The Conservatives lost control of Wandsworth last Thursday after having a slim majority of councillors for just over a month. That had occurred because in July a Labour councillor for Trinity ward resigned, meaning the council was technically no longer under No Overall Control, as it had been since the full council elections in May.
Following that “hung council” outcome, the Tories were able to form an administration because they had the largest number of seats, because they made a “confidence and supply” arrangement with an Independent, and because the civic mayor, who has a casting vote in the event of full council votes ending in a tie, is drawn from their ranks.
The immediate effect of the Labour resignation was to put the Conservatives fully in charge. That was the situation at the full council meeting of 22 July, and the by-election to come opened up the serious possibility of the Tory majority being put on a more solid foundation. The party already held one of the seats in the finely-balanced two-seat ward, and victory would take their total up to 30 out of 58, thereby securing the majority they had fallen one short of in the spring. However, as we shall see, it was not to be.
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The Labour councillor who resigned was Lizzy Dobres. She left after accepting a “politically restricted” job that was incompatible with holding elected office. Dobres had represented the ward since 2022 and chaired the council’s health scrutiny committee. There were some pro forma complaints about her stepping down so soon after taking her seat again, but her departure is in a different category from those recent cases where ineligible candidates were elected.
Trinity ward is at the upper, north end of Tooting. It forms a neat, almost square patch on the ward map, with three of its corners at or near stations: the Northern line’s Tooting Bec in the south, main line Wandsworth Common in the north and in the east, Balham where the two railways meet.
In postcode terms, most of it is in SW17 (Tooting itself) with a section in SW12 (Balham). The area was developed as villas for the well-off middle classes in the second half of the 19th Century following the arrival of overland rail. For most of the time since then it has been an attractive neighbourhood (despite the heavy traffic on Trinity Road), part of the larger area around Clapham and Balham which benefits from good housing, strong transport links and a pleasant environment near parks.
It has concentrations of educated professionals matched only by a cluster of similar wards in Camden. Seventy-one per cent of Trinity’s residents are educated to degree level or above, the 12th highest proportion out of 679 London borough wards. Its population is a mix of young private renters and more secure older owner-occupiers. The 2021 Census found that 60 per cent of the population was White British, the highest proportion in Wandsworth.
Trinity was the product of boundary changes in 2022. Its predecessor ward, Nightingale, had long been a Conservative stronghold. It accounted for three of the seven Tory councillors elected at the party’s historic low point of 1971.
But Labour fell only 62 votes short of winning a Nightingale seat in 2018 and the advent of Trinity probably reduced the Conservative presence. Labour won both Trinity seats in 2022, but the new ward was a marginal and in May the Conservatives managed to gain one of them with only a two per cent swing.
The full council results across Wandsworth were nail-biting. Labour did much better than the party’s national and London baseline performance, but not quite well enough for the party to extend its time in office to a second term, having defeated the long-ascendant Conservatives in 2022.
The Tories won 29 seats (up seven since 2022) to 28 for Labour (down seven) and one Independent. This was immensely frustrating for Labour. The party polled the most votes overall by a two-point margin and there were four wards where the Conservatives won seats by fewer than 100 votes – St Mary’s by 13 votes, West Hill (49), Trinity (64) and Wandsworth Town (99).
Just slight shifts in its favour would have seen Labour retain control of Wandsworth with a working majority of six. Conversely, the Conservatives missed out on a second seat in Battersea Park by – depending on how one calculates it – 86 or 79 votes, which would have given them a tiny but indisputable majority of two seats, as long as the Liberal Democrats hadn’t scraped together another 50 votes in Thamesfield.
The Independent at the fulcrum of the council’s balance of control straight after the elections was Malcolm Grimston, re-elected at the top of the poll for West Hill ward with a mighty 4,081 votes. This beat his own record, set in 2018, as the biggest individual vote-getter in Wandsworth history.
Grimston’s popularity arises from his dedication to ward pavement politics and communication with residents. He was formerly a Conservative councillor and his politics beyond local issues leans somewhat to the Right, although he can be hard to categorise.
It would have been arithmetically possible for him to have kept Labour in by voting for a Labour mayor at the first full meeting of the new council line-up, but the numbers favoured the Conservatives and he made his confidence and supply deal with them, renewable each year.
Grimston’s position became a bit less pivotal once a Tory mayor, with his casting vote, had been chosen. However, Wandsworth’s Conservatives have been in uncharacteristic disarray these past few months. Their previous leader Ravi Govindia had been in charge from 2011 to 2022, but the new man, Aled Richards-Jones, stepped down in July having been made partner in his law firm. A problem of having a council full of young professionals is that they do tend to get promoted to jobs that are hard to reconcile with the demands of public office.
A divisive leadership election in followed, in which Robert Morritt defeated Daniel Hamilton by 15 votes to 14. All the Putney Tories voted for Morritt, all the Battersea Tories voted for Hamilton, and Morritt got the edge in Tooting. Morritt is a controversial figure. A previous spell as a Wandsworth Tory councillor ended in 2013, when he was expelled from the party group following allegations of financial irregularities (Morritt denies any wrongdoing). Following his elevation to the leadership, one cabinet member, Tom Pridham, resigned from rather than serve under him. Hamilton left as well.
