Previewing the seven council by-elections of 3rd November 2022
“All the right votes, but not necessarily in the right order”
There are seven by-elections, for eight seats, on 3rd Novemnber 2022, with four Conservative defences, three Lib Dem defences and a wildcard. We have a lot to get through, so let’s start with the wildcard:
Bridge and Bridge Without
City of London Corporation; caused by the election of Common Councilman Timothy Levene as an Alderman.
2022 has been a bumper year for elections in the City of London. This is partially due to a backlog caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, which meant that elections for the City’s Aldermen were suspended for two years. That backlog has now cleared, but it has created knock-on effects with a number of members of the City’s Court of Common Council being elevated to the Aldermanic bench to replace retiring Aldermen.
The City has still not got to the bottom of the resulting vacancy list, which includes this by-election. We’ve come to London’s waterfront to consider the Bridge and Bridge Without ward. This ward takes in Pudding Lane, the street where the Great Fire of London broke out in the summer of 1666, together with the Monument to that fire. The north-east corner of the ward is 20 Fenchurch Street, the skyscraper known as the Walkie Talkie; the south-west corner is Fishmongers Hall, home to the Worshipful Company of Fishmongers and the scene of an Islamic terrorist stabbing in 2019. Deep underneath the ward is what remains of the City’s first tube railway station: King William Street station, the original northern terminus of what is now the City branch of the Northern Line, operated from 1890 to 1900, and its platform tunnel recently saw use as a contractors’ site during the upgrade of the Bank underground station.
The polling station for this ward is one of the first of the many London churches to go up in the Great Fire. As a result St Magnus the Martyr is one of the many Christopher Wren churches in the City, rebuilt on its original site despite the fact that it was an obstruction on the approach to the bridge which gave its name to this ward. Old London Bridge. in its eventual twelfth-century form, was almost a town in itself with its many tiny arches supporting not only the roadway but also houses and other buildings. These included another church, the Chapel of St Thomas on the Bridge, which was dedicated to St Thomas Becket and was the traditional start of the pilgrimage to Canterbury.
With all those buildings on the bridge and its approach roads, and the fact that before the 18th century there were no other bridges across the Thames below Kingston, congestion on Old London Bridge was chronic from the word go. London’s traffic problems have been going on for longer than you might have thought. And the congestion was just as bad below: the many arches obstructed the flow of the Thames so badly that the upstream side was prone to freezing over during a bad winter. Hence the “frost fairs”. There have been no further frost fairs since a new London Bridge was erected in the nineteenth century with many fewer arches, allowing the old bridge to be demolished. The nineteenth-century bridge was subsequently sold to the USA, and replaced by the structure we have today.
In mediaeval times the City Corporation owned three manors in Southwark on the south bank of the Thames, and these were given representation in 1550 by creating the new ward of Bridge Without, with the previous Bridge ward renamed as Bridge Within. Bridge Without never had Common Councilmen nor did it even have any voters, but all the way up to 1978 there was an Alderman for the ward who was co-opted by the other Aldermen. The City now has no responsibility for any of the former Bridge Without ward, but because the 1978 reform technically merged the Bridge Within and Without wards the name still survives.
Bridge and Bridge Without is one of the smallest wards of the city, returning just two Common Councilmen who are elected by sole traders and voters nominated by companies based within the ward. Residents are also eligible to vote, but the number of people living in this ward is minimal. The two outgoing Common Councilmen, Keith Bottomley and Timothy Levene, were re-elected to the Common Council in March’s City elections without a contest.
There was then a poll for the Alderman for Bridge and Bridge Without ward, to replace Sir Alan Yarrow who had been Lord Mayor in 2014–15. City Aldermen are expected to stand down when they reach the age of 70; Yarrow was allowed to stay on past his 71st birthday because of the pandemic, but once the City’s electoral register was in a fit state to allow elections he bowed gracefully out into retirement. The resulting Aldermanic election on 7th July returned Timothy Levene, very comfortably. This by-election is to fill the seat which Levene left behind on the Court of Common Council.
