Previewing the three local by-elections of 27th March 2025
"All the right votes, but not necessarily in the right order"
Three by-elections on 27th March 2025:
Penllergaer
Swansea council, Glamorgan; caused by the death of Independents @ Swansea councillor Wendy Fitzgerald.
This week is going to be a bit of an independent special. Of the three wards up for election today, one is in a council run by independent councillors; one is an area which has seen an independent challenge in recent years; and the other is to replace an independent councillor. We've come to Penllergaer, a village a few miles north-west of Swansea lying next to the M4 motorway, which is the northern boundary of this ward. The village's proximity to the motorway has resulted in significant housing development here in this century, with the completion of the Parc Penllergaer estate next to the motorway junction; this meant that Penllergaer's parliamentary electorate increased by 33% between 2003 and 2020.
The Parc Penllergaer estate lies next to the Penllergare country park. This was once the country estate of the wealthy Dillwyn Llewelyn family, and in the mid-19th century it was run by John Dillwyn Llewelyn who was a noted botanist and had the money to turn Penllergare into a very fine garden. Llewelyn also shared the family's interest in photography, a subject which was then in its infancy: his sister Mary Dillwyn is remembered as Wales' first female photographer, and his wife Emma Talbot was a cousin of William Fox Talbot. In 1851 an observatory was erected on the Penllergare estate, from which John Dillwyn Llewelyn's daughter Thereza - a noted amateur astronomer - is thought to have captured some of the earliest photographs ever taken of the Moon, although the fact that the entire family were avid photographers has made it difficult for historians to prove who took which picture.
Unfortunately, the Penllergare country park declined in the 20th century. It has now been taken over by a local charity, which is trying to restore Penllergare Valley Woods to its former glory.
John Dillwyn Llewelyn's son of the same name went into politics, and in March 1888 he was the Conservative candidate in a by-election for the Gower constituency - which has covered Penllergaer continuously since the seat's creation in 1885. Dillwyn-Llewelyn junior put up a strong fight but lost by the narrow margin of 54-46 to the Liberal candidate David Randell, a solicitor who had effectively overturned an initial decision from the local Liberal Party to select somebody else thanks to very strong support from the trade unions. John Talbot Dillwyn-Llewlyn did eventually make it into Parliament, serving from 1895 to 1900 as the Conservative MP for Swansea Town; he was also elected to the first Glamorgan county council in 1889, he was created a baronet in 1890, and he served for many years as president of the Welsh Rugby Union.
John Talbot Dillwyn-Llewelyn's 46% of the vote in the 1888 Gower by-election still stands today as the record Conservative score for the Gower constituency. Gower rapidly turned into a safe Liberal and then a safe Labour seat afterwards, and the Conservatives often didn't contest it in the early years of the 20th century: even in the 1940s and 1950s the Tories would normally stand down here in favour of their allies the National Liberal Party, who eventually merged with the Conservatives in 1968. In 1959 the National Liberal candidate here was a very young Michael Heseltine, fighting his first election campaign; other notable future political figures who cut their teeth here include the future Plaid Cymru leader Adam Price, who stood here in 1992 and lost his deposit.
The Conservatives did win Gower once, when Welsh Assembly member Byron Davies gained the seat from Labour in 2015 by just 27 votes in one of the closest results of that election. His winning score was 37.1%, which reflects the fact that there are many more political parties now than there were in 1888. Davies increased his score to 43% in 2017, but he lost the seat to Labour's Tonia Antoniazzi who has been the MP here ever since. Antoniazzi was re-elected for a third term last year, and she is now chair of the Commons Northern Ireland select committee.
In the Senedd the Gower constituency has been represented by Labour continuously since 1999, and its present MS Rebecca Evans is on the Welsh Government frontbench as cabinet secretary for the economy, energy and planning. Evans was first elected in 2011 as a regional MS for Mid and West Wales, before transferring to the Gower constituency (which is part of the South Wales West region) in 2016.