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The other shock to the system for Wandsworth has been the looming prospect of a huge rise in its hitherto very low Council Tax – £1,028.21 for a Band D property in financial year 2026/7 to be precise. Most other boroughs charge twice as much, and in neighbouring Kingston-upon-Thames the rate is more than two-and-a- half times that in Wandsworth.
The borough has been an outlier since at least the introduction of the ill-fated so-called poll tax in 1990. In 1991/2, thanks to a government rebate, Wandsworth deemed that collecting its local taxes was not worth the administrative cost of doing so. Low local rates have long part of the local political culture, and the Labour administration accepted this in 2022-26.
Wandsworth is an efficient borough, but Council Tax accounts for only a small part of local authority finances. Support from central government, based on an assessment of how much local spending is needed, is the main determinant of local tax rates. Wandsworth has had it lucky for decades and eventually there was going to be a reckoning.
The Starmer government’s Fair Funding Review redressed a balance that became tilted against poorer areas under preceding Conservative-led governments. Wandsworth has lost out heavily from this, and also from other adjustments. It’s complicated, but its history of low spending and its demographic shift away from older and poorer people basically means that its assessed needs are lower than before.
Because of this fiscal shock, Wandsworth, along with a handful of other local authorities with low Council Tax levels, is to be exempt from the normal regime of maximum annual rises in Council Tax. The figure of 160 per cent was first reported by Politics Home’s Matilda Martin. The council intends to take legal action against the government.
Overlapping with the cut in central government support is a classic local political row over the financial legacy of the previous Labour administration. The Conservatives allege that Labour was spending down the reserves and “borrowing too much” (though there are strict accounting rules about local authority borrowing). They have commissioned a spending review that promises cuts in Wandsworth’s services and the cancellation of proposed housing developments. Labour counter-claims, in the words of their leader Simon Hogg, that “the Conservatives are pretending the council has run out of money so they can bring in austerity policies.”
In view of this, it is no small irony that in May the Conservatives sent out leaflets mocked up to look like official Council Tax bills claiming there would be vast tax increases under Labour, only to have to implement rises just as large themselves. The 2026 elections may have been, strategically, good ones for a party to lose.
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The Trinity by-election was fought by candidates for the main five parties, although it was clearly going to be an old-school two-party contest between Labour and the Conservatives. In the entire history of Wandsworth elections, beginning in 1964, only four winning candidates out of 1,022 in full borough elections have been other than Conservative or Labour – a lone Liberal in 1982 and Grimston’s three triumphs since 2018.
Defending the Trinity seat for Labour was Shirin Georgiani (pictured) who had come close but missed out on a gain in Wandsworth Town ward in May. The Conservative contender was Otto Jacobsson, a finance and technology PR executive who fought Trinity in May and in January 2024 had contested Tooting Broadway in a by-election.
Green Sylvain Magne, a specialist in “architecture and animation”, fought Wandle ward in May, and Reform UK candidate Josh Stanton had stood in Northcote. Lib Dem Dylan Henderson, having also stood in Trinity in May, now has the unusual, possibly unique, distinction of having contested two public elections before his 19th birthday.
The result was in the Wandsworth tradition of close two-party contests, and counted overnight with trademark speed and efficiency. Turnout at 40 per cent was by far the highest in any London by-election so far this term, reflecting the parties’ organisational efforts as well Trinity residents’ high propensity to vote. For an August election it was fairly amazing. Labour narrowly held the seat as Georgiani won 1,558 votes (47 per cent) to Jacobsson’s 1,431 votes (44 per cent), a majority of 127 for the incumbent party.
The Labour and Conservative shares of the vote were both up by very similar amounts, and there was basically no net swing since the May elections. The other parties all suffered losses, with the five per cent (168 votes) of the third-placed Greens lower than their share in 2022, let alone 2026. The Lib Dems, who have always struggled in Wandsworth (except in the very strange European Parliament election of 2019), came fourth (75 votes, two per cent).
Reform brought up the rear with a measly 51 votes, 1.7 per cent – a lower share than they polled in any ward in London in May. Wards like Trinity will always be Reform’s worst kind of territory, but they have usually managed more than five per cent in such places in the last couple of years. They will be more worried about falling back in their stronger areas, such as Thurrock and St Helens, but the London trend is against them.
The Wandsworth council chamber therefore returns to where it was before the Dobres resignation. The future of the Conservatives’ precarious ascendancy depends on their group holding together amid internal tensions and a very tough financial outlook.
Wandsworth’s continuing adherence to two-party politics makes it an oddity, perhaps a fossil. Local Conservatives have managed to keep their brand viable among an electorate that has rejected it at national appeal increasingly emphatically since 2017.
That electorate, whichever view one takes about the imminent end of low-tax Wandsworth, also seems to have taken a measured view of the issues and the reactions have more or less netted out. Perhaps asking well-off people, who tacitly recognise that they have had it a bit easy for a while, for a bit more tax is not fatal after all. But there will surely be more ructions in Wandsworth’s council chamber as the process unwinds.
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