The Conservatives have consolidated their control of Hillingdon Council with a decisive double victory in the two-seat Hillingdon West ward, a contest that was postponed from its original date of 7 May when the rest of the borough’s and the capital’s local elections took place.
The two seats were successfully defended by their Tory incumbents, who had remained in post until the delayed vote took place yesterday. Their wins confirm their party’s comfortable majority of eleven in the outer west London borough.
The postponement was brought about because one of the original candidates, Reform UK’s Sean Cooling, died after the official campaigning period for 7 May began and before the election could take place.
The re-elected winners, Adam Bennett and Reeta Chamdal, defeated eight rivals, receiving 1,084 and 949 votes respectively. They were followed at a distance by a cluster of candidates from three other parties. Labour’s Tiffany Beales came third with 470 votes, followed by Reform’s Margaret Forrest with 433, Labour’s Imran Razak (362), the Green Party’s Rui Patel (353), Reform’s Justin Anderson (347) and the Greens’ Alicia Windsor (341). The candidate line-up was completed by two Liberal Democrats, both of whom attracted fewer than 100 votes.
Hillingdon West lies just outside Uxbridge town centre in a part of the borough characterised by owner-occupied, interwar Metro-land suburbia. It encompasses Dowding Park, named after Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding, who led RAF Fighter Command during the Battle of Britain from an underground control centre there. This is now memorialised by a museum. (Dowding himself is honoured by a statue at the Temple end of the Strand in front of St Clement Danes church, which was badly damaged by bombing during the war).
The postponed election’s outcome completes a story of disappointment for Reform in London, after the far-Right party’s leader, Nigel Farage, said at the turn of the year that it stood a “very real chance” of winning six London boroughs. After the council elections last month, Hillingdon Conservatives nominated Chamdal (pictured), who was first elected to the council in 2022, to be the borough’s civic mayor, a position she duly secured. The choice suggested confidence that Chamdal and Bennett would retain their seats when the Hillingdon West votes came. If so, it has been fully justified.
Hillingdon seemed to offer potential for Reform to make a significant mark on the Tory-run borough, which had been struggling with financial problems and contained a number of hotels where asylum-seekers were living. However, in the end it has won only four Hillingdon seats compared with the Conservatives’ 32 and Labour’s 16. One Green candidate is represented on the council as well. Across the capital, Reform gained control of only one London borough, Havering, and fell well short in all its other targets.
The completion of Hillingdon’s full council elections wraps up a moderately acceptable sets of campaigns for the Tories, who have ended up winning only five more seats than their lowest ever total in 2022 – 409 out of 1,817 compared with 404 – but recaptured Westminster Council and have formed minority administrations in Wandsworth and Enfield, both of which were previously Labour-led. They have majority in control in six of the 32 boroughs altogether and also retained the mayoralty in Croydon.
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