Last week, in Ealing, Labour enjoyed some respite from its poor run of council by-elections since the general election in July. But this week the party has seen a return to poor performances previously seen in Camden and Westminster, with a loss to the Conservatives in Greenwich and a narrow hold in a safe ward in neighbouring Bexley.
Given the general recent trend, the result in Greenwich’s Eltham Town & Avery Hill ward should not have come as a surprise. It was highly marginal in the 2022 full borough elections, with Labour taking the top two spots on the ballot but a Conservative being elected for the third seat. It is also the successor ward to Eltham South, which Labour never won and where the party was 13 points behind the Tories in 2018. The new ward was, therefore, always going to hard to defend.
Many of London’s recent by-elections have been needed because sitting councillors were elected to the House of Commons, creating vacancies. But this one came about for a more traditional reason – Labour incumbent Sam Backon had accepted a job outside London and needed to move away.
As the area’s electoral history suggests, Eltham Town & Avery Hill forms part of the leafy suburban aspect of the newly-abolished Eltham parliamentary seat, a marginal that flipped to Labour in 1997 and stuck with the party but, unlike a lot of the rest of “middle London”, never swung far enough in that direction to be out of range for the Tories.
The ward’s demographics are more Conservative-inclined than most of Greenwich, or indeed of London as a whole, with 17.3 per cent of its population aged over 65 compared to 10.5 per cent for Greenwich borough as whole, 77 per cent of it white (56 per cent for all Greenwich) and 29 per cent owning their houses outright (16 per cent for Greenwich).
As its name suggests, the ward is based around two communities – the older core of Eltham plus the suburban Avery Hill next to Greenwich’s boundary with Bexley. The two parts of the ward are separated by a large area of green space and two satellites of the University of Greenwich, although few of their students live in the ward.
Labour’s candidate Chris McGurk, a local GP, fought his party’s tricky defence. The Conservatives selected Charlie Davis, who had been their candidate for the new parliamentary seat of Eltham & Chislehurst, which takes in Conservative-leaning wards from another neighbouring borough, Bromley.
Had this new seat existed in 2019, the Tories would have won it. But in the very different circumstances of 2024, Labour’s Clive Efford, who had represented the old Eltham seat since it switched to his party 27 years ago, got home by a comfortable distance with a swing in his favour of over 12 per cent. This was no reflection on Davis as a candidate – he was generally regarded as affable, locally-oriented and moderate – but the inevitable verdict on the Conservative national government.
By-election candidates also came forward from the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and Reform UK, plus one Independent, but not since the 1990s, when the Lib Dems had a success in Avery Hill, has the main battle been anything other than Labour versus Conservative in this part of Greenwich.
The contest was hard-fought by two well-organised local parties, and had a relatively high turnout of 28 per cent (in contrast to the slumps in participation in some other recent elections). Davis (pictured, top) pulled off a fairly comfortable win, polling 1,522 votes (48.8 per cent) to McGurk’s 981 (31.5 per cent). Ruth Handyside of Reform UK was a long way behind in third with 290 votes (9.3 per cent) and the other candidates were a long way behind her – Lib Dem 132, Green 123 and Independent 69.
The swing from Labour to Conservative since 2022 was 10.6 per cent. As in Westminster West End a couple of weeks ago, a well-regarded Conservative former parliamentary candidate received the consolation prize of gaining a council seat. However, Davis’s win only increases the number of Tory councillors in Greenwich from three to four.
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Thursday’s other by-election was in the Belvedere ward of Bexley. While Eltham Town & Avery Hill is a middle-class part of a predominantly working-class borough, Belvedere is one of the more working-class parts of a middle-class and mostly Conservative one. The ward is based on the area of Upper and Lower Belvedere, which lies between Thamesmead and Erith. It includes the green open space around Lesnes Abbey and the wood associated with it, which gives its name to one of the terminal stations of the Elizabeth Line – Abbey Wood. The arrival of the line will no doubt have an effect on the local property market. It seems only a matter of time before Belvedere is “discovered“.
This by-election arose from now-former councillor Daniel Francis being elected as Labour MP for Bexleyheath & Crayford, the most striking of Labour’s 2024 gains in London in terms of the size of the Conservative majority overturned. Part of the reason for Francis’s win was Reform UK’s 22.7 per cent vote share, which was particularly high by London standards. Bexley’s demographic mix – more white, more owner-occupied and with fewer professionals with degrees than the average for London – made it relatively fertile ground for Reform in that it rather resembled the constituencies of north Kent further down the Thames estuary.
The Belvedere result demonstrated that the Reform vote has not gone away, although the majority that Labour won in the ward in 2022 proved too large for either them or the Conservatives to topple in a multi-party local government contest. Labour’s Jeremy Fosten, a locally-educated trainee barrister (pictured above with Abena Oppong-Asare MP), held the seat with 862 votes (38.5 per cent). He fended off opposition from the Conservatives’ Christine Bishop (713 votes, 31.9 per cent) and Reform’s Michael Pastor (378 votes, 16.9 per cent). The Greens (157 votes) and Lib Dems (127 votes) brought up the rear. Turnout was 18.5 per cent, in line with the poor participation in most other London borough by-elections of late. Labour’s vote share dropped by 14.4 percentage points compared with 2022, a bigger fall than in Eltham Town & Avery Hill.
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There are limited lessons to be drawn from these two south east London results. One is that parliamentary candidates valiantly defeated in lost cause House of Commons seats in July make good candidates in local by-elections that follow them. Another is that we can probably expect the Conservatives to continue to bounce back a bit in wards where they are well-organised and favoured by the demographics – and that turnout will tend to be higher in such places.
But perhaps the weightiest bit of data generated is that Reform UK are “real” in that the party has the infrastructure and support to produce local council candidates as well as parliamentary aspirants. None of the London wards where by-elections have taken place since July have been in optimal territory for Reform, but it has drawn respectable shares of the vote, including possibly enough in Belvedere to spoil the Tories’ chances of what would have been a spectacular win for them.
There is a long way to go until May 2026, when the next full London borough elections will take place, but the Tories – particularly in outer London – must be worried about the prospect of a split right-wing vote letting Labour get away with a sharp drop in its own support.
Support OnLondon.co.uk and its freelancers for just £5 a month or £50 a year and get things for your money that other people don’t. Details HERE. Follow Lewis Baston on Bluesky. Photos from X/Twitter feeds of Charlie Davis and Abena Oppong-Asare.