Five candidates have come forward. Top of the ballot paper is Melissa Collett, who lives in the City on the Barbican estate and stood unsuccessfully in May’s election for Alderman of Aldersgate ward. Scott Longman claims to be recognised by the Lord Mayor and Corporation as an Official Ambassador (his capitalisation) for the City. Saif Masood, who was born in India and came to London at the age of 12, is a financial technology entrepreneur. Hugh Selka is a marine underwriter. As usual for the City, all of those four are independent candidates; however, this time we have a party political contest with Gordon Nardell being nominated as an official Labour candidate. Nardell, who is a KC specialising in international disputes, was the Labour candidate for the Cities of London and Westminster at the last general election, and in March’s City elections he contested Farringdon Within ward.
Parliamentary constituency: Cities of London and Westminster
London Assembly constituency: City and East
ONS Travel to Work Area: London
Postcode districts: EC3M, EC3R, EC3V, EC4R
Melissa Collett (Ind)
Scott Longman (Ind)
Saif Masood (Ind)
Gordon Nardell (Lab)
Hugh Selka (Ind)
Previous results in detail
Selsdon Vale and Forestdale
Croydon council, London; caused by the death of Conservative councillor Badsha Quadir.
For our other by-election today within the M25 we travel from the centre of Greater London to the edge of the conurbation. Selsdon is the point where London ends and Surrey begins, an affluent suburb full of interwar houses in the Art Deco style. There’s even an early example of greenbelt here: Selsdon Wood, which has been protected as a nature reserve since the 1930s, is 200 acres of ancient woodland located just after the houses end.
Within this ward is the country house of Selsdon Park, which was converted into a hotel and greatly expanded in the 1920s. The Selsdon Park Hotel became a favourite of the great and the good, the great here including for these purposes the Conservative Party. In advance of the 1970 general election, Edward Heath’s Shadow Cabinet met at this hotel to agree the Conservative party’s manifesto: a radical set of free-market ideas which the prime minister Harold Wilson unsuccessfully tried to denounce as the product of “Selsdon Man”. As Liz Truss recently found out, radical free-market ideas don’t necessarily survive contact with reality; Heath junked a lot of the Selsdon agenda shortly after taking office, but unlike Truss he kept his job. There is still a Selsdon Group on the fringes of the Conservative Party, advocating free-market economics to this day.
If you want to stay at the Selsdon Park Hotel these days, well, you can’t. Its former owners, De Vere, “temporarily” closed the hotel in December 2021; it has not reopened, and the hotel and associated golf course have instead been sold to the “lifestyle hotel” group Birch. The hotel is currently slated to reopen next year, but the golf course would appear to have bitten the dust.
The hotel (but not the golf course) is part of the Selsdon Vale and Forestdale ward of Croydon council, which was created by boundary changes in 2018. At the time of the 2011 census this area was the southern end of the Selsdon and Ballards, and Heathfield wards. These are not like London as a whole. Selsdon and Ballards had the highest owner-occupation rate (90.7%) and the highest age 45–64 population (32.1%) of any ward in Greater London; Heathfield ward, which then covered the Forestdale area, wasn’t that much further down the lower middle-class social scale. The parliamentary boundaries haven’t yet caught up with the ward boundary change: Selsdon Vale is part of the safe-Conservative seat of Croydon South, while Forestdale is in the marginal Croydon Central constituency.
Unsurprisingly this has turned out to be a safe Conservative ward. Six months ago in May 2022 the Conservatives had 67% of the vote here, with Labour second on 16% just ahead of the Greens who were the only other party to stand. The London Mayor and Assembly elections last year had a wider choice for the electors: in the mayoral ballot Shaun Bailey led Sadiq Khan here 63–21, while the Conservative lead in the London Members ballot was a slightly lower 58–18. As usual with GLA voting figures quoted by this column, these figures don’t include postal votes (which are tallied at borough level), so the zero votes recorded here for the National Liberal Party in the London Members ballot refers only to votes cast at polling stations. Another oddity in the lower end of Selsdon Vale and Forestdale’s voting figures last year was that Lawrence Fox placed fourth here in the mayoral ballot, polling 3% and beating the Lib Dems.
