Labour won a council seat of Reform in a local by-election this week, in what proved to be a successful night for the party.
The headline win for Labour came in Holborn and St Pancras, where Sagal Abdi-Wali held off the challenge of Green Party leader Zack Polanski to hold onto the seat for Labour.
But hours before the result was announced, Labour had already secured a by-election win.
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In the Town ward on Newcastle-under-Lyme Borough Council, Labour candidate Andrew Fox-Hewitt won the seat, which had been held by Reform after May’s local elections.
Reform have a significant majority on the council, holding 26 of the 44 seats. This by-election win only gave Labour their third seat on the council, but it is another symbolic win for the party as they continue to lead Reform in the polls.
It was a bad night all round for Reform. Whilst they were never expected to challenge for the win in Holborn and St Pancras, the party will have been hoping to finish ahead of the Conservatives.
But, Reform candidate Pete Newman won 1,612 votes, 310 votes fewer than the Conservatives’ Ewan Cameron, who finished in third place.
Reform’s share of the vote actually was narrowly down on 2024, dropping to 5.9% and meaning the party only just managed to hold their deposit.
The Holborn and St Pancras result was the latest in a long string of poor performances from Reform in parliamentary by-elections.
We keep being told that the party are in a position to win the next general election. But almost every single time the public get the chance to elect a Reform MP, they decided against in.
Holborn and St Pancras was the 27th by-election Reform have stood in since forming in 2018. They have only won two of them: in Clacton, where their main opponent was a man with a bin on his head, and in Runcorn and Helsby, where Sarah Pochin won by just six votes.