Previewing the four local by-elections of 25th September 2025
"All the right votes, but not necessarily in the right order"
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Four by-elections on 25th September 2025:
Caol and Mallaig; and
Tain and Easter Ross
Highland council, Scotland; caused respectively by the resignations of Scottish Green Party councillor Andrew Baldrey and Scottish National Party councillor Derek Louden.
It’s by Shiel water the track is to the west
By Ailort and by Morar to the sea.- Traditional, The Road to the Isles
Today’s edition of Andrew’s Previews is going to be a Green special, with three of today’s four by-elections being triggered by the resignation of Green councillors. The other seat up for election is defended by the Scottish National Party in the Highland council area, which accounts for the first half of this week’s Previews. Both of these are in wards which this column has visited before: and in one case, after writing about the place in 2018 your columnist was inspired to take a visit in person in spring last year. As you’ll see from the pictures, the weather was glorious.
The Caol and Mallaig ward is larger than several European countries, containing almost 800 square miles of mostly inhospitable mountains. The mountains are cut through by glens and lochs and they run down to the Atlantic coast, along which most of the local population lives.
For those who don’t know Gaelic, Caol is not pronounced “kale” but instead is something closer to “curl”. It is essentially a suburb of Fort William which can be found at the head of Loch Linnhe and at the bottom of Neptune’s Staircase, a series of locks at the southern end of the Caledonian Canal. Caol and the nearby villages of Corpach and Banavie form the main population centre in Caol and Mallaig ward, accounting for just over half of the 7,206 electors. To the east the ward covers the southern half of the Great Glen along with the side valleys of Glen Spean and Glen Garry.
But it’s to the west of Caol that generations have journeyed along the Road to the Isles, through Glenfinnan to Arisaig, Morar and finally Mallaig, where the road and railway line terminate at a small harbour. The only way from here to the rest of the ward is by sea, whether it’s offshore to the Small Isles of Eigg, Muck, Rùm or Canna, or eastwards to Knoydart. Knoydart’s 123 electors may live on the Scottish mainland, but they are cut off from the UK’s road network by impassable mountains and deeply indented sealochs: unless you fancy a 16-mile hike over very rugged terrain, the only way in or out is by boat to Mallaig.
The poor quality of the Road to the Isles, which was still single-track in places until as late as 2009, meant that the railway line to Mallaig survived the Beeching Report which had recommended it for closure. The wider West Highland line from Mallaig to Glasgow is internationally recognised as one of the most scenic railway journeys in the world.
But the railway runs at an enormous loss. So, back in 1984 British Rail decided to encourage tourists by reintroducing steam on the Fort William-Mallaig route in summer. This was a success; no doubt helped by the train appearing in the Harry Potter films under the disguise of the Hogwarts Express, the “Jacobite” - as the service is now called - brings thousands of people to the area each summer.
An appropriate name, for this is the place where the 1745 Jacobite rebellion started. The Young Pretender landed on the mainland at Loch nan Uamh, near Arisaig, and raised his standard at Glenfinnan. Rumours have persisted for centuries that the Jacobite treasure is buried somewhere near Loch Arkaig, an offshoot of the Great Glen. The rising was of course eventually put down, but for many years afterwards the Highlands were essentially bandit country that tied the British Army down while it might have been doing something else. One of the figures who benefitted from this was James Wolfe, who learned how to command a regiment here before finding fame at Quebec in the hour of his death.
Rather different in character is a ward on the other coast of the Highlands which seems to have a season ticket for this column. The Royal Burgh of Tain is one of the largest towns in Ross-shire, with 3,173 electors on the roll. The polling station here is the Duthac Centre, whose name recalls Tain’s mediaeval status as a pilgrimage centre for a rather obscure saint called St Duthac. James IV made this pilgrimage regularly.
Unlike Mallaig, Tain is by no means the end of the line. It’s just one stop on the A9 road and the Far North railway line up the eastern seaboard from Inverness, and its main export is whisky from the large Glenmorangie distillery. Glenmorangie has for many years been Scotland’s best-selling single malt, but the profits from this no longer stay in Scotland; the distillery was bought in 2004 by the French luxury goods group Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy.
