The Liberal Democrats won an impressive victory in a by-election in the West Hampstead ward of Camden on Thursday, gaining the seat with a high swing. But the question of which party they gained the seat from is a little more complicated than usual.
Both Labour and the Conservatives had cause for embarrassment thanks to the trajectory of former councillor Shiva Tiwari. A managing director at the private equity firm Peak Rock, Tiwari had been a valued recruit to Labour’s slate in 2018, but he became disenchanted with the party and resigned from it in March 2025 to join the Conservatives.
In doing so, he criticised Labour both nationally and locally, arguing that “I just don’t think the Labour Party stands any more for the values that I strongly believe in around supporting hard-working families and small and medium-sized businesses to drive economic growth”. He accused Camden Labour of “pursuing a minority leftist agenda”.
The depleted Conservative contingent on Camden Council, reduced to just three councillors in the 2022 elections, welcomed Tiwari with open arms and made him deputy leader of their group. He was selected as a candidate for the Frognal ward, Camden’s only Tory stronghold, for the borough elections in May 2026 and seemed set fair for a significant role in his new party home.
However, Tiwari’s period as an asset to the Conservatives proved short. On 12 July, he went to pick up a package at the Costcutter supermarket on Finchley Road and got involved in a dispute with the staff there about whether he had a correct form of identification. Tempers rose and Tiwani shouted, “Don’t annoy me, I’m a councillor for this area, I will shut down your bloody shop, ok? Call your boss, this is a joke,” and went on to use foul language. The incident was recorded on the shop’s CCTV. Tiwari expressed regret for his part in the altercation and resigned his seat on the council.
It was not an election Camden Labour wanted to fight. West Hampstead’s electoral history is interesting. Its predecessor ward, West End, elected one Conservative and one Labour councillor in 1978, but then voted Labour across the board in the next three sets of local elections. In 1986, the Alliance (precursors to the Lib Dems) won neighbouring Fortune Green and some of the local activism spread next-door: the Lib Dems won their first seat in West End in 1994, mopped up the other in 1998, and then dominated three-member West Hampstead from its creation in 2002 until 2014, when Labour gained all three seats. But the Lib Dem vote did not fade away, and even at their 2018 low point they still had a quarter of the vote. West Hampstead has been a vigorously contested Labour-Lib Dem battlefield for over 30 years.
It is a compact ward, well-served by public transport. The three West Hampstead stations (Jubilee Line, Mildmay Line, Thameslink), lined up along West End Lane, are the focus of the ward, although the railway lines divide the residential areas from each other. In the east, the ward extends to Finchley Road, the eponymous stations (including Finchley Road & Frognal) and the O2 Centre, a 1998 shopping centre which was very trendy when it first opened but has aged poorly.
In the east, West Hampstead touches the borough boundary just opposite Kilburn station at the end of Maygrove Road and under the railway arches. The southern boundary is the southernmost railway line, except for several streets around Sherriff Road opposite the West Hampstead Jubilee Line station. To the north, it is divided from Fortune Green at Mill Lane and the northernmost part of West End Lane that runs east-west. Fortune Green and West Hampstead are closely linked and effectively form a single urban community of West Hampstead.
Demographically, West Hampstead is the sort of ward found only in the big cities. It is dominated by flats (89 per cent of households), and 39 per cent of people live alone (29 per cent do in London as a whole). The population is disproportionately drawn from people aged between 20 and 50, and a staggering 66 per cent are educated to degree level, nearly twice the national proportion.
It is skewed towards professional and managerial workers (55 per cent, compared to 38 per cent in London). West Hampstead is ethnically mixed but fairly white for London (62 per cent compared to 54 per cent) and by faith it is plurality non-religious (37 per cent) with a significant (six per cent) Jewish community. The politics of the ward can be read off from these figures – it is a metropolitan liberal stronghold and proud of it, with a small but persistent wealthy Conservative element.
The residential areas forming West Hampstead ward are mostly late Victorian terraces, with subtle social gradations between subdivided villas overlooked by railway lines to the larger family houses up towards the centre of Hampstead. There is also the 1970s Lymington Road council estate, also known as the Potteries because its streets and walks are named, apparently randomly, after pottery firms and the city of Dresden.
Admirers of quirky street names, fresh from last week’s chinchilla-inflected contest in Hounslow, will also be happy with West Hampstead. There is a path named after rock and roller Billy Fury and a road named in Victorian times after a large Indonesian island for reasons nobody seems to know. There is a complete gazetteer of Camden street names with explanations (when they exist) and a little history of street-naming to be found online. Sumatra Road, incidentally, was crowned in 2015 as the UK’s most canvassed street, being in a key three-way marginal (Hampstead & Kilburn) within easy reach of Westminster on the Jubilee line.
The West Hampstead landscape is in the process of changing because of the development of the O2 site, which extends nearly all the way from Finchley Road to West Hampstead stations on a stretch of land originally earmarked for the Ringway motorway scheme that was cancelled in the mid-1970s. Camden Council approved the masterplan for the site in 2023, and it will eventually yield 1,800 new dwellings, 600 of them graded affordable. The development is intended to be car-free. Work on the first phase has already begun with the demolition of the Homebase store at the far end of the O2 car park.
