Previewing the six council elections of 20th June 2024
“All the right votes, but not necessarily in the right order”
Six polls on 20th June 2024:
West Bank
Mansfield council, Nottinghamshire; caused by the resignation of Conservative councillor Ben Brown.
This week is the biggest remaining test of public opinion before the general election in two weeks’ time. Let’s start by travelling to what our genial host’s Britain Predicts model currently has as a very marginal seat: that’s Mansfield. This market town is the largest of a patchwork of towns in western Nottinghamshire which together form a surprisingly large urban area. Historically Mansfield and its satellite towns were dependent on coal mining, and the town continues to profit from that former industry in an unexpected way: the Coal Authority, a quango which owns most of the UK’s unworked coal and deals with subsidence and other hazards from old coal workings, is based in Mansfield.
Mansfield was the birthplace of the Lib Dem leader Sir Ed Davey, but his party are not a significant factor in the town’s politics. Instead this is the sort of area which is emblematic of the so-called “Red Wall” — but Mansfield was never officially a Red Wall constituency. This is because James Kanagasooriam’s original concept for the Red Wall was to compile a list of constituencies which had voted Labour in 2017, but whose demographics could be favourable to the Conservatives. By that definition Mansfield did not qualify, because it had already been gained by the Conservatives in 2017 when Ben Bradley became the town’s MP. He was re-elected in 2019 with over 30,000 votes and a majority of 16,306.
Ben Bradley is also a major figure in the area’s local government. Since 2021 he has been the leader of Nottinghamshire county council, where he represents Mansfield North division. Last month Bradley was the Conservative candidate for the inaugural East Midlands mayoral post, covering the counties of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, but he lost rather resoundingly to the Labour candidate Claire Ward; next month he will seek a third term of office as Conservative MP for Mansfield. At the time of writing Britain Predicts has Bradley being the only Conservative MP for the whole of Nottinghamshire in the next Parliament — that in a county which includes the Rushcliffe seat which returned Ken Clarke to Parliament for nearly half a century, plus the decidedly rural Newark constituency. We’ll see if there’s any truth in this a couple of weeks’ time.
One factor which might hold the Conservatives back in this town is that they are very weak in Mansfield’s local government. This is partly because Mansfield council went over to the elected mayoral system in 2002, and the mayoralty quickly developed into a close contest between Labour and a series of independent mayors, who were backed up on the council by a supporting Mansfield Independent slate which tended to mop up the town’s anti-Labour vote. It took until May 2019 for Labour to gain the Mansfield mayoralty after seventeen years of Mansfield Independent control, and then only by two votes. This seems to have precipitated a collapse in the independent vote, and the initial beneficiaries of this were the Conservatives who performed very well in Mansfield at the 2021 Nottinghamshire county council elections. But in 2023 Labour mayor Andy Abrahams was easily re-elected for a second term of office, and Labour gained control of Mansfield council with a convincing majority — 25 councillors against 5 Conservatives, 4 Mansfield Independents and two other independents.
Mansfield is one of only a handful of English second-tier districts to use the same electoral system as the House of Commons, in which every ward returns a single councillor. This sort of ward pattern tends to lead to frequent ward boundary changes, and a new map for the 2023 council election created West Bank ward from parts of the former Woodlands and Broomhill wards. This area is located immediately north of the town centre around West Bank Avenue and Broomhill Lane, and it includes the Mansfield council offices on Chesterfield Road South. In the 2021 census both predecessor wards were in the top 100 for residents employed in the wholesale and retail sector, with Broomhill coming in at number 4 in England and Wales; both predecessor wards also had over 10% of residents born in the EU expansion states of Eastern Europe. The ward is split between the Mansfield North and Mansfield West county divisions, which both split their two seats between the Conservatives and Labour in 2021; as previously stated, the Conservative county councillor for Mansfield North is Ben Bradley.