The ward based on Tain also takes in a large section of the relatively flat and fertile countryside of Easter Ross. Here we can find the Seaboard villages (Hilton of Cadboll, Balintore and Shandwick) and the small west-facing harbour of Portmahomack.
Both of these wards were created in 2007 when Scottish local elections went over to proportional representation. The first poll for Tain and Easter Ross ward re-elected the three previous councillors for the area, all of whom had previously represented single-member wards: they were Richard Durham as a Lib Dem, and Alasdair Rhind and Alan Torrance as independents. Torrance subsequently joined the SNP. He died in 2011 and the resulting by-election was won by independent candidate Fiona Robertson.
The balance of two independents and one Lib Dem was maintained in 2012, but this time the Lib Dem councillor was veteran politician Jamie Stone, who had been the MSP for the local seat of Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross from 1999 to 2011. He had lost his Holyrood seat to the SNP the previous year. Outgoing Lib Dem councillor Richard Durham unsuccessfully sought re-election as an independent, finishing fifth.
In May 2017 independent Fiona Robertson and Lib Dem Stone were re-elected, but Alasdair Rhind lost his seat to the Scottish National Party candidate Derek Louden. A month later councillor Jamie Stone was elected to the House of Commons as the Lib Dem MP for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross, a seat which he still holds today having overcome adverse boundary changes in 2024. Stone is now chair of the House of Commons petitions committee. He resigned from the Highland council after his election to Westminster, and Alasdair Rhind then returned to the council by winning the resulting by-election in September 2017 easily (Andrew’s Previews 2017, page 257).
The Scottish National Party hold the similar Holyrood seat of Caithness, Sutherland and Ross, which has returned three different MSPs in its last three elections. The current incumbent Maree Todd, who transferred here in 2021 after being a Highlands and Islands regional MSP in the previous term, is a Scottish Government minister with responsibility for drugs and alcohol policy, and sport: a combination which will no doubt raise eyebrows among the people running sport’s anti-doping efforts. Todd took over the drugs and alcohol job in a June reshuffle, following the death of the previous portfolio holder Christina McKelvie.
The 2022 election in Tain and Easter Ross saw the balance of SNP, Lib Dem and independent councillors restored following the Lib Dem by-election loss in 2017. The SNP councillor Derek Louden was re-elected on the first count with 31% of the vote, and the other two seats went to the Lib Dems’ Sarah Rawlings with 22% and Alasdair Rhind with 21%. Fiona Robertson polled 16% and lost her seat.
Tain and Easter Ross’ Lib Dem councillor Sarah Rawlings then stood down from the Highland council after a year on health grounds. The resulting by-election in September 2023 was gained by independent candidate Maureen Ross, who led in the first round with 41% against 24% for the Lib Dems and 19% for the SNP; Ross pulled further away on transfers to enjoy a final majority over the Lib Dems of 62-38.
In 2024 independent councillor Alasdair Rhind died at the age of 65. He had been a funeral director by trade, so hopefully his colleagues gave him a fitting sendoff. The resulting by-election in June 2024 was won by new independent candidate Laura Dundas, a restaurateur. Dundas polled 36% of the first preferences against 25% each for the SNP and the Lib Dems; the Lib Dems got into the final two thanks to minor party transfers, but Dundas then pulled away to win by 57-43. The results of these by-elections will not be encouraging for the SNP, who will now have to defend the third Tain and Easter Ross by-election in as many years - and the fifth in total - following the retirement of Derek Louden who was the ward’s last remaining councillor from the 2022 election.
The tradition of voting for independent councillors in Caol and Mallaig ward proved harder to break down, and the first two contests here in 2007 and 2012 returned a full slate of three independents: Bill Clark, Allan Henderson and Eddie Hunter. This was justified by the vote shares: in the 2012 Caol and Mallaig election the five independent candidates polled 81% of the first preferences between them. Hunter resigned in 2014 as he was moving away from the area, and his seat was held in the by-election by new independent candidate Ben Thompson. Clark retired at the 2017 election, and his seat went to the SNP’s Billy MacLachlan who became the ward’s first party political councillor since proportional representation was introduced. Henderson topped the poll with 28%, the SNP and Thompson had 24% each and runner-up was Lib Dem candidate Denis Rixson, some way behind on 9%.
