Hendon is the most marginal parliamentary seat in the country, Labour’s David Pinto-Duschinsky winning by a margin of only 15 votes over his Conservative opponent Ameet Jogia in the July 2024 general election. The Hendon ward of Barnet Council, however, has long been one of the most Conservative parts of the constituency. This dominance, though, was undermined by the December 2024 defection of one of their three Hendon councillors to Reform UK and further tested in a high-profile by-election on Thursday in which the Tories and Reform went head to head.
The contest was caused by the disqualification of Conservative councillor Joshua Conway, who had represented the ward since 2022, after an unusual chain of events for which he cannot be blamed. Conway is employed by the Nancy Reuben Primary School on Finchley Lane, within the ward. Formerly its head of Jewish Studies, he was promoted to head teacher in 2023.
The independent school’s business model was apparently unable to survive the imposition of VAT on school fees, so in order to continue operating, the school’s governors applied to become a voluntary aided state school and were accepted in September. This meant Conway became an employee of a school supported by the borough of Barnet, and under the terms of Section 80 of the Local Government Act 1972 this was incompatible with membership of the council. His seat became vacant.
Conway and his Conservative colleagues were annoyed about both VAT on school fees and the disqualification. Conway issued a statement, reported by the Jewish News, saying:
“I am deeply saddened. I love serving both my school and my community. It feels wrong to be forced to choose, when both roles only strengthen one another. This wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for the Labour government’s envy tax on independent schools.”
VAT on school fees is a reasonable point of political debate – the House of Commons Library has the details of the background and implementation of the change from January 2025. The evidence so far suggests that it has raised more money than expected and, perhaps predictably, there have been greater consequences in terms of pupils moving into the state sector than official expectations, though not as great as scare-mongering early estimates.
Conway’s Hendon ward colleague Alex Prager dismissed the disqualification rule as “bureaucratic technicalities”. This is surely wide of the mark. It is not a new rule – it has been a basic part of the local government scene for over 50 years. Neither is it a bad principle to prevent councillors from having a direct financial interest in what they are voting on, inconvenient as it sometimes is to dedicated local representatives like Conway – and, indeed, to Louise Couling in Barking & Dagenham, who had to re-fight her Goresbrook seat in 2010 because her job as a lollipop lady made her ineligible to sit on the council.
Hendon is a well-defined ward on the map. It is bounded by major roads. Going clockwise from Junction 2 of the M1 at the top it follows the A1 Great North Way, turns right at the A406 North Circular Road, then right again onto the A41 Watford Way at the Brent Cross junction (Britain’s first triple-deck intersection, opened in 1962), and then a hop at Colindeep Lane to follow the M1 north back to where we started.
By public transport, the ward is served on its western edge by Hendon Central on the Northern Line. There are two large open spaces, Hendon Park and Sunny Hill Park, and the smaller but surprisingly pleasant Brent Park, squeezed next to the North Circular. It borders two other wards where there have been by-elections this council term: Golders Green (2023) and Finchley Church End (2025).
Hendon ward is part of the heartland of the Barnet and, therefore, the British Jewish community. Its population is 33 per cent Jewish by religion, a proportion which underestimates the extent of community identification. The community is growing – 47 per cent of Hendon children are Jewish. There are at least 14 synagogues within its boundaries – fewer than in neighbouring Golders Green, but still a lot by most standards, covering a range of types of observance.
One of the largest and oldest is the Hendon United Synagogue at Raleigh Close. The Hendon community tends to the conservative side of the aisle in religion as well as in politics – as in Golders Green, Orthodox rather than liberal or ultra-Orthodox. The election came at a time when the entire Jewish community feels anxiety following the terror attack on the Heaton Park synagogue in Manchester.
The ward is otherwise a typical London suburban mixture of late Victorian and inter-war housing. As well as its Jewish community, there are other ethnic and religious minorities including Muslims (nine per cent), Hindus (four per cent) and black people (seven per cent). London suburbia is always diverse.
Hendon’s most unusual feature for a suburb is the amount of its accommodation that is privately rented (47 per cent, compared to 30 per cent for London as a whole). It has been Tory for the long term: no other party has won a seat there in the entire existence of Barnet Council, the closest call being a 67-vote lead over the Liberal Democrats in 1998, or even in pre-Greater London Middlesex County Council elections going back at least to 1952.
Despite the ward boundaries looking neat on the map, there was a battle over them when Barnet’s wards were reorganised in the run-up to the 2022 elections. The area at issue was Shirehall Park, a heavily Conservative and Jewish district in the south west corner of the ward.
