50% of the electorate for the Kintyre and the Islands ward. Islay wasn’t fully incorporated into Scotland until the fifteenth century; before then it was ruled by (working backwards in time) the Lords of the Isles, the kingdom of Norway and the kingdom of Dál Riata. The latter was a Gaelic kingdom, and the Gaelic language is still widely spoken on the island today.
Islay’s main export today is Scotch whisky, of which the island is a major centre with nine distilleries currently active. The oldest of these is Bowmore, which is first recorded in 1779. Most of the major drinks companies have interests in Islay distillers: Bowmore and Laphroaig are owned by the Japanese brewers Suntory, the multinational Diageo controls Caol Ila and Lagavulin, and Ardbeg is in the hands of the French luxury goods company Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy. Islay’s newest and smallest distillery, Kilchoman, has to date escaped the attention of the multinationals and it is still independently owned.
The island has left its mark on politics. Islay natives who have become prominent on the national or international stage include the Liberal Democrat MP Alistair Carmichael, the BBC Scotland political editor Glenn Campbell and the NATO secretary-general George Robertson. Robertson sits in the House of Lords with the title Lord Robertson of Port Ellen, a reference to Islay’s largest village. Port Ellen was founded in the early nineteenth century by the Laird of Islay and MP for Argyll Walter Campbell, who named it after his first wife Eleanor. Its polling station has 927 electors on the roll.
The largest single settlement of the ward is, however, on the mainland. Tarbert is a name which occurs commonly in the Highlands for settlements on an isthmus; this particular Tarbert lies on the narrow strip of land between West Loch Tarbert to the west and Loch Fyne to the east, linking Knapdale to the north with the Kintyre peninsula to the south. Looking out over Loch Fyne, Tarbert was once a port supporting a thriving herring industry, and it is still noted for its seafood. The mainland accounts for 42% of the electorate of Kintyre and the Islands ward, about half of whom live in Tarbert.
There are three other inhabited islands in this ward which have polling stations, although none of them have more than 200 electors. Colonsay is located north of Islay; Gigha lies just off the west coast of Kintyre; and Jura is a large, mountainous and sparsely-populated island north-east of Islay. The novelist George Orwell had a house on Jura, and his book Nineteen Eighty-Four was completed there. In the Scottish independence referendum ten years ago Jura reportedly had a 100% turnout.
This ward elects three Argyll and Bute councillors and has had unchanged boundaries since proportional representation was brought in for Scottish local elections in 2007. All of the four ordinary elections to date have returned an SNP candidate and Robin Currie for the Lib Dems, although Currie started in fourth place in 2012 and needed transfers from Labour to overtake the Conservatives’ Alastair Redman. The other seat went to independent John McAlpine in 2007 and 2012, and to Redman for the Conservatives in 2017.
The most recent Scottish local elections were in May 2022, when the new SNP candidate Dougie McFadzean topped the poll with 30% of the vote and was elected on the first count. John McAlpine started with 24% and had no problem getting the transfers to reach the 25% required to get back on the council. That left the final seat between Currie for the Lib Dems and Redman, who by now had left the Conservatives and was seeking re-election as an independent. Currie and Redman started the count in a tie for third place on 474 votes each, 16% of the vote; the transfers decisively broke in favour of Currie who ended up winning the final seat by 670 votes to 623.
Alistair Redman’s exile from the council proved to be short-lived. Independent councillor John McAlpine died shortly after his election, and Redman — again standing as an independent candidate — won the resulting by-election in September 2022. The first preferences split 33% to Redman, 29% to the SNP, 15% to the Lib Dems and 11% to the Conservatives; after transfers Redman defeated the SNP by 54–46.
The voters of Kintyre and the Islands are now being called out again following the sudden death of Liberal Democrat councillor Robin Currie in May. Currie had been in local government for almost 40 years; he was the last remaining member of the first modern Argyll and Bute council elected in 1996, and he started his local government career on the old Argyll and Bute District Council in 1988 as a councillor for northern Islay and Jura. There aren’t many councillors left now from Scottish local government before the the 1996 reorganisation; indeed there aren’t many Liberal Democrat councillors left now who were originally elected under the old Social and Liberal Democrat name. Robin Currie’s service peaked in 2020 when he became leader of Argyll and Bute council at the head of a coalition administration of Conservative, Lib Dem and independent councillors.
