Previewing the five local by-elections of 18th September 2025

"All the right votes, but not necessarily in the right order"

Five by-elections on 18th September 2025:

Trowbridge

Cardiff council, South Wales; caused by the resignation of Labour councillor Chris Lay.

For the second half of September Andrew's Previews is going to be concentrating on left-wing wards. Of the five seats up for election today, one is defended by the Green Party and the other four by Labour. Of course, every ward is different and it's this column's job to show you that those four Labour defences are very different kinds of area.

We'll start this week by considering a ward which covers two estates on the eastern edge of Cardiff. Trowbridge is the older and smaller part of the ward, which despite the name is dominated by the 1980s and 1990s estate of St Mellons. The latter area was annexed by Cardiff in the 1974 reorganisation, having previously been part of Monmouthshire - and thus, by some definitions, part of England.

The ward also extends south over the South Wales railway line to take in part of the Wentloog Levels, a strip of low-lying ground next to the coast where some business parks have sprung up in recent years. Some of the Levels are still under water as part of Hendre Lake Park, which is described as a favourite site for birdwatching and fishing.

In this century Trowbridge ward has generally returned Labour candidates to Cardiff council; the Lib Dems did win a seat here in 2008, but they are a long way from contention now. On revised boundaries, the 2022 election here gave 52% to Labour, 18% to the Conservatives and 12% to a joint slate of Plaid Cymru and Green candidates. The three outgoing Labour councillors Bernie Bowen-Thomson, Chris Lay and Michael Michael (so good they named him twice) were all safely re-elected.

Last year's Westminster boundary review transferred Trowbridge ward into the new Cardiff East constituency, whose Labour MP Jo Stevens - who was first elected in 2015 for Cardiff Central - has survived the recent reshuffle and kept her Cabinet job as Welsh secretary. Trowbridge is part of the Cardiff South and Penarth Senedd constituency, whose Labour MS is also high-profile: Vaughan Gething had his fifteen minutes of fame as First Minister last year. Electoral reform is coming to the Senedd next year, and for the 2026 election this ward will be part of the Caerdydd Ffynnon Taf constituency electing six MSs by proportional representation: the votes cast last year in the Cardiff East and Cardiff North Westminster constituencies would give a notional result of three Labour seats and one each for the Conservatives, Reform UK and the Lib Dems.

Labour have a large majority on Cardiff council, but the local party will no doubt still be smarting at losing a by-election last month to the Greens in Grangetown ward in the west of the city, on a very freakish vote split. This by-election comes hot on the heels of that loss to replace Chris Lay, who had served Trowbridge ward since 2017. Lay works for a subsidiary of Tesco, and his employers have promoted him into a managerial position based out of Telford; accordingly, he has now left Cardiff and his council role behind.

Defending this seat for Labour is Gary Bowen-Thomson, a youth worker who is hoping to join his wife Bernie as a councillor for this ward. He is fighting his first election campaign, as is the Conservative candidate Joe Roberts. The Plaid Cymru and Green alliance in Cardiff has now broken down and the two parties are fielding separate candidates: Plaid Cymru's Carol Falcon has raised some eyebrows by declaring recent previous membership of Reform UK on her nomination papers - she explained this as being for the purpose of espionage - while the Greens' Jess Ryan is a software engineer who was their Westminster candidate for Cardiff West last year. Also on the ballot are Chris Cogger for the Lib Dems, Leanne Lennox for Propel (a Welsh nationalist party associated with Cardiff councillor and former Plaid MS Neil McEvoy), and Edward Topham for Reform UK.