Of the two predecessors to West Bank ward, Woodlands was safe for the Mansfield Independents in the 2010s with Broomhill swinging between Labour and the independents. But at its first election in May 2023 West Bank ward returned a Conservative councillor with 37% of the vote, against 32% for Labour and 27% for the Mansfield Independents. Councillor Ben Brown, who works as a solicitor, stood down from the council in April for personal reasons. Last December he got into the local press for posting a bad-taste Christmas-themed cartoon about a nearby village, depicting Father Christmas’ sleigh and reindeer on bricks with the caption “Santa hated delivering presents to Shirebrook”; on seeing this, Shirebrook’s Conservative MP decided that maybe this was not the season to be jolly, and Brown was forced to apologise.
Defending this three-way marginal ward for the Conservatives is Steve Walmsley, who is a bus driver; his ballot paper description is “Local Conservative”, which is quite common for the party’s local election candidates, but in this case Walmsley slightly undermines that by giving an address in the neighbouring Ashfield district. The Labour candidate is Garry Cole, who lost out on a council seat last year by just two votes in Rufford ward. Faz Choudhury returns for the Mansfield Independents after his third-place finish here in 2023. Also standing are Thorsten Altenkirch for the Lib Dems, Karen Seymour for the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition, and Shaun Thornton for the Green Party.
Parliamentary constituency: Mansfield
Nottinghamshire county council division: Mansfield North (part formerly in Woodlands ward), Mansfield West (part formerly in Broomhill ward)
ONS Travel to Work Area: Mansfield
Postcode districts: NG18, NG19
Thorsten Altenkirch (LD)
Faz Choudhury (Mansfield Ind)
Garry Cole (Lab)
Karen Seymour (TUSC)
Shaun Thornton (Grn)
Steve Walmsley (C)
May 2023 result C 240 Lab 208 Mansfield Ind 178 RUK 28
Previous results in detail
St Oswald
Sefton council, Merseyside; caused by the death of Labour councillor Paula Spencer.
We now travel to north-west England and come to a ward on the northern edge of Liverpool’s built-up area. St Oswald’s is the main Anglican church for Netherton, the point where the housing ends at the aptly-named Northern Perimeter Road — relieved in recent years by the building of a new link road from Switch Island towards Formby. The housing of St Oswald ward spans both sides of the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, and it was mostly built in the 1950s by Bootle Corporation as a massive council estate after Bootle’s housing stock had seen extensive damage in the Second World War. Even after decades of Right to Buy, a third of St Oswald ward’s households are still socially-rented; the ward also makes the top 100 in England and Wales for Christianity, which is a common feature of the census return in Lancashire past and present. For some reason, lapsed Christians (particularly lapsed Catholics) in this general corner of the north-west are much more likely to put their old religion on the census form than lapsed Christians elsewhere.
Since 1950 this area has been part of the Bootle parliamentary seat, which is one of the safest Labour constituencies in the land. Peter Dowd, a Labour backbencher who was first elected here in 2015 and is seeking a fourth term of office, polled 79% of the vote in December 2019. Before entering Parliament Dowd was leader of Sefton council and a long-serving councillor for St Oswald ward, which is also a place where the Labour vote is weighed rather than counted — with the exception of 2022, when nobody else bothered to put up a candidate and Labour won the ward unopposed. In last month’s Sefton council elections Labour polled a relatively low 79% in St Oswald, with the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition best of the rest on 8%. Sefton council also has a strong Labour majority.
This by-election is to replace Labour councillor Paula Spencer, who passed away in March at the early age of 51. Spencer had represented this ward since 2015, originally being elected under her previous surname of Gouldbourn. She had won a third four-year term in 2023, but the winner of this by-election will have that cut short: the next Sefton elections in 2026 are expected to be all-up with new boundaries, although the draft map from the Local Government Boundary Commission makes only minor changes to Sefton’s existing 22 wards.