Sadly, the SNP’s Billy MacLachlan died within a year of his election. The resulting Caol and Mallaig by-election in April 2018 saw a poor choice of defending candidate for the SNP, who gave an address in a Wester Ross hamlet over 90 miles by road from Caol and 130 miles from Mallaig. This time the Lib Dems’ Denis Rixson, a bookshop owner and retired teacher from Mallaig, topped the poll with 31% of the first preferences against 27% for the SNP and 21% for independent candidate Colin “Woody” Wood; after Wood and other candidates’ votes had been redistributed, Rixson pulled away to win the by-election with a 57-43 margin over the SNP.
That was the most recent contest for Caol and Mallaig ward. All three outgoing councillors (two independents and one Lib Dem) retired at the 2022 Highland council elections, at which only three candidates stood for the ward: Andrew Baldrey for the Scottish Green Party, John Grafton for the Liberal Democrats and Liz Saggers for the Conservatives. Because there were three candidates to fill three seats, no poll was needed and Baldrey, Grafton and Saggers were declared elected unopposed. The Local Elections Archive Project’s map for the 2022 Highland council election has filled in Caol and Mallaig ward using the Scottish Green colour, because the Green candidate’s surname was first alphabetically.
Caol and Mallaig ward’s geography creates unusual challenges for electoral administrators. Rùm, Muck and Canna don’t have polling stations and their inhabitants traditionally vote by post. Knoydart and Eigg do have polling stations, but their ballot boxes will have to be put on the boat to Mallaig for onward transport to the count. Under those circumstances it’s not surprising that the counts for these by-elections aren’t starting until Friday morning. Both counts are taking place in Drumnadrochit, halfway up the Great Glen on the shores of Loch Ness.
The rules for Westminster elections don’t allow counts to be held over until the daylight hours: returning officers are required to start counting within four hours of the close of poll or be prepared to justify themselves to the Electoral Commission. The Commission’s report on the 2024 Westminster election duly named and shamed eight constituencies which missed the 2am deadline to start counting: they were Orkney and Shetland, the two seats covering Angus, the two seats covering Dumfries and Galloway, North Northumberland, and the Essex constituencies of Braintree and Witham. Most of these are understandable in the sense that they are rural seats which cover huge areas where it will take a very long time to get all the ballot boxes in, although one wonders what Braintree council’s excuse was for taking more than five hours to finish the verification stage in the two constituencies they were responsible for counting.
The Highland returning officer managed to avoid being put on this list, which is no mean feat given that he is responsible for delivering elections in some of the UK’s largest and most far-flung constituencies. Some special and probably expensive arrangements must have been made to get those overseas ballot boxes from Eigg and Knoydart in promptly for the 2024 count in the Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire constituency. And then the returning officer must have wondered why he bothered, because the count for that seat ended up going so badly wrong that it had to be adjourned and a full recount had to be performed on the Saturday after the election to sort all the discrepancies out. The eventual declaration saw the Lib Dems’ Angus Macdonald win the Westminster seat with a majority of 2,160 votes over the SNP. Macdonald subsequently resigned his previous Highland council seat, and the Lib Dems successfully defended the resulting by-election in Fort William and Ardnamurchan ward.
These results may be of some concern for the SNP, who will have to defend the Holyrood seat of Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch in next year’s Scottish Parliament elections with a new candidate. The Deputy First Minister Kate Forbes, who has represented the seat since 2016 and holds the economy and Gaelic portfolios in the Scottish Cabinet, is not seeking re-election to the Parliament in 2026.
The SNP also lead the Highland council, which they run with coalition with independent councillors. The 2022 Highland elections returned 22 SNP councillors, 21 independents, 15 Lib Dems, 10 Conservatives, 4 Greens and 2 Labour councillors, although a number of by-election and defection changes since then mean that independent councillors now have a plurality.