We are only six months into the current four-year term of Croydon council, but this is already the second by-election in the borough since May. The Conservative group leader Jason Perry was elected as Mayor of the borough in May, defeating a discredited Labour administration, and the Conservatives had no trouble holding the resulting by-election for Perry’s council seat in South Croydon ward.
This poll follows the sad death of Mohammed Badsha Quadir, who had served on Croydon council since 2010. He was originally elected for Purley ward in a 2010 result which was incorrectly tallied: the declared results for Purley that year show more votes than were possible given the number of ballot papers issued, and information from the count observers suggests that Quadir’s total was inflated by over 1,200 votes. This isn’t the only counting error we’ll discuss this week, but there was no doubt that the Conservative slate had won the election so the result has been left uncorrected.
Quadir went on to serve as deputy mayor of Croydon in 2013–14; this is normally a stepping-stone to the mayoralty the year, but Quadir didn’t get to rise to the top job after Labour took control of the borough in the 2014 elections. He was re-elected for Purley and Woodcote ward in 2018 before transferring here in May. In September Quadir passed away while on a visit to India; he was 64 years old. Away from the council he was a businessman whose family owned two curry restaurants, which were often used by the local Conservative party for fundraising events.
Defending this by-election for the Conservative is Fatima Zaman, who has had a long career working in social care; in May she contested Addiscombe West ward. The Labour candidate is Tom Bowell, who is 21 years old and works in the transport sector. Also standing are two candidates who unsuccessfully fought the South Croydon by-election in June, Peter Underwood for the Greens and former Croydon Central MP Andrew Pelling as an independent; they complete the ballot along with George Holland of the Lib Dems.
Parliamentary constituency: Croydon South (part of former Selsdon and Ballards ward), Croydon Central (part of former Heathfield ward)
ONS Travel to Work Area: London
Postcode districts: CR0, CR2
May 2022 result C 1964/1502 Lab 480/446 Grn 469/425
May 2018 result C 1982/1950 Lab 649/646 Grn 228/186 LD 178 UKIP 176
Previous results in detail
May 2021 GLA elections (excludes postal voters)
Mayor: C 1412 Lab 463 Grn 109 Reclaim 68 LD 63 Omilana 23 London Real 20 Count Binface 14 UKIP 13 Rejoin EU 13 Obunge 10 Let London Live 9 Heritage Party 9 Renew 7 SDP 7 Women’s Equality 5 Animal Welfare 4 Farah London 4 Burning Pink 2 Fosh 1
London Members: C 1327 Lab 413 Grn 190 LD 123 Animal Welfare 39 Rejoin EU 38 UKIP 36 CPA 34 Reform UK 27 Women’s Equality 17 Let London Live 13 Heritage 10 London Real 10 SDP 8 Comm 4 Londonpendence 3 TUSC 3 Nat Lib 0
Salisbury St Paul’s
Wiltshire council; caused by the death of Conservative councillor Mary Webb.
Selsdon Vale and Forestdale is the safest of the four Conservative defences this week. It gets harder from here, as we see when we turn to the South Western by-election today.
The city of Salisbury has a number of electoral divisions, some of which are named after churches. St Paul’s church, which was consecrated in 1853, lies on a roundabout to the west of Salisbury city centre where the main roads to Devizes and Wilton meet. Or divide, depending on your point of view. The St Paul’s division extends north and west from that roundabout; boundary changes for the 2021 Wiltshire elections placed Salisbury railway station on the division boundary, while the division also takes in the industrial Churchfields area to the south of the railway line.
This quiet corner of suburban Salisbury came to worldwide attention in 2018, and not in a good way. St Paul’s division includes Christie Miller Road, which was home to former Russian/UK double-agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia; they were nearly killed in March 2018 by being poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok by Russian agents. A local woman, Dawn Sturgess, died after coming into contacted with the discarded perfume bottle containing the chemical a few months later; two other people were treated in hospital for Novichok poisoning, including a Wiltshire police officer who was forced to take early retirement as a result. By the end of March 2018, Western countries had expelled more than 150 Russian diplomats in response to the Skripal poisonings. The Skripals now live outside the UK under new identities; their former house on Christie Miller Road was bought by Wiltshire council in 2021, and the council was reported in May this year to be looking to sell the house — which has been decontaminated and extensively renovated — to a Wiltshire resident on a shared-ownership basis.