Parliamentary constituency: Cardiff East
Senedd constituency: Cardiff South and Penarth
Senedd constituency (from 2026): Caerdydd Ffynnon Taf
ONS Travel to Work Area: Cardiff
Postcode districts: CF3, CF23

Gary Bowen-Thomson (Lab)
Chris Cogger (LD)
Carol Falcon (PC)
Leanne Lennox (Propel)
Joe Roberts (C)
Jess Ryan (Grn)
Edward Topham (RUK)

May 2022 result Lab 1545/1470/1398 C 528/480/449 PC-Grn 367/366/278 LD 228 Propel 197/171 TUSC 80
Previous results in detail

Election Court Watch

Supporters of Reform UK might not find this week's menu much to their taste: the Cardiff ward above is probably today's best fit for that party's demographic, while the rest of this column will cover a series of young and/or trendy urban areas. In the meantime the party's newest MP Sarah Pochin has found herself dragged into the Election Court, where her win in May's Runcorn and Helsby by-election is now being challenged.

The legal challenge here does not come from Labour, who were only six votes away from holding the seat. They accept that they lost to Pochin fair and square. Instead the petition (link) has been submitted by Graham Moore, who stood in the by-election as the candidate of the English Constitution Party and finished in fifteenth and last place with a total of 50 votes. Remember that figure, it will be important later.

Moore named four respondents to the petition: the chief executive of Royal Mail (which was amended to Royal Mail Group Ltd by the High Court), the chief constable of Cheshire, Pochin and the returning officer. He is unhappy with Royal Mail for allegedly failing to deliver his leaflets, while his beef with Cheshire Constabulary includes unreasonable demands by the police to "furnish us with some more details - how many people are expected, what is the nature of the event, where was it advertised, what time will it be going on etc" and a complaint that they failed to investigate Wikipedia deleting the page for the English Constitution Party during the by-election campaign. Following a preliminary hearing in July, the High Court issued a judgment last week (link) throwing out the claims against Royal Mail and the chief constable on the grounds that these are people you can't bring an election petition against; however Pochin and the returning officer failed in their attempts to get the whole thing struck out, and the trial will proceed later this year.

No wrongdoing is alleged against Pochin or the Reform UK campaign generally. Instead Moore's ire is focused on the returning officer, who is accused of running a fraudulent and/or erroneous vote count. In support of this Moore cites interviews he gave to Widnes-based YouTuber Shaun Attwood, Andy the Gabby Cabby, former Mancunian mayoral candidate Nick Buckley and a number of other social media personalities with subscriber counts measured in five or more figures. Apparently "this amount of local social media support does not tally with 50 votes".

Moore also notes that he had stood in the Tooting by-election back in 2016 and also polled 50 votes on that occasion. He states that:

The probability of receiving exactly 50 votes in two unrelated parliamentary elections, nine years apart, in separate constituencies under councils controlled by mainstream parties (Labour and Conservative) protecting the status quo, is not just strange but impossible. The Petitioner's estimate of a 1 in 40,000 "elections" chance assumes a hypothetical scenario of standing in 40,000 by-elections or general elections, which is infeasible, rendering the identical 50-vote counts statistically implausible and indicative of deliberate fraud. The use of bundle counts (typically in 25s or 50s) likely facilitated misallocation of votes, as the 50-vote result aligns suspiciously with standard bundle sizes.

No other candidate in UK parliamentary by-elections or general elections, to the Petitioner's knowledge, has received the exact same vote total in different constituencies, reinforcing the impossibility of this result absent manipulation.

When the above paragraph was brought to the attention of one UK election discussion forum, it took less than half an hour for not one but two examples to be posted of Official Monster Raving Loony Party candidates receiving the exact same vote total in different constituencies. One of them was the late and much-missed Screaming Lord Sutch, who scored 506 votes in two different 1990s by-elections (Islwyn 1995 and South East Staffordshire 1996); while in general elections, Nick "The Incredible Flying Brick" Delves polled 162 votes against Ed Miliband in Doncaster North 2015 and another 162 votes against Keir Starmer in Holborn and St Pancras 2024. If we drop the requirement that the constituencies be different, then one Conservative candidate polled exactly 19,843 votes in both 1974 general elections: that total was enough for Tom Iremonger to win Ilford North in February, but he then lost with the same score in October. (It seems doubtful that this was the same 19,843 people both times.)