The O2 development was a campaign issue. Labour supported the scheme for its new housing and argued that existing local residents would get benefits, including new parks and £10 million in improvements to West Hampstead station. The Lib Dems were more equivocal, arguing that the housing was good but improved local infrastructure should precede it, but it was not a major theme of their campaign. The Conservatives complained about the 15-storey “high rise” buildings in the development – the developers argue that density is needed to allow more green space – and Reform UK alleged that “uncontrolled development is reshaping West Hampstead behind closed doors”.
The issue of fly tipping was prominent in the campaign, as it was in Cranford last week. It seems a ubiquitous problem regardless of whether the ward is urban, suburban or semi-rural, although the very central boroughs are perhaps less affected. It rankles with voters who see it as a sign of creeping squalor in their neighbourhood and an example of the state’s inability to control antisocial behaviour.
Looking into the economics of why the tippers do it and enforcing the regulations that exist would be good investments by central and local government. Labour pointed out that Camden was doing this, funding an enforcement officer focused on West End Lane and prosecuting several local businesses for violations, but the opposition argued that there was a lot of room for improvement.
Liberal Democrat leaflets targeted left-liberal voters who had supported Labour in the 2024 general election and subsequently felt disappointed. They criticised the Starmer government over welfare cuts, Europe and potential cuts to central government funding of London boroughs. Gaza came up frequently on the doorstep. Labour’s campaign majored on the record of Camden Council, one of London’s more effective and popular borough administrations, although it is rare even in those circumstances for people to feel all that grateful for improved schools and libraries.
The candidates were an interesting bunch. The Lib Dems selected Janet Grauberg, a significant personality in the local party and Camden’s political history. Camden is, despite having more wealthy and Conservative areas than other inner north London boroughs, generally loyal to Labour, and Labour control has only lapsed on two occasions – the Conservative sweep of 1968 and Labour’s recent nadir of 2006. The result in that year was a hung council, with the Lib Dems the largest single party. The administration was formed from a coalition between the Lib Dems and the Conservatives.
Elected for Kilburn ward, Grauberg became the borough’s cabinet member for finance. Labour regained control in 2010, unseating her in Kilburn. She stood there again in 2014 and 2018 with diminishing returns and was redeployed to the more hopeful ward of West Hampstead in 2022, achieving a strong result – the Labour version of Tiwari finished only 38 votes ahead of her, and she led her Lib Dem colleagues by around 200 votes, indicating an effective personal campaign.
Her personal qualities formed a major part of the Lib Dem by-election campaign – she had been awarded an OBE for services to education and the community. Labour criticised her record in power in 2006-10. If there is a non-Labour administration to be formed after the 2026 elections, Grauberg will form an important part of it.
Labour’s candidate was Francesca Reynolds, a young parliamentary staffer and management consultant. The Conservatives nominated Ian Cohen, who had contested West Hampstead in 2022 and Fortune Green in both 2014 and a 2021 by-election. Cohen runs a dry-cleaning business in West End Lane and is a long-standing local resident. Thomas Sterling stood for Reform and Matthew Hull represented the Greens.
Despite a vigorous campaign, the electorate had not shaken off its summer torpor and turnout was poor (26.4 per cent). As the Lib Dem bar charts claimed, it was a two-horse race – their campaigners were impressed by the Labour effort and pushed back against predictions of a big win. But when the votes were counted Grauberg (pictured, centre) had won in a landslide. She polled 1,176 votes – eight more than in the higher turnout 2022 borough elections – which amounted to 54.4 per cent of the vote (up from 38.9 per cent in 2022).
Reynolds fought a good fight, but was miles behind on 21.2 per cent (a steep drop from the Labour team’s 44.5 per cent in 2022). Cohen polled 222 votes (10.3 per cent), a poor showing, although the Tory vote was buffeted by Lib Dem squeeze tactics and the arrival on the ballot of Reform (155 votes, 7.2 per cent). The Greens brought up the rear with 152 votes (7.0 per cent).
It is not a good sign for Labour that they ran a decent campaign yet only just scraped over the 20 per cent barrier, even considering the factors making for a good Lib Dem result. It is enough to make one revise down the estimates of Labour performance in the 2026 borough elections, and those predictions were not looking too rosy to start with. But the question with challenges to Labour’s inner London hegemony is always from which direction they might come, and whether the opposition merely split the vote and enable Labour to survive despite reduced support.
In West Hampstead it was always clear that the Lib Dems were the main contenders, but in many wards it is far from clear – Conservatives, Reform, Lib Dems, Greens, local parties, Independents and Corbynites will all have ambitions. Three Camden by-elections last year painted a confused picture. To lose Camden, for example, Labour needs to lose 20 seats compared to 2022. It is easy to see six going to the Lib Dems and two more going to the Greens, but after that it gets harder. The bedraggled Camden Tories would have to pick up seats in their targets such as South Hampstead and Primrose Hill and the Greens would need to expand into Kentish Town. That’s still only 19 seats, so somewhere unexpected would have to flip as well.
Camden, for the first time since 2010, will be one of the headline contests in London, as local voters weigh the merits of the council and their verdict on Sir Keir Starmer’s government on the Prime Minister’s home turf.
Follow Lewis Baston on Bluesky. Photo from Janet Grauberg’s X/Twitter feed.
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