But all this Labour and Conservative parliamentary history has had little relevance to Penllergaer's local elections in this century. Swansea council has a Labour majority, but since 2004 Penllergaer has been represented by (Elizabeth) Wendy Fitzgerald who enjoyed massive local support: in 2022 Fitzgerald won her fifth and final term of office by trouncing the Labour candidate 88-12 in a straight fight. Fitzgerald was a teacher by trade, while her political career included a spell as Swansea's cabinet member for social services as part of a Lib Dem-Independent coalition. When she died in January at the age of 81, she was serving as the deputy lord mayor of Swansea.
Wendy Fitzgerald was originally elected in 2004 on the ticket of the Swansea Independents Association, which subsequently changed its name to "Independents @ Swansea" - a name which certainly pushes the boundaries of the requirement in party registration law that a political party name should not include "any script other than Roman script". It would appear that the Electoral Commission took the view that the commercial at sign counts as Roman script, so all is fine. Independents @ Swansea is the only party name on the register which uses that particular symbol.
Defending this by-election for the Independents @ Swansea is Tony Fitzgerald, Wendy's widower. This time I@S have a lot more competition for Penllergaer ward, with seven candidates nominated in total: also standing are Marsha Phillips for Labour, William Beasley for the Greens, Wayne Erasmus (who lives in Carmarthenshire and has also contested recent local by-elections there) for the Welsh independence party Gwlad, Howard Evans for the Lib Dems, Jake Harry for the Conservatives and Gareth Turner for Reform UK.
Westminster constituency: Gower
Senedd constituency: Gower
ONS Travel to Work Area: Swansea
Postcode districts: SA4, SA5
William Beasley (Grn)
Wayne Erasmus (Gwlad)
Howard Evans (LD)
Tony Fitzgerald (Inds @ Swansea)
Jake Harry (C)
Marsha Phillips (Lab)
Gareth Turner (RUK)
May 2022 result Independents @ Swansea 971 Lab 135
Previous results in detail
Mayfield
Redbridge council, London; caused by the resignation of Labour councillor Jas Athwal.
Cast ne'er a clout till may be out. Spring may be starting to do its thing, but the Great British Weather is a fickle beast as we all know and it may be colder than it looks out there. The old saying goes that once the hawthorn - or mayflower - is in full bloom, it's safe to take your big coat off. Hawthorns are of course a familiar sight across the UK, and the many Mayfield placenames across the UK refer to fields next to hawthorn trees.
Or in the case of the present Mayfield ward, former fields. This Mayfield is part of the town of Ilford, lying to the south of the Elizabeth Line station at Seven Kings and to the north-east of Barking. It's almost entirely built up with mostly inter-war housing, and fields here are a distant memory. Confusingly the ward does not include Mayfield School, which lies some distance off the ward's north-east corner.
The only significant open space within the Mayfield ward boundary is South Park, which was was opened by Ilford Council in 1902 and has been well preserved by that council's successor, the London Borough of Redbridge. It is not to be confused with the well-known American adult cartoon TV series of the same name, which has somehow now been going for 26 seasons with a 27th season in the pipeline. South Park even has an Oscar nomination to its name, in the Best Original Song category for the 1999 film Bigger, Longer and Uncut. It probably goes without saying that this song is not safe for work, but if you're outside that sort of environment then enjoy the satirical lyrics (it says here) of Blame Canada.
In the 2021 census Mayfield ward was in the top 100 wards in England and Wales for residents working in the real estate sector (4.5%), Asian ethnicity (67.1%), Islam (49.0%), Sikhism (10.9%) and residents born in the Middle East and Asia (27.8%). It will not be a surprise with this demographic profile that Mayfield ward leans hard to the political left, as this column discussed in May 2022 (Andrew's Previews 2022, page 230). We were here then to cover the last action in the 2022 Redbridge council elections, which returned 58 Labour councillors against just five Conservatives. This in a borough which had never had a Labour majority before 2014, illustrating the scale of demographic change here.
