Labour wins byelection after Greens fall short
Here’s a fuller rundown on Labour’s win in the Holborn and St Pancras byelection that has been a high-stakes battle for the left of British politics.
The byelection, called after the former prime minister Keir Starmer resigned from the seat in September, was considered a two-horse race between the Labour candidate, Sagal Abdi-Wali, and the Green party leader, Zack Polanski.
Abdi-Wali recieved 12,292 votes to Polanski’s 8,928, Sammy Gecsoyler reports.
Turnout was 38.7%, the lowest for any byelection held in England during this parliament and 15.4% down from 2024.
The Greens conceded defeat shortly before the result was announced, with a party spokesperson saying “taking the fight to Labour in one of its safest seats shows just how far the Greens have come”.
Labour’s victory will be a relief for Andy Burnham in his first big electoral test as prime minister, and reinforces polling that shows he has recovered some public support lost by Starmer, his predecessor in Downing Street.
See the full report here:
Key events
Polanski claims Holborn and St Pancras result shows Greens ‘more of a threat’ to Labour than before
Zack Polanski is doing a media interview round this morning.
Speaking to BBC Breakfast, he said he was “incredibly proud” of the campaign he ran in Holborn and St Pancras and he said it showed the Greens were “more of an electoral threat in [Labour] seats than we’ve ever been before”. That was a “foundation we’re looking to build on”, he said.
Green party’s claim its vote share up 22% in Holborn and St Pancras misleading, polling expert says
As Bridget Phillipson prepares for her media round (see 6.34am), she may be reading this post by Peter Kellner on his Substack blog. Kellner, a former president of YouGov and a leading polling expert, argues that this is not just a standard byelection win for Labour in a safe seat, but instead a historic win for the party. And he says that it is misleading for the Greens to claim they have had a great result on the basis of their vote share rising by 22%. (See 4.23am.)
Kellner explains:
Last night [Polanski’s] team crowed that the Greens had trebled their share of the vote. This is an example of “paltering”, a useful, underused word for a statement that is technically correct but seriously misleading. I wrote about this last year, with Labour and Conservative examples of this shoddy practice.
The Greens can make their “trebling” claim only because the left-wing vote two years ago was divided between the Greens’ 10.4 per cent and an independent, Andrew Feinstein’s, 18.9 per cent. Together, they won 29.3 per cent. Feinstein stood aside this time to support Polanski, who won 32.8 per cent: a true increase of just 3.5 percentage points.
That’s not all. The same issue arose in Gorton & Denton in February. There, George Galloway’s Workers Party stood aside, having won 10.3 per cent two years ago. So the combined Green/Workers baseline was 23.5 per cent. In the by-election, the Greens’ Hannah Spencer won 40.7 per cent, a hefty 17.2 point increase on the combined left-wing share in 2024.
Kellner has this chart illustrating his point.
Kellner also points out that, when Hannah Spencer won Gorton and Denton for the Greens in February, the total number of people voting for her as the Green/left was up by more than 6,000 on the equivalent vote at the general election. That was a sign her campaign had generated huge enthusiasm. In Holborn and St Pancras, the overall Green/left vote was down by more than 2,000 on the 2024 result.
Kellner points out that Polanski’s personal approval ratings have fallen sharply over the past eight months, and he says this byelection is only the 10th when Labour has been in government and defending a seat in a byelection with the main opposition coming not from the right but from either the Lib Dems or the Greens. He says Sagal Abdi-Wali’s share of the vote fell by just 3.7 percentage points – which was less than in any of those other contests.
There is more in Kellner’s analysis, which is well worth reading in full.
And here is his take on how significant this is.
Only three times in the party’s history has a Labour government been able to cheer a by-election night as a boost to its prospects of remaining in office.
The first was retaining Kingston-upon-Hull North in January 1966, ahead of its big national victory two months later. The second was four months ago, when Andy Burnham won Makerfield (though some ministers were happier than others).
The third was last night.
Here is Bridget Phillipson, the Labour party chair, commenting on the byelection result on Bluesky.
The best news to wake up to ahead of the morning round.
Congratulations to Sagal, who has led such a positive campaign. Thank you to the brilliant Labour team and members who made this win possible.
Britain is backing Labour’s message of hope.
“Morning round” means she is giving interviews later.
Prof Sir John Curtice, the BBC’s lead elections expert, has said the Holborn and St Pancras byelection result reflects what is happening in national opinion polls. He said:
Labour are in a much better position than they were six months ago, but they are still not as popular as they were in 2025, and holding a general election now would look an extremely risky project for them.
But [the result] also indicates that the Greens, while, yes, a more significant player than historically they have ever been, they have lost a significant portion of the ground that they had managed to gain during the first year of Zack Polanski’s leadership.
This chart, from Politico’s Poll of Polls, illustrates Curtice’s point. Nationally, the Greens are polling at about 10% – which is broadly where they were before Polanski became leader in September last year.
Full results in Holborn and St Pancras byelection
Andrew Sparrow
Good morning. I’m Andrew Sparrow, taking over from Hamish Mackay.
Here are the full results for the byelection, including vote share and how it has changed since the general election, plus the results from 2024. The figures are from the Press Association.