Defending for Labour is Helen Duerden, who is a civil servant and a parish councillor in Formby; in last month’s Sefton council elections she contested Duke’s ward in Southport. There is no repeat of the uncontested election in 2022, because five other candidates are standing against her: they are Conor O’Neill for the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition, Lyndsey Doolin for the Greens, Katie Burgess for the Conservatives, Ian Smith for the Workers Party and Paul Young for the Liberal Democrats. If you want an indication of what Burgess and Smith think of their chances of success here, well, we’ll be meeting them again in two weeks’ time when they will be candidates in another Sefton council by-election.
Parliamentary constituency: Bootle
ONS Travel to Work Area: Liverpool
Postcode districts: L21, L23, L30
Katie Burgess (C)
Lyndsey Doolin (Grn)
Helen Duerden (Lab)
Conor O’Neill (TUSC)
Ian Smith (Workers)
Paul Young (LD)
May 2024 result Lab 1270 TUSC 127 Grn 119 C 100
May 2023 result Lab 1362 C 151 TUSC 145
May 2022 result Lab unopposed
May 2021 result Lab 1557 C 262
May 2019 result Lab 1351 Grn 147 C 143 LD 93 Socialist Labour 79
May 2018 result Lab 1721 C 218 Socialist Labour 119
May 2016 double vacancy Lab 1618/1231 Grn 281 Socialist Labour 165 C 116
May 2015 result Lab 4412 Grn 483 Socialist Labour 228
May 2014 result Lab 1732 UKIP 424 C 101 Socialist Labour 73
May 2012 result Lab 2035 C 112 LD 79
May 2011 result Lab 2405 C 200 LD 94
May 2010 result Lab 3596 LD 529 C 332 UKIP 332
May 2008 result Lab 1269 LD 229 C 215 BNP 179 UKIP 57
May 2007 result Lab 1574 C 408
May 2006 result Lab 1376 LD 518
June 2004 result Lab 2164/1944/1896 LD 582/543/515
Previous results in detail
Radford
Coventry council, West Midlands; postponed from 4th May following the death of Dave Anderson, who had been nominated as a Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition candidate.
Regular readers of Andrew’s Previews will have some understanding of the toll which the Grim Reaper takes on our elected representatives. In the 2nd May 2024 edition, this column’s annual In memoriam section listed 83 councillors — plus Sir Tony Lloyd MP — who had passed away over the previous year. That’s an average of one death every four or so days, out of around 20,000 to 25,000 local councillors across the country.
Now, every May round of local elections sees tens of thousands of candidates standing, and there is about a month between close of nominations and polling day. So you don’t have to have advanced actuarial skills to realise that a few of those of tens of thousands of candidates will not make it through that month.
In most circumstances, and invariably in English local elections, the death of a candidate for election will result in the poll for the relevant ward being called off. Nominations will then be reopened to allow new candidates to stand (although surviving previous candidates do not have to submit new forms), and a new polling day will be set within 35 working days of the original.
So, every May and June postponed polls form a regular feature of Andrew’s Previews. This year we have got away lightly with only one such piece of unfinished business, in Coventry. We’ve come to Radford, a northern suburb of Coventry with a distinguished industrial history. In 1896 the Daimler Company bought a disused cotton mill at the southern end of this ward, close to the Coventry Canal terminus, and set up the UK’s very first car factory. It prospered, to the extent that there is still an area of this ward known as Daimler Green, and Daimler and later Jaguar cars were still being made in Radford into the 1990s. The old car factory site has since been redeveloped.
Radford ward is part of the Coventry North West parliamentary seat, which — unlike Mansfield earlier — is part of the canonical Red Wall. Not all of the Red Wall seats fell to the Conservatives in December 2019, and Coventry North West stayed in the Labour column by just 208 votes following the retirement of long-serving MP Geoffrey Robinson. Labour’s Taiwo Owatemi will shortly be seeking her second term of office; she was Labour’s shadow minister for women and equalities for a year in 2021–22, and she has spent much of the year to date on maternity leave from Parliament following the birth of her first child — a girl — last December.