The modern Wiltshire council dates from 2009, and the Conservatives have won all four elections for Salisbury St Paul’s to date on minority votes. Indeed some of the past results here are best described as freak vote splits; in 2009 four candidates got over 20% of the vote here, and the winning Conservative score was just 27.5%. Richard Clewer, the elected councillor here that year and in 2013, is now the leader of Wiltshire council — from the safer territory of Downton and Ebble Valley division. The revised boundaries for St Paul’s in 2021 delivered another freak vote split here: 32% for the Conservatives, 30% for the Lib Dems, 22% for Labour and 16% for the Greens giving a Conservative majority of just 32 votes.
This by-election follows the death of Mary Webb, who had joined Wiltshire council in 2021 and was in her first term. Before becoming a councillor Webb had chaired the Wiltshire and Somerset branch of the Federation of Small Businessses, and she had run a B&B in the city.
Defending for the Conservatives is Katrina Sale, who may be a name to watch for the future; Sale was the Conservative candidate for Doncaster North in the December 2019 general election, cutting the majority of the former Labour leader Ed Miliband to under 2,500 votes. Sam Charleston is back for the Lib Dems after his runner-up placing last year. The Labour candidate is Tony Mears, who stood for the party last year in the less-promising territory of Amesbury South. If the Conservatives can’t improve on their 32% score from May 2021 then they will lose this seat, because the withdrawal of the Greens has left this by-election with only those three candidates.
Parliamentary constituency: Salisbury
ONS Travel to Work Area: Salisbury
Postcode districts: SP1, SP2
Sam Charleston (LD)
Tony Mears (Lab)
Katrina Sale (C)
May 2021 result C 461 LD 429 Lab 312 Grn 227
Previous result in detail
Longstanton
South Cambridgeshire council; a double by-election caused by the resignations of Liberal Democrat councillors Sarah Cheung Johnson and Alex Malyon.
We now come to the first two of the week’s three Liberal Democrat defences, which come in a part of England which is changing fast. Let’s travel north-west of Cambridge into the countryside — or not, as the case may be.
The village of Longstanton is of long standing. Stantone was recorded in the Domesday survey with 67 peasant tenants, a large number for a Cambridgeshire village at the time. However, it took until the twenty-first century for population growth to get going here in earnest.
Yes, you read that right — the twenty-first century. However, the seed for that population growth was planted many years earlier with the establishment of RAF Oakington, which opened in 1940. This airfield was used during the Second World War by Bomber Command, and after the war for pilot training. The RAF left Oakington in 1974, after which it was taken over by the Army and used as a barracks; the Army left in 1996, after which the Home Office took the site over as an immigration reception centre. Although Oakington is a nearby parish, the airfield/barracks/immigration centre buildings were all in Longstanton parish.
The immigration centre had closed by the time of the 2011 census, at which point Longstanton ward had the same boundaries as Longstanton parish and returned one South Cambridgeshire councillor. The 2011 census recorded 2,657 people in the ward, with a middle-class demographic and high levels of full-time employment. Not surprising for somewhere clearly within the economic orbit of Cambridge.
Since then this area has changed out of all recognition. The RAF Oakington site is being completely redeveloped as a new town called Northstowe, and the housebuilders are currently hard at work. The maps here are from OpenStreetMap, whose contributors can usually do a faster job than the Ordnance Survey of updating their mapping; but even they are struggling with the development of Northstowe. In the case of Northstowe Phase 2, the associated secondary school opened in 2019 but the houses couldn’t be occupied until the A14 improvements to the south were finished; Northstowe Phases 3A and 3B, for which an outline planning application was submitted in 2020, will total 5,000 new homes with a link road to the A14, and will join Longstanton and Oakington together into one urban area. This will be linked to the city of Cambridge and the fast-growing Huntington area by the Cambridgeshire Guided Busway, which runs along the north-eastern edge of the development site.