This column hasn't tried to work out the reasoning behind Moore's 1 in 40,000 figure, but probability and combinatorics in general is a field of mathematics which is full of counter-intuitive results and general traps for the unwary, and even experienced mathematicians who venture into this area regularly get confused. One reason why bookies remain consistently in business is that the general punter is usually very bad at estimating probabilities.

There's other stuff in the petition about the 1703 decision of Ashby v White and alleged violations of Bill of Rights, the European Convention on Human Rights and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which the English Constitution Party asserts applies to the English people as an indigenous group. Maybe we'll find out more about how this is relevant when the trial of Moore v Pochin gets going later this year. So keep an eye out for the next exciting occasional edition of Election Court Watch. In the meantime, we now resume our scheduled programming.

This section has been corrected: Tom Iremonger was a Conservative MP, not Labour as originally stated.

Queen's Park

Brighton and Hove council, East Sussex; caused by the resignation of Labour councillor Tristram Burden.

Would you like to take the waters? Well, this was a fashionable thing for the upper-class to do in the early 19th century. And one fashionable location for the upper-class to congregate at the time was Brighton: George IV had built the exotic Royal Pavilion as a seaside retreat, and Regency houses were sprouting up all over the town. But Brighton had no natural springs suitable for spa water.

This didn't stop one enterprising German. Frederick Struve, a doctor and chemist from Dresden, had developed a way to reproduce mineral waters by treating ordinary water with chemicals, and in 1825 he opened a pump room in Brighton from which wealthy patrons could obtain the waters from a large number of German spas (but actually from a local well). It was a great success, and William IV and Queen Adelaide became regular customers. Subsequent attempts to pass off treated local water as something more exotic have not always worked, though.

Struve also sold bottled water and fizzy drinks, and when the German Spa pump room closed in the 1850s the building was turned into a bottling plant. Hooper Struve became one of the UK's largest soft drinks firms, and production continued here until 1963. After this the pump room was eventually demolished, although its neoclassical façade was saved, and its site is now occupied by a nursery school.

The German Spa was surrounded by open space in 1825, but that didn't last for long. An enterprising developer bought up the land north of Eastern Road and had grand plans for high-status detached housing set around a park. The park was duly opened next to the spa and named Queen's Park, after Queen Adelaide; but the housing part of the plan didn't really come to fruition at the time. No matter: another 200 years of development has solved that. For the locals and anyone visiting, Queen's Park is described by the council as "perfect if you want to take a short stroll and relax".

Those taking a short stroll to the local polling station tend to be young and left-wing. This ward is part of the Brighton Kemptown and Peacehaven constituency, which has been in Labour hands since 2017: in 2024 Chris Ward took over as the seat's Labour MP following the effective deselection of the previous incumbent Lloyd Russell-Moyle. Ward had previously worked for Keir Starmer as a parliamentary researcher, and in the recent government reshuffle he is back working for his old boss as a parliamentary secretary for the Cabinet Office.

In the 2023 local elections Labour gained overall control of Brighton and Hove council, and Queen's Park was one of the wards they won in doing so: the Labour slate of Tristram Burden and Chandni Mistry won with 51% of the vote against 24% for the Green Party and 13% for a Brighton and Hove Independents candidate. The previous Queen's Park ward, which was larger than the present one and included a large chunk of the Kemptown seafront, had been closely fought between Labour and the Greens.

In December 2023 Queen's Park ward councillor Chandni Mistry, who was at the time the youngest member of Brighton and Hove council, was thrown out of the Labour party alongside her mother, Kemptown ward councillor Bharti Gajjar. The pair had been the subject of negative publicity over allegations that they did not live in the city: Mistry was at the time a student reading medicine at Lancaster University, while a Companies House filing for Gajjar gave a correspondence address in Leicester. The pair had also become embroiled in legal action in India. They both resigned from the council in early 2024 and the resulting by-elections were successfully defended by Labour in May 2024: the Queen's Park by-election saw a reduced Labour majority, with 46% for the new Labour candidate Milla Gauge, 28% for the Greens and 18% for the Brighton and Hove Independents.