The Coventry North West constituency as a whole may be marginal, but Radford ward is firmly in the Labour column. The most recent poll here was in 2023, when Labour led the Conservatives by 60–19. May 2024’s city council election in Radford was called off following the death in April of Dave Anderson, who had been a regular far-left candidate for Radford ward in recent years: he was the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition candidate here in 2023, polling 4% and finishing in fifth and last place, and he had been renominated for the party this year. Radford’s electors did, however, get to cast their votes last May for the West Midlands mayor and the West Midlands police and crime commissioner.
The Labour candidate is the previous sitting councillor Mal Mutton, who was first elected here in 2008 and is seeking re-election for her fifth term of office. She is the widow of the former Coventry council leader John Mutton, and she was deputy Lord Mayor of the city for 2023–24. By convention the previous year’s deputy Lord Mayor of Coventry steps up to Lord Mayor the following year, and the council have delayed this year’s mayormaking meeting until next week to allow time for this poll to take place. The Conservative candidate Stephen Smith came close to being elected to the council last year in Whoberley ward, but this looks a rather tougher challenge for him. Also standing are Julie Spriddle for the Greens, Cameron Baxter for the localist Coventry Citizens Party, the replacement Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition candidate Mila Matharu, and Caroline Spence for the Lib Dems.
Parliamentary constituency: Coventry North West
ONS Travel to Work Area: Coventry
Postcode districts: CV1, CV6
Cameron Baxter (Coventry Citizens)
Mila Matharu (TUSC)
Mal Mutton (Lab)
Stephen Smith (C)
Caroline Spence (LD)
Julie Spriddle (Grn)
May 2023 result Lab 1686 C 535 Grn 266 Coventry Citizens 199 TUSC 118
May 2022 result Lab 1807 C 600 Grn 261 Coventry Citizens 175 TUSC 114
May 2021 result Lab 1846 C 835 Grn 299 Coventry Citizens 187 TUSC 124 LD 121
May 2019 result Lab 1581 UKIP 497 C 418 Grn 302 Socialist Alternative 109
May 2018 result Lab 1951 C 561 Grn 169 TUSC 163 UKIP 158
May 2016 result Lab 1694 C 504 Grn 332 TUSC 313
May 2015 result Lab 3478 C 1239 UKIP 1047 TUSC 365 Grn 339 Christian Movement for Great Britain 93
May 2014 result Lab 1928 C 553 BNP 372 Grn 341 TUSC 124
May 2012 result Lab 1896 C 498 Grn 210 Socialist Alternative 142 BNP 126
May 2011 result Lab 2607 C 699 Grn 226 BNP 205 Ind 159 Socialist Alternative 94
May 2010 result Lab 3580 C 1279 LD 1091 BNP 415 Grn 208 Ind 127 Socialist Alternative 99 Ind 61
May 2008 result Lab 1444 C 796 BNP 344 LD 273 Grn 131 Ind 124
May 2007 result Lab 1663 C 670 BNP 359 LD 282 Grn 144 Ind 132
May 2006 result Lab 1564 C 692 LD 433 BNP 415 Ind 180
June 2004 result Lab 1516/1345/1309 C 858/812/776 LD 764/728/716 Ind 357 Marxist Party 222 Socialist Alternative 220
Previous results in detail
Sutton Courtenay and Marcham
Oxfordshire county council; and
Sutton Courtenay
Vale of White Horse council, Oxfordshire; both caused by the resignation of Liberal Democrat councillor Richard Webber.
And now for something completely different, as we move into the south of England. The village of Sutton Courtenay can be found some miles south of Oxford on the right bank of the River Thames, and its riverside location is the reason for its relatively long history. Sutton Courtenay was a royal vill of Anglo-Saxon England from 801, and in 868 Alfred the Great, king of Wessex, married the Mercian princess Ealhswith here. In more recent times the prime minister Herbert Asquith established his country residence here in two adjoining properties called Mill House and The Wharf, and he spent many of his weekends here; many years later, Asquith’s great-granddaughter Helena Bonham Carter and her then partner Tim Burton bought Mill House back. Herbert Asquith died in Sutton Courtenay in 1928 and is buried here — in the same churchyard as George Orwell, whose headstone gives his real name of Eric Blair.
