Previewing the Alperton, Brent by-election of Tuesday 18th February 2025
"All the right votes, but not necessarily in the right order"
One by-election on Tuesday 18th February 2025:
Alperton
Brent council, London; caused by the resignation of Liberal Democrat councillor Anton Georgiou.
For the second week in a row we have a by-election taking place on a Tuesday, because why not? This half-term week is going to be a bit of a London special on Andrew's Previews, because four of the six seats up for election are in the capital including today's poll. We might not be going for some winter skiing, but we have the next best thing here: instead of the Alps, we're going to Alperton.
Sadly there are no Alps in Alperton, whose name derives from a farm or estate associated with an Anglo-Saxon called Ealhbeorht. The Paddington arm of Grand Union Canal was built through the area in the 18th century, and a faster link to central London followed in 1903 with the opening of Alperton underground station on what was originally the Uxbridge branch of the District line, before it was transferred to the Piccadilly line in the 1930s. Despite the Underground title Alperton station is in fact on a viaduct, and it was one of two Underground stations (the other being Greenford) with an escalator going up from street level to the platforms; the escalator, which came here second-hand from the Festival of Britain site on the South Bank, was taken out of use in 1988 but still exists behind a brick wall.
Until the creation of Greater London Alperton was located within Middlesex as the southern end of the borough of Wembley, one of the two boroughs which merged together in the 1960s to create the London Borough of Brent. The name of Wembley subsequently disappeared from the UK's constituency map, but the modern seat of Brent West covers a similar area to the old borough. It is represented in parliament by long-serving Labour MP Barry Gardiner, who had a number of shadow cabinet positions under Jeremy Corbyn. Gardiner was first elected in 1997 for the former Brent North seat, and Alperton was transferred into his constituency in 2010.
In 2020 the Indian government gave Barry Gardiner MP the Padma Shri, an award within the Indian honours system, for distinguished work in public affairs. Gardiner's seat is home to one of the UK's largest Indian communities, and Alperton is no exception to this. In the 2021 census Alperton came in at number 4 of the wards in England and Wales for Hinduism (44.7%), behind only the neighbouring ward of Wembley Central and two wards in Leicester; it ranked number 9 for residents born in the Middle East and Asia (42.8%), and it was in the top 100 for Asian ethnicity (59.7%). Alperton also has a highly working-class demographic, and it is the number 1 ward in London for residents employed in manufacturing (11.7%).
Labour have a large majority on Brent council and this demographic profile would normally result in a Labour banker at election time, but for a variety of reasons local elections here are another matter. One reason is that the very large Hindu community can inject a measure of apparent weirdness into local elections here. We can see this by looking at what used to be a mainstay of this column when discussing London - ward-level breakdowns of London Mayor and Assembly election results. These were published from 2004 to 2021, but then discontinued when the London Assembly moved to manual counting in 2024 following the abolition of the Supplementary Vote system for the mayoral election. (Something which not only did not require a referendum but apparently did not even require a second reading debate in Parliament - the change was introduced to the Commons as a government amendment to an electoral administration bill. Electoral reformers, take note.)
The 2016 London Mayor election featured 12 candidates, with twelfth and last place on 0.2% of the vote going to Ankit Love of his One Love party. Love claims to be the Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir and his parents founded a socialist political party there which he now leads. The UK electorate has consistently seen Love as a joke candidate (he's turned up in a number of parliamentary by-elections since 2016 with a total lack of success), but in India his political and leadership credentials are taken seriously enough that he was nearly killed in a 2017 Islamist terror attack. Maybe the Hindu electorate of Wembley shared some of that sentiment, because in Ankit Love's May 2016 London mayoral campaign Alperton and Wembley Central were by far his best-polling wards. Rather more inexplicably, in that election Alperton was the only ward in London to give more than 100 votes to the "Cannabis is Safer than Alcohol" candidate, Lee Harris.
Another reason for historic Labour weakness in Alperton is that the Liberal Democrats once had some strength in Brent at local level, and this ward returned Lib Dem councillors up to and including 2010. One of its Lib Dem councillors, James Allie, stood as the party's parliamentary candidate for Brent North in that year; he then defected to Labour and was re-elected under their banner in 2014 and 2018. The 2018 Brent council elections saw the Lib Dems wiped out of Brent council, where they appeared to be a spent force.
James Allie was a solicitor in his day job, and in this capacity he had been appointed as executor of the estate of a wealthy lady called Ruth Ballin following her death in 2016. Ballin's estate was valued at just under £1.6 million, and her will requested that this be left to the Canon Collins Educational and Legal Assistance Trust, a charity which does good work in the social justice and educational sector in southern Africa.