No such scandal attaches to the resignation of the ward's other Labour councillor Tristram Burden, which has forced the second Queen's Park ward by-election in as many years. He has taken up a new job with the Care Quality Commission which is incompatible with his role as a councillor.

Defending for Labour this time is Simon Charleton, who is seeking to return to Brighton and Hove council after many years away: Charleton previously represented St Peter's ward from 1996 to 1999. He has recently retired as headteacher of St John's College, a specialist college for children with special educational needs, and he was awarded the British Empire Medal in the 2020 Birthday Honours for services to young people with special educational needs during Covid-19. The Green Party have selected Marina Lademacher, a teacher who is studying for a PhD in social and political thought at Sussex University. Adrian Hart, a community filmmaker who was the Brighton and Hove Independents candidate here in 2023 and the 2024 by-election, is back again and this time he is simply an independent candidate. Also standing are Sunny Choudhury for the Conservatives, Rudi Dikty-Daudiyan for the Lib Dems and John Shepherd for Reform UK.

Parliamentary constituency: Brighton Kemptown and Peacehaven
ONS Travel to Work Area: Brighton
Postcode district: BN2

Simon Charleton (Lab)
Sunny Choudhury (C)
Rudi Dikty-Daudiyan (LD)
Adrian Hart (Ind)
Marina Lademacher (Grn)
John Shepherd (RUK)

May 2024 by-election Lab 1241 Grn 766 Brighton and Hove Ind 449 C 168 LD 67
May 2023 result Lab 1822/1702 Grn 856/682 Brighton and Hove Ind 467 C 266 LD 163
Previous results in detail

Plaistow South

Newham council, London; caused by the death of Labour councillor Neil Wilson.

We now travel into the capital for another Labour defence in a safe ward. Plaistow (pronunciation guide: "Plah-stow") can be found to the south-east of West Ham, and it's one of those London suburbs whose history reads like the stuff of urban legend. Even the name is up for dispute: "stow" is an Old English word for "place", but the "Plai" has been variously interpreted as a reference to the former lords of the manor (the de Plaiz family) or a place where plays - specifically miracle plays - were performed.

Whatever the history of this particular place, Plaistow really got going with urbanisation and industrialisation in the 19th century. The South ward mostly dates from that era with its Victorian and Edwardian terraces, lying between the Barking Road to the north, the A13 arterial road to the south and Boundary Road or Boundary Lane, the old dividing line between West and East Ham, to the east. The Greenway, a foot and cycle path lying on top of the Northern Outfall sewer, divides the ward into two parts: to the north are closely-packed terraces radiating from the New City Road, while the south-east corner of the ward is dominated by the Newham University Hospital and the Terence McMillan Stadium. The latter is a centre for athletics and football, and it is home to the Newham and Essex Beagles athletic club and Athletic Newham FC, who play their football five divisions below the EFL in the Essex Senior League.

The Terence McMillan stadium is named after the first mayor of the London Borough of Newham, which was created in the 1965 reorganisation of London's local government as a merger of the former county boroughs of West Ham and East Ham into a New Ham. Newham council has been under Labour control continuously since 1971, and Labour won every single seat here in the local elections of 2010, 2014 and 2018, but that streak is nothing compared to parliamentary level where Plaistow has had only Labour MPs since 1906.

It says something for just how densely populated this area was in the early twentieth century that in the inter-war period the old West Ham county borough had four members of Parliament. The result of this was a Plaistow parliamentary seat, which was one of the safest Labour seats in the country throughout its 1918-50 existence. Its first contest in 1918 set the tone: trade unionist Will Thorne, who had represented the predecessor seat of West Ham South since 1906, polled almost 95% of the vote - a record for a Labour parliamentary candidate which still stands today - against Arnold Lupton, a mining engineer and prominent antivaxxer who had spent time in prison during the First World War for distributing pacifist leaflets. Although Lupton had previously been the Liberal MP for Sleaford from 1906 to 1910, he did not get that party's endorsement on this occasion and he stood as an independent Liberal. Will Thorne was re-elected six more times as MP for Plaistow - in the Labour nadir year of 1931 he was elected unopposed - and he eventually retired from the Commons in 1945, when he was 87 years old. It was during Thorne's time as Plaistow's MP, in 1924, that he founded the trade union which we now call the GMB.

