Labour Holds Holborn and St Pancras With Its Majority Cut by 71%

Chris Mason’s reading is the right one: this “falls in the column marked ‘relief’ for Downing Street rather than ‘jubilation’”. Ms Abdi-Wali, leader of Camden council and a child refugee from Somalia in the 1990s, used her declaration speech to answer a Reform UK spokesman who had questioned whether she was British: “I hope this moment also says something about who gets to belong… This is Camden, and this is Britain.” She won, she said, “not by making people afraid of each other, but by bringing people together”, and named homelessness as the thing that drove her into politics and Thames Water as a company that “failed residents up and down our constituency”. Two numbers are being spun in opposite directions and both are true. The Green share more than tripled, from 10.44% to 32.81%; the Green vote count did not, rising from 4,030 to 8,928, slightly more than double. The sharper comparison is that in 2024 the Greens and the pro-Gaza independent Andrew Feinstein together took 11,342 votes in this seat — 2,414 more than Mr Polanski managed alone. The Greens consolidated an existing bloc rather than growing one. One other result deserves recording: the Conservatives finished third on 1,922, beating Reform UK for the first time at an English by-election this parliament, though Reform and Restore Britain between them would have been ahead of them.