The Boundary Commission redrew Longstanton ward for the 2018 elections, expanding it to include Oakington village and increasing its representation from one councillor to two. This was a major over-representation at first, but the ward was deliberately drawn small because of the Northstowe developments; its electorate increased by 42% from December 2015 to May 2022, and there is some room for more population growth yet. Mind, if Phases 3A and 3B come anywhere close to full occupancy the Boundary Commission are likely to be back here in short order.
South Cambridgehire council has had two elections on the current ward boundaries, in 2018 and 2022. Both of these returned large majorities for the Liberal Democrats, who built on that to nearly gain the South Cambridgeshire parliamentary seat from the Conservatives in 2019 against the national trend. Things have not improved for the Cambridgeshire Conservatives since: they lost both their majority on Cambridgeshire county council and the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough mayoralty in 2021. The Liberal Democrats are now leading the ruling coalition in the Shire Hall, while their transfers were crucial to the Labour gain in the mayoral election.
Longstanton ward forms the major part of the Longstanton, Northstowe and Over division of Cambridgeshire county council, which the Liberal Democrats gained in last year’s county elections. That put the county division into line with Longstanton ward, which voted Lib Dem narrowly in 2018 and decisively in May this year — the Lib Dem slate of Sarah Cheung Johnson and Alex Malyon had a 66–21 lead over the Conservatives.
Cheung Johnson — who is one of the few UK councillors of Chinese descent — and Malyon have both quit South Cambridgeshire council just a few months into their second terms, both of them citing difficulty in balancing their democratic and family duties. They both have full-time jobs elsewhere, Malyon working as an NHS nurse and Cheung Johnson for Cambridge University. A single by-election will be held to replace both of them.
Defending for the Liberal Democrats are Natalie Warren-Green and Lawrence Zeegen. Warren-Green was one of the few unsuccessful Lib Dem candidates for South Cambridgeshire in May, contesting Swavesey ward; Zeegen, who is a professor of illustration (whatever that means), is one of Northstowe’s new residents having moved in last year. The Conservatives have selected Tom Bygott and Khadijeh Zargar; Zargar fought this ward in May, while Bygott was the losing Conservative candidate in the county elections here last year. Also standing are Dan Greef and Anand Pillai for Labour, Colin Coe and Silke Scott-Mance for the Green Party, and independent candidate Debbie Poyser.
Parliamentary constituency: South Cambridgeshire
Cambridgeshire county council division: Longstanton, Northstowe and Over
ONS Travel to Work Area: Cambridge
Postcode districts: CB23, CB24
Tom Bygott (C)
Colin Coe (Grn)
Dan Greef (Lab)
Anand Pillai (Lab)
Debbie Poyser (Ind)
Silke Scott-Mance (Grn)
Natalie Warren-Green (LD)
Khadijeh Zarger (C)
Lawrence Zeegen (LD)
May 2022 result LD 1326/1183 C 425/340 Lab 252
May 2018 result LD 831/703 C 691/551 Lab 156/138 Grn 104
Previous results in detail
Chasetown
Lichfield council, Staffordshire; caused by the resignation of Conservative councillor Samuel Tapper.
Our two remaining English by-elections are in the Midlands, and this time I’ll start on the west side. Chasetown is a 19th-century pit village which has now been absorbed into the town of Burntwood. Much of the ward’s acreage is under water, but that’s not the result of subsidence as in some other mining areas; the Chasewater reservoir dates from 1797, when it was built to supply water to the canals of Birmingham and the West Midlands.
However, Chasetown is not part of the Black Country urban sprawl and never became part of the West Midlands metropolitan area. The ward does have a border with Walsall borough, and Walsall is the centre of the local Travel to Work Area, but Chasetown is cut off from that borough (specifically, the town of Brownhills to the south) by the reservoir and the M6 Toll motorway.
Despite this, Chasetown does have a working-class demographic. It continued to grow in population after the collieries closed, partly through the development of council estates and partly through white flight from the Black Country. In the 2011 census 27% of Chasetown ward’s households were socially rented; the ward boundaries have changed since then, but that’s not likely to have changed the general picture.