Thorne stood down in 1945 and was succeeded by Elwyn Jones, who spent much of his first two years in office as part of the British prosecution team at the Nuremberg trials. He was a senior law officer throughout both Wilson governments and the Callaghan administration, serving as Attorney General from 1964 to 1970 (and leading the prosecution of the Moors Murderers) and then leaving the Commons in 1974 to become Lord Chancellor for the next five years. Other famous past MPs for the modern Plaistow South ward include Tony Banks, who represented the area from 1997 to 2005, and none other than Keir Hardie whose parliamentary career began when he gained West Ham South from the Conservatives in 1892.

The present MP for this area is James Asser, who rose from the position of deputy mayor of Newham to become the first Labour MP for West Ham and Beckton in July 2024. Second place in that election went to Sophia Naqvi, who had won a by-election in Plaistow North ward in November 2023 as an independent candidate and stood for Parliament last year with the nomination of the Newham Independents. Naqvi's win came just after the current Gaza war kicked off, but the current strong independent vote in Newham actually predates Hamas' 7th October attacks: Labour had already lost a by-election to another independent candidate in Boleyn ward in July 2023. The Newham Labour redwash had previously been broken in 2022, when the party lost the all-new Stratford Olympic Park ward to the Greens. Mind, the Newham Independents haven't had it all their own way since then: in 2024 Labour held all of Newham's parliamentary seats and four council by-elections in the borough.

Demographically, Plaistow South is the sort of area that the far-right love to hate with a very multicultural ethnic makeup and a White British population of only 17.7%. The ward is in the top 50 wards in England and Wales for residents born in Bulgaria or Romania (8.3%) and in the top 20 for residents employed in the administrative or support services sector (10.7%). In the 2022 local elections, which had no independent candidate, Labour polled 55% of the vote against 17% for the Conservatives and 16% for the Green Party.

This by-election is to replace the longest-serving member of Newham council. Despite that, Neil Wilson held the dubious distinction of being the last Labour candidate to lose an election in this area: he came second to the Conservatives in a 1991 by-election for Bemersyde ward, which then covered the northern part of the present Plaistow South. Wilson was then elected in 1994 for Hudsons ward (the southern part of this area) and had served continuously since then, transferring to Plaistow South ward on its creation in 2002. He was Newham's cabinet member for health and adult social care when he died in July. Wilson had worked as a teacher before entering politics, and he was a lifelong high church Anglican who worshipped and was a trustee at St Alban the Martyr in Holborn.

Defending this seat for Labour is Asheem Singh, who describes himself on his LinkedIn as an "AI founder, author, educator, investor and entrepreneur"; he has previously advised the UK government on civil society and tech policy, and he is a director of a group called Compost Newham which is a local support hub for the voluntary sector. The Conservatives have reselected Rois (or Roy) Miah who previously stood in this ward in 2018 and 2022: he works in financial services and he is the chairman of the local party branch. Standing for the Greens is Nic Motte, who works in the film and TV sector: hie IMDB profile lists him as a director of five short films. Also standing are Sheree Miller for the Lib Dems, Md Nazrul Islam (who used to be in the Conservatives and finished as runner-up in this ward in 2018 on their ticket) as the Newham Independents candidate, and Lazar Monu for Reform UK.

Parliamentary constituency: West Ham and Beckton
London Assembly constituency: City and East
ONS Travel to Work Area: London
Postcode districts: E13, E16

Md Nazrul Islam (Newham Inds)
Rois Miah (C)
Sheree Miller (LD)
Lazar Monu (RUK)
Nic Motte (Grn)
Asheem Singh (Lab)

May 2022 result Lab 1360/1292/1284 C 430/345/331 Grn 390/334/328 LD 279
Previous results in detail

Kenilworth Park Hill; and
Leamington Clarendon

Warwick council; caused respectively by the resignations of Green Party councillor Lara Cron and Labour councillor Helen Adkins.