But it’s not nice history like this that Sutton Courtenay is important for. The ward and parish also includes the massive Didcot power stations, which have been exporting electricity from the ward for decades. Didcot A (coal-fired) is now gone, but Didcot B (gas-fired) is still very much in operation. The engineering and services firm Amey started life as a company quarrying gravel from the Thames Valley, and for a time its head offices were in Sutton Courtenay.
The Sutton Courtenay and Marcham county council division also takes in the village of Milton, which is on the main A34 road from Oxford to Southampton and is home to a large business and technology park. The county division then extends north to the villages of Marcham and Shippon west of Abingdon; here can be found Dalton Barracks, currently the home of 4 Regiment Royal Logistic Corps, on the site of the former RAF Abingdon airbase. In recent years the barracks and airfield have been used as a filming location for Masters of the Air, a Second World War US TV series produced by Tom Hanks and Stephen Spielberg.
Until 2022 the business park at Milton was the home of both Vale of White Horse council and South Oxfordshire council, which share offices and staff; the two councils were previously based at a site in the village of Crowmarsh Gifford until that buliding was destroyed by fire in 2015. Currently the councils are run from premises in Abingdon, pending the construction of a new head office in Didcot.
In recent local elections this corner of Oxfordshire has been an unmitigated disaster area for the Conservative Party. At the 2015 local elections the Conservatives won 33 out of 36 seats on South Oxfordshire council and 29 out of 38 in Vale of White Horse. Nine years later they now have one seat left in South Oxfordshire and have been completely wiped out in the Vale, whose composition now stands at 34 Lib Dems and 4 Greens. Asquith would no doubt approve. Oxfordshire county council is run by a minority Lib Dem and Green coalition. Pretty much all the Conservatives have left here is the Wantage parliamentary seat, now renamed Didcot and Wantage (even through Didcot was already part of the seat), where David Johnston will seek a second term in the upcoming general election — but Britain Predicts currently have his seat going Lib Dem in two weeks’ time. The Marcham part of the Sutton Courtenay and Marcham county division is already part of a Lib Dem parliamentary seat: that’s Oxford West and Abingdon, where the party’s foreign affairs spokeswoman Layla Moran is seeking a third term of office.
Before then the Liberal Democrats have to defend two by-elections which both arise from the resignation on health grounds of Richard Webber, who had served on Oxfordshire county council since 2013 and on Vale of White Horse council since 2019. His Sutton Courtenay and Marcham county division is marginal, with a 49–40 Lib Dem lead over the Conservatives in 2021; the Sutton Courtenay district ward had a larger Lib Dem lead of 59–28 last year.
The Lib Dems have nominated Peter Stevens as the defending candidate for both the county and district by-elections. He is a consultant and developer in the electric vehicle industry. For the county by-election his Conservative opponent is James Plumb, who is the party’s election agent for Didcot and Wantage; he contested his home Marcham ward in last year’s Vale of White Horse elections and was provisionally informed he had won, until checks before his result was declared revealed that actually the votes for him and his Lib Dem opponent were the other way round. Hopefully we won’t see anything like that happen this time. Also standing in the county by-election are Jim Broadbent for Labour (no, not that one) and Adam Reilly for the Green Party.
In the Vale of White Horse district by-election Lib Dem Peter Stevens is opposed for the Conservatives by Christopher Campbell, who also stood in Sutton Courtenay ward in 2019 and has previously been a Sutton Courtenay parish councillor. Adam Reilly doubles up at district and county level for the Greens, and the Labour candidate here is Stephen Webb.