Burntwood is part of the Lichfield parliamentary seat represented by Boris Johnson wannabe Michael Fabricant, and is contained within the Conservative-majority Lichfield district. However, the two elections to Chasetown ward on the current boundaries have both returned a close result with one seat each for Labour and the Conservatives. In 2015 UKIP and the second Labour candidate tied for the runner-up spot, 22 votes behind the winning Labour candidate.
The Conservatives’ organisation in Burntwood is clearly not great and they could only rustle up one candidate for the 2019 Lichfield elections; this meant that Labour were guaranteed one of Chasetown ward’s two seats, but the Conservatives’ Samuel Tapper won the other with a majority of just three votes. The Local Elections Archive Project, considering only the votes of the higher-placed Labour candidate, shows a Labour lead in percentage terms of 58–42. Appropriately enough given that this is the town of the Chase, the Labour candidate at the top of the table in 2019 was called D Ennis — Darren, not Darragh, on this occasion.
Ennis subsequently finished as a close runner-up in the local Burntwood South division of Staffordshire county council last year, cutting the Conservative majority to just 80 votes against the national and Staffordshire trend. And with a three-vote majority the Conservatives might have hoped not to have to defend a by-election in Chasetown ward.
The outgoing councillor Samuel Tapper, who is a young man with his career ahead of him, has put his career first by leaving these shores for Japan. He was due to start a teaching job there last month, and hopefully that’s working out for him.
The by-election to replace Tapper will be another straight fight. Defending from the blue corner is Norma Bacon, a former Lichfield councillor for Curborough ward in Lichfield city; she sought re-election for Chase Terrace ward, which borders Chasetown, in 2019 without success. Challenging from the red corner is Burntwood town councillor Paul Taylor.
Parliamentary constituency: Lichfield
Staffordshire county council division: Burntwood South
ONS Travel to Work Area: Wolverhampton and Walsall
Postcode districts: WS7, WS8
Norma Bacon (C)
Paul Taylor (Lab)
May 2019 result Lab 391/279 C 282
May 2015 result C 601/378 Lab 543/521 UKIP 521
Previous results in detail
Eastwood
Nottinghamshire county council; caused by the death of Conservative councillor Eddie Cubley.
Last week we saw the Conservatives lose a seat to Labour in Derbyshire county council at the southern end of the Erewash valley, in Long Eaton. That poll was actually the first instalment of a three-part series, because we are back in the Erewash valley both this week and next week — but on the Nottinghamshire bank.
I was born nearly forty-four-year ago, in Eastwood, a mining village of some three thousand souls about eight miles from Nottingham, and one mile from the small stream, the Erewash, which divides Nottinghamshire from Derbyshire. It is hilly country, looking west to Crich and towards Matlock, sixteen miles away and east and northeast towards Mansfield and the Sherwood Forest district. To me it seemed, and still seems an extremely beautiful countryside, just between the red sandstone and oak trees of Nottingham and the cold limestone, the ash trees, the stone fences of Derbyshire.
Those are the words of one of the UK’s best-known authors of the early 20th century, David Herbert Lawrence, writing shortly before his early death in 1930. D H Lawrence was born at 8a Victoria Street in Eastwood, a house which is now a museum dedicated to him; from the ages of 17 to 21 he was a pupil-teacher at a school in the town, before leaving Nottinghamshire to find fame in the wider world.
Lawrence identifies Eastwood’s mining history (which was mining reality at the time he wrote), but the place was also important in the development of the railways. Last week I mentioned how the Midland Counties Railway turned the Trent floodplain just outside Long Eaton into a major railway junction; that railway can trace its history back to the autumn of 1832, when a meeting of Nottinghamshire miners at the Sun Inn in Eastwood approved a scheme to extend the horse-drawn Mansfield and Pinxton Railway southwards to Leicester. The need for outside investment, and the tangled railway politics of the 1830s, meant that the Midland Counties Railway as originally built did not in fact go to Eastwood or Pinxton; that link came later. The modern-day railway at this point is on the Derbyshire side of the Erewash, with Eastwood served by Langley Mill station a short distance to the west.
