Labour faced a tough by-election contest in Thursday in the Westminster City Council ward of Vincent Square. It was the most precarious London seat Labour has had to defend in a by-election in the borough since winning control of it for the first time in its history in May 2022, and its chances of holding it were not great.
The Conservatives duly gained the seat and in so doing trimmed Labour’s majority to four – 29 seats to the Tories’ 25. But Labour strategists will not be looking at the outcome with undue alarm. Let us examine the ward itself and the result.
The ward is well-defined on the map, marked out by Vauxhall Bridge Road, Victoria Street, Horseferry Road and the River Thames. The landmarks best-known to the casual visitor are the Tate Britain gallery overlooking the Thames and the striped brick, turn of the century Westminster Cathedral at the other end of the ward.
Political historians may note that it also contains Millbank Tower, operations centre of New Labour back in the 1990s. MI5’s headquarters at Thames House is one of the ward’s major employers. Vincent Square itself is one of central London’s largest, with the playing fields of Westminster School in the garden in the middle. Much of the ward is convenient for the Palace of Westminster and the government and political institutions in its hinterland.
But it would be a mistake to associate it entirely with grandeur and privilege. It is the location of more than one milestone in the history of public housing, and this has had a strong influence on its political history. Most of the ward was a marshy, neglected corner of inner Westminster before being extensively rebuilt in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. There was a large prison at Millbank, but it was closed in 1890.
Part of the prison site was used for the Tate Gallery, as it was originally called, and part for the London County Council ‘s Millbank Estate, a harmonious urban environment of tall, red-brick mansion blocks and tree-lined streets. The blocks are, in a nod to the Tate, named after artists. It remains a popular place to live.
Just round the corner is the Grosvenor Estate, whose Page Street blocks of flats (1928-30) with their distinctive chequerboard design were Sir Edwin Lutyens’s only public housing commission. This estate was targeted in the 1980s by Dame Shirley Porter’s gerrymandering policy, in which then Conservative controlled Westminster Council sold off housing at a discount on the open market rather than letting it to new tenants in an attempt to alter the area’s political complexion.
The housing had been leased to the council in 1937 by the 2nd Duke of Westminster and his family trustees with a stipulation that it should be “dwellings for the working classes”. But Westminster wanted to make them available for sale when they became vacant. In 1990, when the matter came to in court, the council argued that “working class” was a meaningless term, but the courts agreed with the 6th Duke that it was still very much relevant.
Of parenthetical interest, your correspondent lived in one of these blocks in the mid-1990s, renting from a Right-to-Buy purchaser, although my job wasn’t stereotypically proletarian. The flat was generally well-designed, though it suffered from condensation. The community there was pleasant. The Regency Café, a fine working men’s café, was a regular haunt and still is, for taxi drivers and civil servants alike.
The corner of the ward around Westminster Cathedral, close to Victoria station, is the exception to most generalisations about Vincent Square. The streets there are lined with expensive privately-built mansion blocks. The generalisation that holds is that the people of the ward live in flats – 97 per cent of households, the eighth highest proportion in England (I’m indebted to Andrew Teale for highlighting this fact).
The main demographic groups in the ward are “younger professionals in smaller flats”, multi-ethnic estate communities and metropolitan professionals – 46 per cent are professional or managerial and 73 per cent are of working age. The population is majority white (60 per cent) including several communities of mainland European origin (particularly Italians), 17 per cent Asian, eight per cent black and 16 per cent other and mixed. It is a cosmopolitan area.
Politically, Vincent Square and its pre-2002 predecessor, Millbank, have interesting histories. Millbank ward was a marginal. It was Conservative in 1982 but Labour from 1986 until 1998 when, rather against the trend, the Conservatives gained two of its three seats from Labour.
The inaugural result for Vincent Square ward, in 2002, was a big Conservative win, by 68 per cent to 20 per cent, and it seemed to have become a safe Tory seat. The addition of the Westminster Cathedral area was a definite enhancement to Tory prospects. Yet as time went on, the Conservative majority eroded and by 2018 the ward was looking marginal again, even though the Tories held all three seats that year.
Owner-occupation drove up the Conservative vote – proximity to Westminster and Victoria meant that the open market value of the flats was high. But then the trend switched and between 2011 and 2021 private renting jumped from 29 per cent to 38 per cent, much of it in flats that had been bought from the council and let out at high rents to young professionals desiring the central London location. As in Wandsworth, the new renters felt less warm towards the Tories than the people who had bought their flats at a discount, even before the arrival of Brexit and culture wars.
Even with this tailwind, though, Vincent Square ward did not yield fully to Labour in 2022. There was a split result, with two Conservative winners and one Labour. In percentage terms, the Tory lead was a narrow 46-43. The sole victorious Labour candidate, Gillian Arrindell, ran ahead of her running mates to secure a 27-vote majority over the lowest-polling Tory.
Thursday by-election was caused by the death of Arrindell in November from a stroke. She was an energetic campaigner, taking on roles for Westminster in championing air quality and the interests of disabled people. She was also an advocate for Palestine, homeless people and victims of domestic violence.
Her successor as Labour candidate, Joanna Camadoo-Rothwell, followed in her footsteps in being head of policy for a domestic violence charity. She had been also a councillor in Ealing from 2014 to 2022. She ran an energetic doorstep campaign in a ward where Labour could call on assistance from staffers from party headquarters and Parliament as well as local members. The party was defending its record of running Westminster, helped by the generally positive view that residents take of the administration and the high standard of its housing services.
All five main parties stood candidates, as did the Christian People’s Alliance (CPA). But the Conservatives, always the main opposition, are better-organised – or at least richer – in south Westminster than more or less anywhere else in the country. Their candidate Michael Hayes (pictured, centre), a publican in Pimlico who stood unsuccessfully in 2022, won with 978 votes (45.4 per cent).
Camadoo-Rothwell was runner-up with 700 votes (32.5 per cent). Reform’s Nick Lockett was third (206 votes, 9.6 per cent) with the Liberal Democrat (156 votes) and the Green (101 votes) behind and the CPA bringing up the rear (14 votes). Turnout was a fairly respectable 29.1 per cent.
The swing to Conservative since 2022 was a modest 5.6 per cent, lower than in West End ward in September – the last Westminster contest between the two biggest parties – when it was 9.5 per cent, or the previous 2025 average of 9.4 per cent. And the drop in Labour’s vote share was 10.6 per cent, making it easily the least-bad Labour by-election result so far in 2025.
Putting the result in perspective, it is about where the parties were for the 2018 full council elections, which were generally not bad for Labour. While the Conservatives would certainly retake Westminster if that sort of swing were to happen across the board in May 2026, the result does point to a certain resilience in Labour’s vote in central areas, something which also shows up in polling companies’ MRP models.
The odds are against Westminster Labour being able to replicate their May 2022 Marble Arch Mound-assisted miracle, but if the government’s popularity picks up and local councillors are able to translate incumbency into personal votes, the Vincent Square result shows that it is not unthinkable. There is still life in the workers’ movement in central London, even if the work the workers are doing is not the same as it was in the 1930s.
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