Sutton Courtenay and Marcham
Parliamentary constituency: Didcot and Wantage (part: Drayton and Sutton Courtenay wards), Oxford West and Abingdon (part: Marcham ward and part of Wootton ward)
Vale of White Horse wards: Sutton Courtenay
ONS Travel to Work Area: Oxford
Postcode districts: OX11, OX13, OX14
Jim Broadbent (Lab)
James Plumb (C)
Adam Reilly (Grn)
Peter Stevens (LD)
May 2021 result LD 1756 C 1439 Lab 409
May 2017 result LD 1345 C 1311 Lab 239 Grn 96
May 2013 result LD 776 C 749 UKIP 529 Lab 253 Grn 104
Previous results in detail
Sutton Courtenay
Parliamentary constituency: Didcot and Wantage
Oxfordshire county council division: Sutton Courtenay and Marcham
ONS Travel to Work Area: Oxford
Postcode districts: OX11, OX14
Christopher Campbell (C)
Adam Reilly (Grn)
Peter Stevens (LD)
Stephen Webb (Lab)
May 2023 result LD 488 C 233 Grn 113
May 2019 result LD 700 C 222
May 2015 result C 745 Lab 281 UKIP 229 LD 202 Rural Oxon Action Rally 103
Previous results in detail
Tiverton Westexe
Mid Devon council; caused by the disqualification of Liberal Democrat councillor Jamie Frost, who failed to attend any meetings of the council in six months.
Our final by-election of the week comes in the West Country, as we visit another district which has been recently been the subject of a Lib Dem takeover. We’ve come to Mid Devon district, which is misleadingly named because it hugs Devon’s north-eastern boundary and lies almost entirely to the north of Exeter.
Fifteen miles up the Exe valley from Exeter lies the ancient town of Tiverton. This was fortified by Henry I who built Tiverton Castle here; the castle saw action in the Civil War, when it fell to the Roundheads in a brief siege in October 1645. Earlier, in the 13th century Isabella, countess of Devon, had a leat built to provide Tiverton with a water supply; this is supposed to be commemorated every seven years with the Perambulation of the Town Leat, an ancient custom which was originally designed to clear the stream of any obstructions. The last Perambulation was in September 2017, but there is a question-mark as to whether the 2024 event will go ahead, because the leat has been neglected and has fallen into some disrepair over recent years.
Tiverton is divided into four electoral wards, of which Westexe is west of the River Exe. (Well done to anybody who got that at home.) The ward extends for some distance west into the Devon countryside because Tiverton parish covers quite a large area. Boundary changes for the 2023 elections added in two small rural parishes, Loxbeare and Templeton, while also prepending “Tiverton” to the ward name.
Included within Tiverton Westexe ward is the Heathcoat Fabrics factory and shop, a name which brings to mind another aspect of the town’s history. Tiverton’s ancient trade was in wool, and in 1815 its textile heritage attracted John Heathcoat, an industrialist and inventor from Derbyshire, when he left the Midlands to escape Luddite attacks on his business. Heathcoat established a lace-making industry in the town and he became an MP for Tiverton, starting off a political dynasty. Several of his descendants have served in the Commons: Heathcoat’s great-great-grandson Derick Heathcoat-Amory was MP for Tiverton from 1945 to 1960 and served as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Macmillan government, while David Heathcoat-Amory (a great-great-great-grandson of John Heathcoat) was MP for Wells from 1983 to 2010 and had a number of ministerial positions in the Major government.
Tiverton was an ancient parliamentary borough entitled to send two MPs to Parliament, a privilege which it retained all the way up to the Third Reform Act in 1885. John Heathcoat’s fellow Tiverton MP for some of his time in Parliament was the Prime Minister Viscount Palmerston, whose Irish title didn’t entitle him to a seat in the Lords meaning that he had to seek election and re-election to the Commons. Mostly this was a formality given Tiverton’s restricted franchise and status (even after the Great Reform Act of 1832) as one of the more notorious rotten boroughs, but in the 1847 general election Heathcoat and Palmerston — who at the time was Foreign Secretary — were challenged by the Chartist leader George Julian Harney. Harney won the hustings on a show of hands, but Palmerston called for a ballot and Harney, knowing he had no chance of winning on Tiverton’s parliamentary franchise of just 445 men, withdrew. The eventual result of the poll, which had a low turnout, gave Heathcoat 148 votes, Palmerston 127 and Harney nil — a good score in Pointless, not so much at election time.