Sagal Abdi-Wali (Lab) 12,292 (45.17%, -3.75%)
Zack Polanski (Green) 8,928 (32.81%, +22.37%)
Ewan Cameron (C) 1,922 (7.06%, -0.13%)
Peter Newman (Reform) 1,612 (5.92%, -0.22%)
Patrick Stillman (LD) 924 (3.40%, -2.40%)
Tyler Johnson (Restore) 692 (2.54%)
George Galloway (WPB) 314 (1.15%)
Briony Kapoor (Rejoin) 236 (0.87%)
Barmy Brunch (Loony) 87 (0.32%, -0.10%)
Helen Spiby-Vann (CPA) 63 (0.23%)
Clare Fischer (Climate) 51 (0.19%)
Ben Walker (UKIP) 51 (0.19%, -0.01%)
Ketankumar Pipaliya (Voice) 23 (0.08%)
Jonathan Silberman (Comm Lge) 9 (0.03%)
Tom Darwood (ND) 7 (0.03%, -18.92%)
Lab maj 3,364 (12.36%)
13.06% swing Lab to Green
Electorate 70,449; Turnout 27,211 (38.63%, -15.52%)
2024: Lab maj 11,572 (29.98%) – Turnout 38,602 (54.14%)
Starmer (Lab) 18,884 (48.92%); Feinstein (ND) 7,312 (18.94%);
Stansell (Green) 4,030 (10.44%); Malik (C) 2,776 (7.19%); Roberts
(Reform) 2,371 (6.14%); Clinton (LD) 2,236 (5.79%); Islam (Ind) 636
(1.65%); Brick (Loony) 162 (0.42%); Poynton (UKIP) 75 (0.19%);
Scripps (Soc Eq) 61 (0.16%); Kumar (Ind) 40 (0.10%); Smith (ND) 19
(0.05%)
Sagal Abdi-Wali, Zack Polanski and the other candidates have now left the count. Here are some of the latest images from Holborn and St Pancras:
Sammy Gecsoyler
Speaking to the Guardian after her win, Abdi-Wali said local people at the school gates found the Greens’ Zionism motion “divisive”, adding:
It just speaks to the larger divisive discourse that set off and I don’t want to engage in that kind of thing.
On Labour’s stance on Palestine, she said:
The work Ed Miliband has been doing on Gaza, Palestine and Israel has resonated really well with local people. He’s been taking action and not just speaking.
Asked after the result whether he believed Zionism was racism, Polanski said he “grew up in a Zionist household” with the “idea that region was a land without a people and a people without a land”. But he said after educating himself he doesn’t “believe that’s true, and what we’re seeing is an ongoing genocide and the displacement of the Palestinian people. I believe that’s clearly racist.”
Polanski sidesteps question about whether he thinks Zionism is racism
Ahead of the vote, former Green leader Caroline Lucas suggested Polanski could face a threat to his leadership if he lost.
Lucas, the three-time former Green Party leader who was its first MP, said people should “see what happens in the coming days and weeks” when asked about his future the previous evening on BBC Newsnight. (See 2.55am.)
She pointed to Polanski’s failure to take part in the controversial anti-Zionism motion on Sunday, saying he “should have been there and he should have voted”.
Polanski did not directly answer when asked if he believed that Zionism is racism after the by-election result, but said:
The displacement of the Palestinian people, the genocide is clearly racist.
He also denied he had lost control of his party.
I don’t think that’s true at all. I’ve got a party that was 55,000, 60,000 members when I was running for leader, it’s now 220,000.
Any member is entitled to their opinion. We’re a democratic grassroots party.
We’ve got a bit from Polanski on his future after the defeat.
He told PA:
Of course I can carry on as leader of the Green Party. Of course, I wanted to win. No-one runs an election to lose.
Of course, we didn’t get over the line, but the point here is that ultimately, I want to make sure those were the options that people have.
So many people told me on the doorstep, so they want to give Andy Burnham a chance. Well, he’s got a chance now. Let’s see what he does with it.
Result is victory for diversity that cannot be ‘casually undone’, says Abdi-Wali
New Labour MP Sagal Abdi-Wali said her win in the Holborn and St Pancras byelection was a victory for diversity and warned cohesion should not be “casually undone”.
Her comments came after Reform UK’s home affairs spokesperson Zia Yusuf attacked her candidacy as a British-Somalian shortly after the byelection was called.
Abdi-Wali said she hoped “people like (her)” would feel like they also “belong here”.
Speaking after her victory was announced in Camden council’s headquarters in north London, she said:
I hope this moment also says something about who gets to belong, for people who look like me, I hope they see themselves reflected in this place and know that their path too belongs here. This is Camden, and this is Britain.
We have a responsibility to defend what we’ve built, and pass it on. Hope is not naive. Without hope there is nothing to build on, and nothing to build for.
People need to believe that politics can make their lives better and that their communities can thrive and that tomorrow can be better than today.”
The Holborn and St Pancras turnout of 38.76% is lower than in some other recent byelections, including 47.62% at Gorton and Denton in February.
At that one, Hannah Spencer won for the Green party and took the seat from Labour.
There was 58.7% turnout at the Makerfield byelection in June that paved Andy Burnham’s way to become prime minister. And it was 44.37% in Clacton in August, when Nigel Farage kept his seat but Count Binface took more than a quarter of the vote.