We finish for the week by considering by-elections in two towns which are geographically in the Midlands but socially part of the affluent South. This is particularly true in the case of Kenilworth, which is a commuter town for cities like Coventry and Birmingham. Park Hill, which is the eastern of Kenilworth's three wards, is a riot of development right now: new houses are going up on the eastern fringes of the town next to the secondary school, while the High Speed 2 railway line is taking shape through the ward's north-east corner. In the 2021 census Kenilworth Park Hill made the top 75 wards in England and Wales for residents employed in the education sector: the University of Warwick, whose campus is just a couple of miles away on the edge of Coventry, will be a major contributor to this statistic.

Many of the University's students commute to the campus from Royal Leamington Spa to the south, and Clarendon is Leam's town centre ward. Unlike the "German Spa" we encountered earlier in Brighton, the mineral waters of Leamington Spa were the real thing. The Pump Rooms building, which now serves as a museum and art gallery, still exists next to the river at the bottom of the Parade.

The Parade is the town's main shopping street, and its terraces are as Georgian as they come. It's also the main route for buses to the University, although Clarendon's student population of around 21% isn't as high as some other Leam wards. (Also, Warwick's 2025-26 year hasn't started yet so this statistic will be misleading right now.)

The Pump Rooms opened in 1814 at a time when Leam was one of the fastest-growing towns in the country. Their architect also developed the Regent Hotel partway up the Parade, which in 1882 was the location where Warwickshire county cricket club was founded. If you want to stay in the Regent yourself, you can and doing so probably won't break the bank: following a refurbishment in 2003-05 it's now part of the Travelodge group, and it has much more generously-sized rooms than your average budget hotel.

Next to the Regent is Leamington Spa Town Hall, opened in 1884 and with a large statue of Queen Victoria outside it. Victoria's statue is slightly off the centre of its plinth, having been shifted sideways by a German bomb which exploded nearby in 1940.

One exception to all this Georgian gorgeousness is Leamington Spa's railway station, which was rebuilt in the late 1930s in the Art Deco style. Chiltern Railways, who now run the station as part of their London-Birmingham route, have paid tribute to this by decorating the station with vintage Great Western Railway and British Rail posters.

Leamington Spa is part of the Warwick and Leamington parliamentary seat, which has swung a long way to the left since it returned the Conservative prime minister Anthony Eden to parliament. Like Brighton Kemptown and Peacehaven above, Warwick and Leamington was gained by Labour in 2017 and shows no sign of going back to the Conservatives; its MP since 2017 has been Labour backbencher Matt Western. On the Parliamentary map Warwick and Leamington is completely surrounded by the Kenilworth and Southam constituency, which is now the only remaining Conservative seat in Warwickshire: Sir Jeremy Wright has represented this and the predecessor seat of Rugby and Kenilworth since 2005, and he served in Cabinet under Cameron and May as Attorney General and then culture secretary.

Warwick district, which covers both Kenilworth and Leamington Spa, was the only West Midlands district to vote to remain in the EU and it continues to have rather strange politics for the region. This is the only West Midlands district led by the Green Party, who run the council in coalition with Labour. The latest composition has 15 Green councillors plus the Kenilworth vacancy, 10 Lib Dems, 6 Labour plus the Leamington vacancy, 5 Conservatives, 3 members of the Whitnash Residents' Association and 3 ex-Labour independents. The defection of the latter group means that the Green-Labour coalition needs to hold both of these by-elections to preserve its council majority.

The Green total includes Kenilworth Park Hill ward, which has been in the party's hands since the current ward boundaries were introduced in 2019. Vote shares here in May 2023 were 48% for the Green Party, 28% for the Conservatives and 13% for Labour. Lara Cron, who was elected here in second place in 2023, is standing down because she is moving away from the district.