The most recent parliamentary election in Tiverton saw a more successful challenge to the status quo, after Conservative MP Neil Parish resigned as MP for Tiverton and Honiton after admitting that he had watched pornography within the Palace of Westminster. In one of those statements which are so bizarre that they must be true because nobody could possibly make this up, Parish claimed he had initially been looking at a website about tractors. The mind boggles.
The resulting Tiverton and Honiton parliamentary by-election in June 2022 turned into a big win for the Liberal Democrat candidate Richard Foord, who had served with the Army in Iraq and the Balkans and as a UN peacekeeper in Kosovo. The Lib Dems followed up on that in the 2023 local elections by winning a large majority on Mid Devon council: 33 seats against 5 Conservatives, 3 Greens and an independent. For context, in the 2021 Devon county elections Mid Devon had returned five Conservative county councillors and one Lib Dem (for Crediton), while in the 2019–23 term Mid Devon had been a very messy independent-led hung council.
What Foord’s by-election win means for the next general election here isn’t clear, because the boundary changes have divided Tiverton and Honiton into two new constituencies. Foord is seeking re-election in the redrawn Honiton and Sidmouth, which is a celebrity match between him and the outgoing Conservative MP for East Devon Simon Jupp. Tiverton, on the other hand, will form part of a completely new constituency called Tiverton and Minehead which crosses the Devon-Somerset border; this is a notionally Conservative seat, and the Conservative candidate here is Ian Liddell-Grainger who has represented Bridgwater (and later Bridgwater and West Somerset) since 2001. He is descended from Queen Victoria, via her son Prince Leopold, Duke of Albany; Leopold’s son Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone; Alice’s daughter Lay May Abel Smith; and May’s daughter Anne Abel Smith who was Ian’s mother. Britain Predicts currently has him as favourite. The Lib Dem candidate for Tiverton and Minehead will be Rachel Gilmour, a communications director and Mid Devon councillor who has previously stood for parliament three times without success.
In this century Westexe ward has returned councillors for all three main parties plus UKIP; independent candidates normally did well in the ordinary elections, while two by-elections (in September 2017 and May 2021) saw Conservative gains. The Conservatives also hold the local county division, Tiverton West. Perhaps because of the large independent vote this is traditionally a weak ward for the Liberal Democrats, so perhaps the party can be excused for not seeing the 2023 result coming and running only a partial slate of candidates in Tiverton Westexe. Vote shares here last year were 32% for the Lib Dems, 22% for the Conservatives, 18% for independent candidates and 14% for Labour, who finished just ahead of the Green Party. With three seats available but only two Lib Dem candidates, David Broom and Jamie Frost, Tiverton Westexe ward’s third seat had to go somewhere else and the lucky beneficiary was Claudette Harrower of the Conservatives.
The Liberal Democrats are defending this council by-election after Jamie Frost didn’t turn up to any council meetings within six months, an action which doesn’t get you the coveted Pointless trophy: instead it gets you disqualified. It appears that Frost was also kicked out of the party for the same reason at some point before he was kicked out of the council. The defending Lib Dem candidate is Adam Stirling. The Conservatives have selected Paul Osman, an electrical engineer who stood in Canonsleigh ward last year. One of the independent candidates here from last year is back for another go: Jason Lejeune is a Tiverton town councillor who runs a firm which provides training in first aid, food hygiene, health and safety and fire safety, Labour have not stood a candidate this time, so the Greens’ Laura Buchanan completes the ballot paper.
Parliamentary constituency: Tiverton and Minehead
Devon county council division: Tiverton West
ONS Travel to Work Area: Exeter
Postcode district: EX16
Laura Buchanan (Grn)
Jason Lejeune (Ind)
Paul Osman (C)
Adam Stirling (LD)
May 2023 result LD 494/444 C 334/287/277 Ind 273/236/170 Lab 221 Grn 208/156
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
