At around three o’clock on a quiet north London morning, the returning officer at the Holborn and St Pancras by-election declared Labour’s Sagal Abdi-Wali the winner — and with that, the seat once held by Sir Keir Starmer passed, unremarkably enough, to his party’s chosen successor. The result was, in one sense, the outcome the political establishment had expected. In another, it was rather more uncomfortable than the headline suggested.
Abdi-Wali secured 12,292 votes, a workable majority on the night but one achieved against a backdrop of notably depressed turnout. Just 38.76 per cent of registered voters participated — a figure that compares poorly with the 47.62 per cent recorded in the Gorton and Denton by-election in February, where the Greens’ Hannah Spencer pulled off a remarkable upset, taking the seat directly from Labour. The enthusiasm that once animated Starmer’s own electoral base appears, at least in this contest, to have cooled.
The more striking story of the night belongs to Zack Polanski, the Green Party’s recently elected co-leader, who threw considerable personal and organisational resources into the campaign. He finished second with 8,928 votes — a result his party was quick to frame as an “incredible” achievement, pointing to a substantially increased vote share relative to the Greens’ previous performance in the constituency. The framing is not entirely without merit. Closing the gap with a governing party in its former leader’s own seat, in a contest that attracted relatively modest public attention, is not nothing.
Yet it is worth applying some rigour to the Green Party’s self-congratulation. Second place in a by-election is not a parliamentary seat, and Polanski’s campaign — energetic, well-funded by Green standards, and personally led — did not translate into the kind of seismic upset that Gorton and Denton had briefly suggested might be replicable. The result is better understood as a consolidation of Green strength in inner London than as evidence of a broader realignment. Whether that strength can be converted into seats under first-past-the-post remains the central and unresolved question for a party whose support tends to cluster in precisely the kinds of urban, educated constituencies where it can accumulate votes without winning them.
For Andy Burnham, who had staked some personal credibility on Labour’s performance here, the result offers a straightforward boost — a hold is a hold, and the optics of losing Starmer’s old seat to a resurgent Green movement would have been damaging in ways that extended well beyond the constituency itself. Labour’s strategists will nonetheless register the warning embedded in the numbers: a second-place Green finish with nearly nine thousand votes, in a seat the party has long treated as safe territory, is the kind of data point that concentrates minds ahead of the next general election cycle. The night belonged to Labour, but the margin of comfort was narrower than the party might have wished.