There will be a further change to the council composition as a result of the Caol and Mallaig by-election, which is prompted by the resignation of Scottish Green councillor Andrew Baldrey last month. Baldrey appears to have stood as a paper candidate and never seriously expected to be elected three years ago, and the excellent Ballot Box Scotland blog reports that he has now stood down on health grounds.
The Scottish Greens have only ever won one council by-election - in Hillhead ward in Glasgow last year, which was a gain from Labour - and I think this is the first time they have ever had to defend a council by-election. If so, their attempt to hold the seat has fallen at the first hurdle because there is no defending Green candidate in Caol and Mallaig. We have a free-for-all!
Top of the poll here on the last occasion Caol and Mallaig went to the polls in the 2018 by-election were the Liberal Democrats, whose candidate Isla Campbell comes to elected politics from 30 years in the police, including a previous role as the local policing inspector for Lochaber. The Conservatives, who hold the ward’s other seat, have selected Donald Mackenzie: he is an accountant who regularly stands in faraway Inverness Central ward. The SNP, who unaccountably failed to stand here in 2022, have made no mistake this time by nominating former RAF figure Aaron Taylor. Independent candidate Allan Henderson, who lives in Glenfinnan, is seeking to get his seat back after standing down at the last election: Henderson was an independent councillor for this ward from 2007 to 2022 and he topped the poll here in the 2012 and 2017 elections. Two other independents on the ballot are Sammy Cameron, who has recently retired from running the fish and chip shop in Caol, and Matthew Prosser who is also based in Caol and has previously worked for Highland council. Ryan Forbes, who stood in the 2022 Highland council election as the Tory candidate for Inverness West and has contested two subsequent by-elections on the eastern seaboard as a Conservative, is now standing here with the Reform UK nomination; and Labour’s Michael Perera has been a frequent feature in Highland council by-elections over this term with - so far - a complete lack of success. He completes a list of eight candidates.
We have a shorter ballot paper on the east coast in Tain and Easter Ross with six candidates standing. Here the SNP are defending the seat with their candidate Peter Newman, a qualified rugby union referee and football coach who works a teacher at the Dornoch Academy secondary school and is on the board of Tain’s St Duthac Books and Arts Festival, whose 2025 edition was earlier this month. Newman, whose current ability to pound the streets of Tain and its hinterland may be impaired by the effects of a recent hip replacement operation, would appear to be a fairly recent recruit to the Nationalist cause: in the 2024 Westminster election he was the Scottish Greens’ candidate for Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire, and his LinkedIn page also lists previous roles from some years earlier in the local branch of the Liberal Democrats. The last two by-elections here have both been won by independent candidates, and hoping to make it 3 out of 3 is Eric Nimmons, a butcher from Portmahomack; he has been endorsed by the 2023 by-election winner Maureen Ross who is acting as his election agent. The Liberal Democrat candidate is notable enough for Wikipedia: Connie Ramsay is a former British judo champion who won a bronze medal in the women’s 57kg category at the 2014 Glasgow Commonwealth Games, and she now works in personal fitness and as a retained firefighter. Manuel Androulakakis for the Conservatives, Andrew Barnett for the Greens and Stuart Wilson for Reform UK complete the ballot paper in Tain and Easter Ross. Both Highland council polls today are Scottish local by-elections, so Votes at 16 and the Alternative Vote apply: please remember to rank the candidates on your ballot paper in order of preference.