The census return for Eastwood is a bit tangled because Broxtowe council, which covers this area, had its wards redrawn in 2015. At the time of the 2011 census the town was covered by two wards, one of which — Eastwood North and Greasley (Beauvale) — included part of a neighbouring parish. Both this ward and Eastwood South had a working-class demographic, although Eastwood North and Greasley (Beauvale) had high levels of owner-occupation while South ward had a significant amount of social housing.
Eastwood North and Greasley (Beauvale) ward split its two seats between Labour and the Lib Dems at the 2011 elections to Broxtowe council. The Lib Dem slate in that election was a husband and wife, and it seems that this confused the counting team so much that Hazel Charlesworth — who was declared elected at the count — was mistakenly credited with votes that were in fact cast for her husband Bob. The Election Court had to be called into session to sort this error out, and they reversed the result and declared Bob elected instead of Hazel.
The 2015 ward boundary changes gave Eastwood three wards all to itself, and in the 2019 Broxtowe council elections Labour clearly led across the division; they won four councillors to the Conservatives’ one, although the shares of the vote were closer than the seat count might suggest. The Conservatives are the largest party on Broxtowe council, but they are short of a majority and a Labour-led coalition is in control there.
However, the Tories represent Eastwood at other levels of government. The Eastwood county division has been in Conservative hands since 2017, having previously voted Lib Dem in 2009 and 2013. The Eastwood Lib Dem vote has collapsed in recent years resulting in the county division swinging to Labour in 2021, against the national and indeed the Nottinghamshire trend; new Conservative county councillor Eddie Cubley was elected to the county council last year by the narrow margin of 46–42. Cubley was a passionate skydiver in his spare time, but his political career was clearly on an upward rather than downward trajectory.
Indeed, Cubley first came to the attention of this column in February 2016 when he was elected to Broxtowe council in a by-election for Greasley ward (Andrew’s Previews 2016, page 41). He still held both his county and district council seats at the time of his death in August. The Greasley ward and the Broxtowe county division border each other but do not overlap, so the local parties and the returning officer have been able to arrange for the two by-elections to take place on different dates without calling anybody out to vote more than once. The county by-election is today; the district by-election will take place next week.
With a marginal seat on the line here, both the Conservatives and Labour have selected high-profile candidates for the Eastwood by-election. Defending for the Conservatives is Mick Brown, who has run a bicycle shop and repair business in Eastwood since 1976; Brown has been a Broxtowe councillor since 1999, currently representing Greasley ward, and he was Mayor of Broxtowe in 2019–20. Labour have reselected their candidate from 2021 Milan Radulovic, who has led the Labour group on Broxtowe council since 1995; he was Leader of the Council from 1995 to 2007, from 2011 to 2015, and since 2019, and was appointed MBE in the 2008 New Year Honours for services to local government in Nottinghamshire. There is one other candidate, pub landlord Kane Oliver who is standing as an independent; and at this point I must point out that Eastwood is part of the Ashfield parliamentary constituency, so if the Ashfield Independents have got involved in this independent campaign then write Oliver off at your peril.
Parliamentary constituency: Ashfield
Broxtowe council wards: Eastwood Hall; Eastwood Hilltop; Eastwood St Mary’s
ONS Travel to Work Area: Nottingham
Postcode district: NG16
Mick Brown (C)
Kane Oliver (Ind)
Milan Radulovic (Lab)
May 2021 result C 1387 Lab 1251 LD 205 Grn 149
May 2017 result C 1180 LD 861 Lab 721 UKIP 219 Grn 84
Previous results in detail
Buckie
Moray council, Scotland; caused by the resignation of Liberal Democrat councillor Christopher Price.
And now for something completely different as we finish for the week in what was once the largest town in Banffshire. Buckie is a port town lying on the southern side of the Moray Firth. Historically shellfish were the main catch for the town’s fishermen; maritime industries are still important here, and Buckie’s shipyard is home to the main company which refits lifeboats for the RNLI. The North Sea oil industry is a major employer here, while the Inchgower distillery provides jobs of a more local nature making Speyside whisky.