Since 2014 the leader of the council had been one Jasbir Singh Athwal, who was born in the Indian Punjab and came to Ilford in the 1970s after his father had found work in a London car factory. In the 2022 local elections Jas Athwal's bid for another term in Mayfield ward had to be postponed from the normal date of 2nd May after one of the Conservative candidates for the ward died during the election campaign: the poll was rescheduled for three weeks later to allow time for nominations to reopen, and the Labour slate - with Athwal at the top of it - was duly re-elected on 26th May with a 71-16 lead over the Conservatives.
Athwal is clearly a very ambitious individual, and he saw a chance to step up from council leader to Parliament in 2019 when Mike Gapes defected to Change UK or the Independent Group or whatever it was they were called that week. Gapes was at the time the MP for the safe Labour seat of Ilford South, the constituency which includes Mayfield ward, However, Athwal's bid for the Labour nomination on that occasion was derailed when he was suspended from the party, on the evening before the selection meeting, following allegations of sexual harassment. The Labour nomination instead went to left-winger Sam Tarry, who was duly elected to Parliament in 2019; Gapes only narrowly saved his deposit.
The Labour Party's investigation into Athwal eventually cleared him of wrongdoing, and he subsequently won a deselection battle against Tarry for the 2024 Labour nomination in Ilford South. Athwal was duly elected to Parliament in July 2024, but he polled nothing like the 66% which Tarry had managed in 2019: the eventual shares of the vote were 40% for Labour; 23% for an independent candidate, NHS worker and magistrate Noor Begum; 15% for the Conservatives; and 8% for the Greens. It was a much more comfortable win than Athwal's former deputy council leader Wes Streeting had in Ilford North, but this result demonstrates that there may be work for Labour to do here which isn't obvious from the 2022 council result.
Athwal has attracted some controversy since his election to Parliament, partly because of the rather poor state of his large rental property portfolio, which might explain the delay in him resigning his council seat to focus on his Westminster duties. The troubles for Redbridge Labour don't stop there, either: this column will be back in the borough soon for a by-election in Hainault ward, following the resignation of a different Labour councillor (and former aide to Streeting) who had pleaded guilty to two counts of indecent exposure.
In the meantime the independent campaign which took Athwal and Streeting on in 2024 has registered with the Electoral Commission as the Ilford Independents, and they contested a by-election last November in the borough's Wanstead Park ward after the resignation of Bayo Alaba, who is now a Labour MP for Southend (Andrew's Previews 2024, forthcoming). On that occasion the Ilford Independents didn't make much impact - they finished in third place with 14%, well behind Labour's winning score of 47% - but Wanstead Park has a much lower Muslim population than Mayfield so the independents might find this area more fruitful for them.
Defending this seat for Labour is Mazhar Saleem, who was an unsuccessful candidate for Fairlop ward in the 2022 Redbridge elections. The Conservatives have selected Robin Thakur, who works in the banking sector. Also on the ballot are Neil Hepworth for the Liberal Democrats, Ilford Independents candidate Noor Begum who is hoping to build on her parliamentary campaign last year, Nadir Gilani for the Greens and Paul Luggeri for Reform UK.
Parliamentary constituency: Ilford South
London Assembly constituency: Havering and Redbridge
ONS Travel to Work Area: London
Postcode districts: IG1, IG3, IG11
Noor Begum (Ilford Ind)
Nadir Gilani (Grn)
Neil Hepworth (LD)
Paul Luggeri (RUK)
Mazhar Saleem (Lab)
Robin Thakur (C)
May 2022 postponed poll Lab 2349/2148/2125 C 525/470/360 LD 229 Independent Network 218
May 2018 result Lab 2717/2602/2523 C 774/761/619
Previous results in detail
Maldon North
Maldon council, Essex; caused by the resignation of Conservative councillor Nigel Miller.
We finish for the week on the deeply-indented Essex coast, in a town to the east of Chelmsford which has been part of the parliamentary map continuously since 1332. Despite this and the town's long history (it was the second town to be founded in Essex, after Colchester), Maldon today only has a population of around 15,000. It has been a port since Saxon times thanks to its location at the head of the Blackwater estuary, and the town was raided by the Vikings in 924 and 991; the latter raid led to a military defeat for the English in the 991 Battle of Maldon.