Caol and Mallaig
Westminster constituency: Inverness, Skye and West Ross-shire
Holyrood constituency: Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch
ONS Travel to Work Area: Fort William
Postcode districts: PH31, PH33, PH34, PH35, PH37, PH38, PH39, PH40, PH41, PH42, PH43, PH44
Sammy Cameron (Ind)
Isla Campbell (LD)
Ryan Forbes (RUK)
Allan Henderson (Ind)
Donald Mackenzie (C)
Michael Perara (Lab)
Matthew Prosser (Ind)
Aaron Taylor (SNP)
May 2022 result Grn/LD/C unopposed
April 2018 by-election LD 658 SNP 574 Ind 45 C 183 Ind 146 Ind 98; final LD 968 SNP 737
May 2017 first preferences Ind 917 SNP 778 Ind 767 LD 304 C 256 Lab 181 Ind 30
Previous results in detail
Tain and Easter Ross
Westminster constituency: Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross
Holyrood constituency: Caithness, Sutherland and Ross
ONS Travel to Work Area: Alness and Invergordon
Postcode districts: IV18, IV19, IV20
Manuel Androulakakis (C)
Andrew Barnett (Grn)
Peter Newman (SNP)
Eric Nimmons (Ind)
Connie Ramsay (LD)
Stuart Wilson (RUK)
June 2024 by-election Ind 895 SNP 630 LD 621 C 134 Grn 89 Ind 89 Libertarian 25; top 3 Ind 987 LD 708 SNP 689; final Ind 1179 LD 890
September 2023 by-election Ind 1022 LD 603 SNP 464 C 207 Lab 88 Grn 56 Libertarian 23; final Ind 1312 LD 801
May 2022 first preferences SNP 1051 LD 739 Ind 726 Ind 554 C 364
September 2017 by-election Ind 1266 SNP 612 LD 372 C 233 Ind 68 Libertarian 13; final Ind 1290 SNP 634 LD 387 C 243
May 2017 first preferences SNP 831 Ind 708 LD 679 Ind 569 C 558 Ind 139
Previous results in detail
Woodhouse Park
Manchester council; caused by the resignation of Green Party councillor Anastasia Wiest.
Our two English by-elections today are both defended by the Green Party of England and Wales, but that’s where the similarities between the wards end. Demographically they are chalk and cheese. And don’t let the fact that one of them is in the city of Manchester confuse you, because Woodhouse Park ward does not fit the stereotype of trendy young urban educated professionals or students - in fact, only 5.3% of the workforce here are in higher managerial or professional occupations. Woodhouse Park is in the top 100 wards in England and Wales for people employed in administration and support services (8.8% of the workforce) and for socially-rented housing (47.5% of households).
The latter statistic is instructive. Ordnance Survey maps from a century ago show Woodhouse Park as a country hamlet in rural Cheshire, a couple of miles to the west of Heald Green railway station; but this was before Manchester Corporation started to develop a strong claimant for the title of Europe’s largest council estate. Today Woodhouse Park is the southern of the five wards covering Wythenshawe.
The ward’s housing lies immediately to the south of Wythenshawe Civic Centre, which is not a centre for local government - Wythenshawe has never been an independent town - but rather is a 1960s shopping mall. The Civic Centre was bought back by the city council in 2022, and they have plans for it.
In 2014 Wythenshawe’s transport connections were seriously improved by the opening of a Metrolink tram line to the city centre, which gives Woodhouse Park ward something of the flavour of a European suburb with its garden city-type housing and sleek trams passing by.
There are five tram stops within the boundary of Woodhouee Park ward, including the Wythenshawe Town Centre tram stop next to the Civic Centre and the line’s terminus. Which brings us to the elephant in the room.
Woodhouse Park ward has a far higher acreage than any other Manchester ward. The reason for this is because the ward includes all the terminals and other buildings, the apron and the original runway of Manchester Airport. Opened in 1938 and originally known as Ringway Airport, this is the busiest airport in the north of England, handling over 30 million passengers in 2024 with just under 200,000 plane movements on its two runways. Last year the airport’s busiest three routes - to Dubai, Amsterdam and Dublin - had over a million passengers each. The Manchester Airport Group, which also owns Stansted and East Midlands airports, collectively handled one-fifth of the UK’s air passengers in 2024.
The airport has essentially swallowed the parish of Ringway, which was annexed by Manchester in 1974. Ringway parish does still exist, but according to the notice of poll for this by-election only 59 people are registered to vote there. And they will have to trek into Woodhouse Park proper to reach their polling station.