Argyll and Bute council has been rather politically unstable in recent years, and the current council term has been no different in that regard. The 2022 elections returned returned 12 SNP councillors, 10 Conservatives, 7 independents, 5 Lib Dems and one seat each for Labour and the Greens. The ruling coalition continued in office, but it fell in April 2024 in dramatic fashion after a proposed 10% rise in council tax led to a challenge from the opposition. Robin Currie was challenged for the council leadership by SNP councillor Jim Lynch; the vote was tied, lots were drawn, and on the cut of the cards Currie was deposed and Lynch became leader of the council. The SNP-led administration then froze Argyll and Bute’s council tax. Currie unexpectedly died a month later.
This recent SNP takeover of the council reflects that the Nationalists represent this area in both Parliaments. Two weeks ago, the SNP’s Brendan O’Hara was re-elected for a fourth Commons term in the redrawn seat of Argyll, Bute and South Lochaber which takes in the whole of the council area. He was the SNP’s foreign affairs spokesman going into the last general election. The Argyll and Bute parliamentary seat (which is smaller than the council area, excluding Helensburgh) has been in SNP hands since 2007; the current constituency MSP Jenni Minto was first elected in 2021 and she is a minister in John Swinney’s administration, with responsibility for public health and women’s health.
The Lib Dems have it all to do to defend this Kintyre and the Isles by-election, having finished in a tie for third place at the May 2022 ordinary election and in third at the September 2022 by-election. Their defending candidate is Douglas Macdonald. There is one independent candidate standing who will be a familiar figure to Andrew’s Previews readers: Donald Kelly was a long-serving councillor who had a massive personal vote in the South Kintyre ward, based on Campbeltown to the south, until he resigned from Argyll and Bute council last year. (The resulting South Kintyre by-election was won by his daughter.) Also seeking to return to the council is the SNP candidate Anne Horn, who represented this ward from 2007 until 2022 when she stood down; she gives an address in Tarbert. The Conservative nomination has gone to Elizabeth Redman, who lives on Islay; she is the daughter of the ward’s independent councillor and 2022 by-election winner Alistair Redman. Completing a ballot paper of five candidates is Alan McManus of the Freedom Alliance, who gives an address in faraway East Dunbartonshire. This is a Scottish local by-election, so Votes at 16 and the Alternative Vote apply here.
Westminster constituency: Argyll and Bute
Holyrood constituency: Argyll and Bute
ONS Travel to Work Area: Mull and Islay (islands), Lochgilphead (mainland)
Postcode districts: PA28, PA29, PA41, PA42, PA43, PA44, PA45, PA46, PA47, PA48, PA49, PA60, PA61
Anne Horn (SNP)
Donald Kelly (Ind)
Douglas Macdonald (LD)
Alan McManus (Freedom Alliance)
Elizabeth Redman (C)
May 2022 first preferences SNP 863 Ind 680 LD 474 Ind 474 C 276 Lab 122
May 2017 first preferences SNP 821 C 648 LD 626 Ind 411 Lab 160 Grn 134
May 2012 first preferences SNP 610 Ind 584 C 553 LD 540 Lab 225 Grn 73 Ind 19
May 2007 first preferences LD 1131 Ind 608 SNP 482 Ind 342 C 300 Lab 219 Ind 190
Previous results in detail
Final thoughts
We’re exactly 52 weeks on from the July 2023 parliamentary by-elections in Selby and Ainsty, Somerton and Frome, and Uxbridge and South Ruislip. In the Preview for those polls your columnist compared Boris Johnson to the Biblical king Belshazzar of Babylon, because of his provocative and offensive behaviour in office, his failure to understand the writing on the wall, and the way in which he was deposed by his own supporters. It was Johnson’s behaviour in office that sowed the seeds for the Conservatives’ collective failure in this month’s general election; two weeks ago the electorate weighed the party and its record in the balance, and found them both wanting. In that election night the government of Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak was dramatically removed, and its kingdom divided.
By coincidence, last weekend your columnist was at a performance of William Walton’s cantata Belshazzar’s Feast in which that old story from the Book of Daniel is dramatically told. A year ago I gave you the section of that cantata which described the feast itself; this time I’ll give you the hymn of praise which closes the piece. If you voted Labour two weeks ago, or if you didn’t vote Labour but you are nevertheless content with the outcome of the general election, then this is for you. Turn up the volume to the maximum, and damn what the neighbours think.
“Then sing aloud to God our strength,
Make a joyful noise unto the God of Jacob,
For Babylon the Great is fallen. Alleluia!”
There will now be a lull in by-elections after our recent surfeit of them, so Andrew’s Previews is going to take a summer holiday for a few weeks. Normal service will resume in four weeks’ time on 15th August, and with all those brand new MPs in the Commons — many of whom are councillors, and some of whom have already resigned their council seats — it looks likely that by-election watchers will have a busy autumn ahead of us. Stay tuned.
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