The Maldon North ward covers the town centre and quayside, together with an industrial area to the north of the River Chelmer. That area includes the Combined Military Services Museum and a large Tesco Extra supermarket, which wasn't Tesco's original location here: this was because the very first Tesco score to be described as a "supermarket" was opened south of the river on Maldon High Street in 1958. (Tesco did have shops before then - the company was founded in 1919 - but those stores weren't big enough to be considered supermarkets.). We may be in a predominantly urban ward here, but Maldon has a much older age profile than London: in the 2021 census Maldon North made the top 100 wards in England and Wales for residents aged 85 or over (6.3%).
As stated, Maldon has been on the parliamentary map since 1322 and the town was a parliamentary borough up to 1885. It hasn't quite had continuous representation in the Commons since then. Like many towns, Maldon was unrepresented in the Barebones Parliament of 1653 (named after the City of London MP Praise-God Barebone, rather than for its tiny membership), while two centuries later the Commons refused to issue a writ for a by-election for a year after the Conservative MPs Charles du Cane (who would later serve as governor of Tasmania) and Taverner Miller were unseated following a corrupt election campaign in 1852. Parliament was taking a hard line on electoral corruption then, and some boroughs were disenfranchised altogether for corruption at this time; Maldon escaped that fate, but it took until 1854 for a fresh election to be held and for the town to be represented again.
In fact, the Maldon borough had a long history of corruption. Before the 1832 Reform Act the right to vote here was vested in freemen of the borough, including honorary freemen and those who had bought the title, which gave the town an unusually large and rather venal (and often non-resident) electorate: in the mid-eighteenth century about 800 people were eligible to vote here. At this point in time the government could often control elections in Maldon by promising lucrative posts in the town's custom house to voters, but this broke down in 1763 when the government-supporting MP Bamber Gascoyne (a distant ancestor of the University Challenge host Bamber Gascoigne) had to seek re-election after being appointed to the Board of Trade. Gascoyne's opponent in the resulting by-election, John Huske, accused Gascoyne of threatening freemen/voters who worked in the custom house with the sack if they voted for Huske. Both Gascoyne and the Prime Minister George Grenville denied this, but Maldon Corporation took Huske's side in the dispute and they created enough new freemen to ensure that Huske won the election by 438 votes to 254.
Gascoyne's response to this defeat was to launch legal action, which eventually resulted in Maldon Corporation being dissolved by the courts in 1768. This prevented any new freemen being sworn in as voters for decades afterwards, and by the 1807 general election only 58 of Maldon's electors from 1768 were still alive. A new borough charter had to be granted to the town in 1810, at which point more than 800 freemen were added to the town's electoral roll. The reconstituted Maldon Corporation was soon back to its old tricks of creating as many new (not necessarily resident) freemen as necessary, and the 1832 Reform Act, which reconstituted the borough's franchise, ended up cutting Maldon's electorate by more than 80% even after the constituency boundaries were expanded to take in neighbouring Heybridge.
Maldon has had Conservative MPs continuously since the retirement of controversial Labour MP Tom Driberg in 1955. Its present representative Sir John Whittingdale is a political veteran who was first elected in 1992 to what was then the South Colchester and Maldon constituency: he is one of six survivors of the 1992 intake, and only five MPs in the Commons have longer continuous service. Whittingdale was already an OBE when he entered Parliament 33 years ago, having received that appointment in Margaret Thatcher's resignation honours for service as her political secretary. He was chairman of the Commons culture, media and sport committee for ten years before serving in the Cabinet as culture secretary in the second Cameron government; Whittingdale subsequently returned to that department as a junior minister on two occasions, most recently in 2023 when he covered for Julia Lopez while she was on maternity leave.