In 1993 Manchester Airport gained its own railway station, which originally had two platforms. It now has six: four for mainline trains and two for trams (although the Metrolink only use one platform in normal service), with a total of 8 trains and 5 trams to central Manchester every hour. Manchester Airport station is an important terminus for Northern and for Transpennine Express, who operate long-distance trains from here as far as Teeside and Scotland. When the Airport tram line opened it originally had a special early morning service, with trams commencing at 4am to get the airport’s morning shift into work, but this ceased with the COVID lockdowns and has not been reinstated.
Another effect of the COVID lockdown is that the airport’s dividend abruptly disappeared. The Manchester Airport Group is majority-owned by the ten Greater Manchester councils, with Manchester city council having the largest single stake of 32.25%, and until 2020 its dividends were worth tens of millions of pounds each year to Greater Manchester’s local government. The loss of the dividend here hasn’t had the dramatic effect on local government seen in Luton, whose council wholly owns Luton Airport and had to be bailed out by central government as a result of the pandemic, but it hasn’t exactly been helpful.
Since 1955 Wythenshawe has been large enough to be the centre of its own parliamentary constituency. Manchester Wythenshawe voted Conservative until 1964, which is mostly explained by the fact that the seat then included Didsbury, but it and its successor seats have been in Labour hands since then. The present Wythenshawe and Sale East constituency has been represented by Labour’s Mike Kane since he won a by-election in 2014; following the 2024 election Kane became a junior minister in the Department of Transport, with responsibility for aviation, maritime and security, but he left the frontbench in the reshuffle earlier this month.
The Labour party have traditionally dominated local elections in Wythenshawe as they do in the rest of the city. Manchester city council has had a Labour majority continuously since 1971 and for much of the 2010s it had a full slate of 96 out of 96 Labour councillors. The redwash has been broken in recent years, but the latest composition still has 86 Labour councillors against 4 Lib Dems, 2 Greens plus this vacancy, 2 ex-Labour independents and 1 councillor elected for George Galloway’s Workers’ Party of Britain.
When the city’s current ward boundaries were introduced in 2018, there was nothing out of the ordinary in Woodhouse Park’s election result of 69% for Labour and 18% for the Conservatives. But in 2019 the Green Party gave the ward a go and finished a strong second, and they broke through in 2021. Four years later Woodhouse Park ward now has a full slate of three Green councillors, with the 2024 election giving 59% to the Green Party and 33% to Labour. There is precedent for the Greens to do well in deprived outlying council estates - they have been a presence in local government for some years now in the tower blocks of Castle Bromwich to the east of Birmingham - but it’s still a rather rare phenomenon, and the Greens haven’t shown much sign to date of breaking through in other Manchester wards.
So this by-election might be telling. It’s to replace Anastasia Wiest, who was elected here in 2023 and was leader of Manchester’s Green group. Wiest’s resignation statement indicated some frustration with her experience on the council, which she described as a “deeply flawed forum”.
Defending this seat for the Greens is Zoe Marlow, who is a single parent living with a disability. She is fighting her first election campaign, as is the Labour candidate Roger Beattie. Also on the ballot are Stephen Carlton-Woods for the Conservatives, Seb Bate for the Lib Dems and Johnathan Hendren for Reform UK. Hopefully the campaign teams are having better luck with the electorate than I had with this resident of Woodhouse Park, who wouldn’t tell me how they were going to vote.
Parliamentary constituency: Wythenshawe and Sale East
ONS Travel to Work Area: Manchester
Postcode districts: M22, M90, WA15
Seb Bate (LD)
Roger Beattie (Lab)
Stephen Carlton-Woods (C)
Johnathan Hendren (RUK)
Zoe Marlow (Grn)
May 2024 result Grn 1580 Lab 890 C 130 LD 71
May 2023 result Grn 1252 Lab 1106 C 137 LD 34
May 2022 result Grn 1345 Lab 1150 C 160 LD 46
May 2021 result Grn 1355 Lab 1180 C 244 LD 42
May 2019 result Lab 1149 Grn 771 C 195 LD 79
May 2018 result Lab 1336/1285/1246 C 349/296/286 Grn 145 LD 99/92/86
Previous results in detail
Rolvenden and Tenterden West
Ashford council, Kent; caused by the resignation of Green Party councillor Kate Walder.