Instead, Allie diverted Ballin's assets to buy a property for himself (via a company of which he was sole director) at a cost of £580,000. This eventually came to light three years later, and when the charity found out what had happened it launched legal action to get its money. In December 2019, the High Court ordered Councillor Allie to vacate the property and hand over anything that's left of the inheritance. With his reputation and his legal career in shreds (his firm had already sacked him), Allie handed in his resignation to Brent council the following day. In due course Allie found himself not only in the Councillors Behaving Badly file but also in the Solicitors Behaving Badly file, when the Solicitors Regulation Authority formally struck him off in 2022.
The Brent branch of Labour then went on to make a complete and utter mess of the resulting by-election in January 2020 by selecting Chetan Harpale as its defending candidate, apparently without looking at his Twitter account first. When other people started looking at Harpale's Twitter, all sorts of anti-Muslim and other disturbing nasties emerged, from tweets alleging that Pakistan is a terror state through allegations that Jeremy Corbyn is a jihadist via rants about "Londonistan" to - possibly most disturbingly of all for the local Labour party - admiration for the Conservative Harrow MP Bob Blackman. Labour suspended Harpale, but by then was too late to take him off the ballot paper. Your columnist wrote at the time (Andrew's Previews 2020, page 16) that "this unforced selection error could present an opportunity for a shock gain for another party", and that's what happened: the January 2020 Alperton by-election returned the Liberal Democrat candidate Anton Georgiou on a massive swing.
Two other Brent council by-elections were held on the same day, including a poll for two seats in Barnhill ward in Wembley which turned in an unexpectedly close result with Labour nearly losing the ward to the Conservatives. One of the losing Conservative candidates, Stefan Voloseniuc, then launched an Election Court case basically alleging that the count was wrong and the Conservatives were the rightful winners. The Court ordered a recount which got delayed by the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, and then things went strangely quiet. It wasn't until February 2021, over a year after the by-election that things reached a resolution after the Brent returning officer escalated the case to the High Court in London: at this point it was revealed that the recount had taken place in July 2020, nothing wrong had been found with the original result, and Voloseniuc and his running-mate Kanta Mistry - who would probably have been well-advised to cut their losses and ask to withdraw the case at that point - had instead done nothing further to progress matters. High Court hearings do not come cheap, and following the dismissal of Voloseniuc and Mistry's case their bill for everyone's legal costs had doubled to over £60,000. Voloseniuc is a businessman who is clearly wealthy enough to absorb this financial blow, as he subsequently turned up as the Conservative candidate for the Brent and Harrow constituency in the 2024 London Assembly elections.
Meanwhile back in Alperton, the Lib Dems' Anton Georgiou was re-elected for a second term at the top of the poll in the May 2022 Brent elections and he got a running-mate in, with Hannah Matin defeating the second Labour candidate for the ward's final seat by 15 votes. Alperton ward split its three seats, with the Lib Dems winning two seats on 47% and Labour holding the other seat on 41%. In October the Liberal Democrats won a by-election in the neighbouring Hanger Hill ward of Ealing council, gaining that seat from the Conservatives, so the Brent party may be able to call on reinforcements from over the borough boundary in their attempt to hold this by-election.
Unfortunately, in 2021 Councillor Georgiou became the subject of a vicious stalking and harassment campaign carried out by one Jack O'Donnell. It took the Metropolitan Police some time to bring O'Donnell to justice because he lived in the Republic of Ireland, but O'Donnell was eventually arrested in the UK in May 2022 and prosecuted for stalking involving fear of violence. In April 2023 Harrow Crown Court sentenced O'Donnell to 21 months in prison plus a restraining order, but O'Donnell was released from custody on licence the following day because he had already served more than half of that time on remand. He immediately breached his restraining order by resuming his harassment campaign against Georgiou, forcing police to install a panic button at Georgiou's home. O'Donnell was recalled to prison the following week and subsequently pleaded guilty before Willesden magistrates to breaching his restraining order, for which Harrow Crown Court gave him another prison sentence. In December 2024 O'Donnell was released from prison, prompting Anton Georgiou to resign from Brent council on police advice in order to protect his privacy.
Defending this seat for the Liberal Democrats is local resident Charlie Clinton, who works in marketing and tech development while also playing music on the side; in last year's general election he was the Lib Dem candidate standing against Keir Starmer in Holborn and St Pancras. Labour have selected Prerna Thakkar; she is a student reading international social and public policy with politics at the LSE. Also on this ballot are Harmit Vyas for the Conservatives and Mahendra Negi for Reform UK.
This Preview has been corrected to clarify that (a) I can read a calendar, and (b) Alperton ward was not in the Brent East constituency prior to 2010.
Parliamentary constituency: Brent West
London Assembly constituency: Brent and Harrow
ONS Travel to Work Area: London
Postcode districts: HA0, NW10
Charlie Clinton (LD)
Mahendra Negi (RUK)
Prerna Thakkar (Lab)
Harmit Vyas (C)
May 2022 result LD 2108/1703/1631 Lab 1871/1688/1566 C 533/532/450
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