Handily this ward has the same boundaries as the Kenilworth Park Hill division of Warwickshire county council, which in May gave 44% to the Green Party, 26% to the Conservatives and 16% to Reform UK. Reform UK are the largest party on Warwickshire county council and they run a minority administration, having failed to win a single seat in Warwick district in May.

Leamington Clarendon ward appears to have a season ticket for Andrew's Previews, as this is the fourth by-election here in the last five years. It's to replace Labour councillor Helen Adkins, who won the last by-election here in May 2024 but resigned abruptly in July, not just from the council but also from the council cabinet where she held the housing portfolio. Warwick council's Labour group put out a statement blaming her departure on bullying and poor behaviour by the council's Green leadership.

Clarendon has voted Labour at both ordinary elections and all three previous by-elections since the current boundaries were introduced in 2019. In the 2023 ordinary elections Labour polled 49% against 19% for the Greens and 16% for the Lib Dems; the 2024 by-election had 52% for Labour, 17% for the Conservatives and 15% for the Lib Dems. However, in May's county elections the Liberal Democrats narrowly gained the Leamington Clarendon county division - which is slightly larger than this ward - from Labour.

So Leamington Clarendon may be a more difficult defence than it looks for Labour's Chris Knight, who works in the criminal justice system: he stood in Leamington Brunswick division in May's county elections. The Conservatives have selected Dominic Smith, who appears to be fighting his first election campaign: according to the excellent website Who Can I Vote For, his favourite biscuit is "anything but a Rich Tea". Standing for the Lib Dems is Raina Deo, who is a health and wellbeing specialist. Also on the ballot are Abi Underwood for the Green Party, left-wing independent Megan Clarke and Reform UK's Nigel Clarke. (I assume they are not related.)

In Kenilworth Park Hill the defending Green candidate is Alison Firth, a former mayor of Kenilworth who was the Greens' parliamentary candidate for Kenilworth and Southam back in 2019. The Conservative challenger is again Malcolm Graham, who was runner-up here in the 2023 Warwick election and the 2025 county election. Labour have selected Nicola Jones, who stood elsewhere in May's county elections: she runs a small business working with construction companies and lawyers. Also standing here are two more unsuccessful candidates for the county council in May, John Dubber for the Lib Dems and Timothy Wade for Reform UK.

Kenilworth Park Hill

Parliamentary constituency: Kenilworth and Southam
Warwickshire county council division: Kenilworth Park Hill
ONS Travel to Work Area: Leamington Spa
Postcode district: CV8

John Dubber (LD)
Alison Firth (Grn)
Malcolm Graham (C)
Nicola Jones (Lab)
Timothy Wade (RUK)

May 2025 county council result Grn 1365 C 794 RUK 485 LD 268 Lab 141 Ind 47
May 2023 result Grn 1838/1585/1333 C 1066/971/846 Lab 491 LD 436/404/214
May 2021 county council result Grn 1983 C 1153 LD 225 Lab 223
May 2019 result Grn 1629/1483/1477 C 1177/1097/1041 LD 345/338 Lab 286/268/220
May 2017 county council result C 1591 LD 699 Lab 390 Grn 317
Previous results in detail

Leamington Clarendon

Parliamentary constituency: Warwick and Leamington
Warwickshire county council division: Leamington Clarendon
ONS Travel to Work Area: Leamington Spa
Postcode districts: CV31, CV32

Megan Clarke (Ind)
Nigel Clarke (RUK)
Raina Deo (LD)
Chris Knight (Lab)
Dominic Smith (C)
Abi Underwood (Grn)

May 2024 result Lab 1267 C 407 LD 365 Grn 362 UKIP 50
May 2023 result Lab 1480/1427/1302 Grn 569 LD 493/441/427 C 482/425/409
June 2022 by-election Lab 1064 LD 612 C 365 Grn 105 UKIP 24
May 2021 by-election Lab 1370 C 761 LD 539 Grn 431 Ind 103 SDP 16
May 2019 result Lab 1021/977/896 LD 873/817/784 C 520/520/504 Grn 360/357/332 UKIP 188
Previous results in detail

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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