We’ll finish for the week with a Green Party defence in a very different area to Wythenshawe. In fact, nearly all of this ward on the southern border of Kent lies within the High Weald National Landscape, “National Landscape” being the newish term for what were previously known as “areas of outstanding natural beauty”. Mind, not all of this ward is rolling hills: the small parish of Newenden at the southern end of the ward lies on low-lying ground next to the River Rother.
Most of this ward’s acreage is taken up by the parish of Rolvenden, which lies on the main road between Ashford and Hastings. This is an old village which goes back to Domesday. Its church, dedicated to St Mary the Virgin and little changed since the fifteenth century, once had as its incumbent John Frankesh who was burned at the stake in Canterbury in 1555 as a Protestant martyr.
To the west is the country house of Hole Park, whose gardens are regularly opened to the public. However, the rose garden of Great Maytham Hall remains firmly closed - which is perhaps appropriate, as it is reputed to be the inspiration for Frances Hodgson Burnett’s children’s book The Secret Garden. Burnett had lived in the hall from 1898 to 1907, and she had restored its walled garden after finding it neglected and overgrown. Shortly after she moved out, Great Maytham Hall itself was completely rebuilt by Edwin Lutyens for its new owner Harold “Jack” Tennant, who was the Liberal MP for Berwickshire from 1894 to 1918 and briefly served in Cabinet as Scottish secretary for six months in 1916. Perhaps it helped that Tennant was Asquith’s brother-in-law. Tennant also commissioned Lutyens - whose work did not come cheap - to design Rolvenden’s war memorial.
Last year’s parliamentary boundary changes placed Rolvenden and Tenterden in a new constituency called Weald of Kent. It has a new MP to match: the Conservatives’ Katie Lam, who was elected very easily amidst the carnage of 2024, is a former president of the Cambridge Union who went on to a career as a banker, special adviser, lyricist and scriptwriter. In collaboration with the composer Alex Parker, Lam has written five musicals including an adaptation of another children’s classic, The Railway Children.
Local elections here are another matter. Reform UK ran rampant in the 2025 Kent county council elections, and among the dozens of Conservative seats they gained in Kent was the Tenterden county division which covers this ward. At Ashford council level Rolvenden and Tenterden West returned its Conservative councillor without a contest in 2015, but he lost his seat in 2019 to independent candidate Kate Walder by 61-39 in a straight fight. Walder then joined the Green Party and she was re-elected in 2023 with their nomination, defeating the new Conservative candidate by 53-38; the reduced majority compared to 2019 was due to Labour contesting the ward.
Kate Walder, who farms sheep for a living, was the Green Party candidate for Weald of Kent in 2024, finishing fourth out of five candidates with 9% of the vote. The Greens are part of the ruling coalition on Ashford council, which has a leader from the localist Ashford Independents party, and Walder sat on the council’s cabinet with the parks and recreation portfolio. (Make up your own jokes here.) After six years in office, she has now stood down on health grounds.
Defending this seat for the Greens is Guy Pullen, who was their county council candidate for Tenterden in May and finished in fourth place: he is a gardener and former primary school chair of governors. The Conservatives have selected George Davis, who is fighting his first election campaign. Also on the ballot are Ava Charlton for Labour, Chris Grayling (no, not that one) for the Lib Dems and Reform UK’s Tony Trilsbach, a tutor who was an unsuccessful Conservative candidate for Ashford council in 2023.
Parliamentary constituency: Weald of Kent
Kent county council division: Tenterden
ONS Travel to Work Area: Ashford
Postcode districts: TN17, TN18, TN30
Ava Charlton (Lab)
George Davis (C)
Chris Grayling (LD)
Guy Pullen (Grn)
Tony Trilsbach (RUK)
May 2023 result Grn 444 C 317 Lab 70
May 2019 result Ind 556 C 352
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