Buckie, together with the nearby villages of Findochty and Rathven, forms a ward which since 2007 has returned three members of Moray council; a boundary review in 2017 left the ward unchanged. In 2007 and 2012 the three seats went to two independent candidates and the SNP. One of the independent councillors resigned at the end of 2013, and the resulting by-election returned another independent candidate, Gordon Cowie. The other independent councillor died in a freak accident in 2015 — he was run down by his own mobility scooter — and the resulting by-election was won by the SNP with almost 60% of the first preferences.
The SNP subsequently lost their by-election gain to the Conservatives in 2017, when the first preferences split 45% to the SNP, 34% to the Conservatives and 21% to Cowie; the Conservatives won a seat on first preferences and their transfers re-elected Cowie.
That was the latest poll on these boundaries. In 2022 the Conservative councillor Tim Eagle and independent councillor Gordon Cowie stood down, and the SNP inexplicably decided not to try for a second seat in the ward. When nominations closed there were just three candidates: outgoing councillor Sonya Warren for the Scottish National Party, new Conservative candidate Neil McLennan, and Christopher Price of the Liberal Democrats. As there was a perfect match of three candidates for three seats, McLennan, Price and Warren were declared elected unopposed.
The Lib Dems had never previously stood in Buckie ward since PR was introduced in 2007, and indeed had never held a seat on Moray council during that period. It’s clear that Christopher Price was standing as a paper candidate and had never expected to win. Price already had a full-time job with the Ministry of Defence, and found it difficult to reconcile that with his council and other duties; after three months trying to juggle all the balls in the air, he eventually admitted defeat and resigned from the council in August.
This isn’t the only set of strange goings-on in Moray council at the moment. The May elections returned 11 Conservative councillors, 8 SNP, 3 Labour, 2 independents, 1 Green and Price. An SNP minority administration was defeated, and a Conservative-Independent coalition was installed under two Conservative co-leaders, one of whom was newly-elected Buckie ward councillor Neil McLennan. This arrangement lasted for even less time than Christopher Price’s term on Moray council; McLennan was removed as co-leader after two months, narrowly outlasting Liz Truss, and is now an independent councillor. A further Tory councillor has left the group, meaning that the SNP will draw level with the Conservatives as largest party if they can win this by-election.
All this Tory infighting is rather embarrassing given that this is the constituency represented at Westminster by the Scottish Conservative leader Douglas Ross, who is also a Highlands and Islands list MSP at Holyrood. In Scottish Parliament elections Buckie is within the Banffshire and Buchan Coast constituency, which the SNP narrowly held last year against a strong Conservative challenge.
So, goodness knows what will happen here. The Lib Dems have found a candidate to defend this by-election: he is Les Tarr, who is approaching retirement from a career in local government and the public sector. The Scottish National Party have selected John Stuart, who is the chair of Buckie and District community council. Tim Eagle is seeking to make a comeback for the Conservatives: he was the ward’s Conservative councillor from 2017 but stood down in May, and he also contested the Moray Holyrood constituency (which does not cover this ward) in 2021. Neil Houlden, who works in the maritime sector and is chair of the parent council at a local school, is standing as an independent candidate. Completing a ballot paper of five candidates is Buckie’s first Labour local candidate since 2017, Keighly Goudie. The local press have interviewed all the candidates, and you can find out more here (link). Don’t forget that this is a Scottish local by-election, so Votes at 16 and the Alternative Vote are in use.
Westminster constituency: Moray
Holyrood constituency: Banffshire and Buchan Coast
ONS Travel to Work Area: Elgin
Postcode district: AB56
Tim Eagle (C)
Keighly Goudie (Lab)
Neil Houlden (Ind)
John Stuart (SNP)
Les Tarr (LD)
May 2022 result C/LD/SNP unopposed
May 2017 first preferences SNP 1407 C 1060 Ind 673
March 2015 by-election SNP 1485 Ind 696 C 315
January 2014 by-election Ind 830 SNP 670 Ind 220 C 143; final Ind 1034 SNP 718
May 2012 result Ind 1205 SNP 1136 C 179
May 2007 result Ind 1575 SNP 1188 Lab 507 C 397
Previous results in detail: 2007–15 2017-
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