Sir John Whittingdale has a safe seat, but Maldon council is a different matter. This very small local government district (the entire district only has three Essex county councillors, with the Maldon division being safely Conservative) has normally had a Conservative majority, with the main challenge coming from independent and localist councillors. The 2019 election here had a close result with 17 Conservatives and 14 independents elected; independent candidates actually had a 48-43 lead in votes cast across the district, but this is a slightly misleading statistic because two Conservative councillors were elected unopposed. The Conservative administration here then fell apart, leading to independent councillor Wendy Stamp taking over the leadership in November 2020.
Now, readers might remember the infamous Handforth Parish Council Planning and Environment Committee video and the bad behaviour exhibited there. Handforth had Jackie Weaver's authority over the virtual waiting room and the power of the viral internet to eventually shame its disruptive councillors into resigning. Maldon council didn't have those advantages, which caused a problem in dealing with the increasingly disruptive and aggressive behaviour of independent councillor Chrisy Morris, a man who clearly has no idea how to behave as an adult.
The 4th November 2021 Maldon council meeting had on its agenda a standards committee report which had recommended extensive sanctions against Chrisy Morris, as a result of sustained vindictive behaviour by him against council staff. I'll let you watch what happened for yourself. After half an hour of this, the council chairman had had enough, the meeting was wound up and the police were called. Within a week Wendy Stamp had resigned as leader of the council, after her husband had been beaten up and with reports of councillors and council staff receiving abuse and threats of violence on a daily basis. (The council leadership then went back to the Conservatives.) Eventually the law caught up with Chrisy Morris, because a few months after this meeting he was prosecuted for breaching a non-molestation order and given a suspended eight-month prison term; that sentence disqualified him from the council, and the returning officer understandably wasted no time whatsoever in declaring his seat vacant.
The resulting by-election in Heybridge West ward in April 2022 (Andrew's Previews 2022, page 146) was rather surprisingly won by the Liberal Democrats, who had shown no previous sign of having any form of organisation in Maldon this century and hadn't stood a single candidate in the district in 2019. The Lib Dems followed up on this with a respectable performance in the 2023 Maldon council elections, which elected ten Conservatives, seven members of the Maldon District Independent Group, seven other independent councillors, six Lib Dems and one Green. The Maldon District Independent Group currently run the council as a minority.
The Lib Dem councillors here are concentrated in Maldon town and Heybridge, and the party came from nowhere to top the poll in Maldon North ward with 42% of the vote. The Conservatives won the ward's other seat with 23%, narrowly defeating outgoing independent councillor Caroline Mayes who polled 21% as a Maldon District Independent Group candidate. Both seats in Maldon North had gone to independent candidates at the previous election in 2019, so this result marked a gain for both the Lib Dems and Conservatives.
This split ward is defended by the Conservatives in this by-election, which follows the resignation of Nigel Miller at the end of January. The defending Conservative candidate is James Burrell-Cook, who is a Maldon town councillor and landlord of the Queen Victoria pub within the ward. Another town councillor on the ballot is the Lib Dems' Robert Jones, who is a retired teacher. There is no independent or localist candidate on this ballot, so candidates for two new parties entering the fray - Isobel Doubleday for the Greens and Jon Ross for Reform UK - might have a chance to pick up some of those votes.
Parliamentary constituency: Maldon
Essex county council division: Maldon
ONS Travel to Work Area: Chelmsford
Postcode district: CM9
James Burrell-Cook (C)
Isabel Doubleday (Grn)
Robert Jones (LD)
Jon Ross (RUK)
May 2023 result LD 736 C 401 Maldon District Ind Group 375 Lab 248
May 2019 result Ind 703/367/256 C 347/310
May 2015 result C 1058/976 Lab 504/407 Grn 463
May 2011 result C 720/606 Lab 516 Ind 481
August 2008 by-election C 339 Grn 200 Ind 115 BNP 107 Ind 69
May 2007 result Maldon and District Ind Democratic Alliance 572 C 550/499
May 2003 result Maldon and District Ind Democratic Alliance 529 C 493/368
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