It had previously been in West Hendon ward, where it was probably responsible for the Conservative win in 2018 in that marginal ward. Labour successfully argued to the Local Government Boundary Commission for England that it had more links with Hendon proper. This made West Hendon more winnable for Labour and Hendon even more of a Tory stronghold.
The principal meetings of Barnet’s elected councillors take place within the ward at Hendon Town Hall on The Burroughs, although the main administrative centre for the council has moved to Colindale. The civic buildings there were at the centre of a planning row about the previous Conservative administration’s wish to develop what was called the Hendon Hub in partnership with Middlesex University.
The full plan would have brought up to 1,000 more students to the area, adding to the 13 per cent of the ward’s residents who were students in 2021. The development was a controversial issue in the 2022 elections and Labour’s victory in the borough meant that most of it was scrapped. Statutory planning approval was granted in December 2024, but this was a legal formality because the Labour administration had decided to “halt the scheme indefinitely” after consultations with the university and residents.
Six candidates stood in the by-election; those of the five main parties were joined by Ben Rend of Rejoin EU, who had contested the Hendon parliamentary constituency in 2024. The Conservative candidate, Shimon Ryde, had previously been councillor for the Childs Hill ward from 2014 until 2022, sitting for a while as chair of strategic planning, but he left the Conservative group in 2021 over a still unknown “personal matter”.
The Reform UK candidate Yosef David can be described as a character. He stood for the Brexit Party against Jeremy Corbyn in Islington North in 2019, and fought Cricklewood ward in the Conservative interest in 2022 before switching to Reform, the Brexit Party’s successor. David was described by Dave Hill in a recent On London Extra as “very much the Full Nigel, waving a flag at any opportunity”. He has a lively social media presence and has appeared on the Farage-promoting GB News channel.
Lewis Harrison ran a quiet campaign for Labour. Green candidate Gabrielle Bailey had been the party’s parliamentary candidate for Hendon in 2024, and also fought the Burnt Oak by-election in February. The Lib Dem candidate was Jeremy Walsh, a retired solicitor.
The Hendon race was always going to be between the Conservatives and Reform. Labour was just over 1,000 votes adrift in May 2022, and the party’s popularity is well below what it was then. Despite this, the Conservatives leafleted Hendon ward with bar charts illustrating the irrelevant and misleading Hendon constituency result, arguing that it was a choice between them and Labour.
A high-pressure campaign brought in shadow cabinet members, including party leader Kemi Badenoch (in picture, centre), undaunted by failure in Bromley Common. In the past, it was unusual for high-level Westminster politicians to descend on local by-elections, but it now seems to be the pattern when a London ward is being defended by the Tories.
Reform tried to cover a lot of issues in their populist campaign, including local matters such as potholes, grumbles at the council and the state of the high street (Brent Street) in the old part of Hendon, as well as Jewish community issues such as protecting shechita (ritual slaughter in kosher butchery). David argued that diverse identities, including his own Jewish faith, could be united in Reform’s “civic patriotism” and traditionalist vision of Britain, although the party in general has questions to answer. Even very conservative Jews have tended to be resistant to the appeal of the populist Right, for obvious reasons.
The Conservatives emerged the winners. Ryde polled 1,656 votes (46.8 per cent), well ahead David received 1,069 (30.2 per cent). Labour trailed in third: Harrison polled 426 votes, representing 12 per cent – a better share than Labour got in Caerphilly last week. The other parties lagged behind: the Greens with 201 (5.7 per cent), the Lib Dems with 107 (three per cent) and Rejoin EU with 81 (2.3 per cent). Turnout was 25.2 per cent, down nine points on 2022, but par for the course in a local by-election.
The Conservatives have cause for satisfaction in holding the seat, of course, but it is not an entirely pretty picture for them. Their vote share was a bit down on 2022, and if one measures the swing from Labour to Conservative it was only six per cent. If repeated in the marginal Barnet wards next May, that would be just about sufficient for the Tories to eke out a narrow majority, but it was not a commanding performance, adding to the evidence from Whetstone and Finchley Church End that Barnet Tories might find it tough to win in one of their top target boroughs.
Reform will be pleased with their result, despite falling well short of winning. It was only the second time since they gained Bromley’s Common & Holwood ward in July that they have topped 30 per cent in a London by-election. Hendon had less obvious demographic and geographical potential for the party than Bromley, but they ran a prominent, punchy campaign.
David must have made inroads into the Orthodox Jewish community, which has usually been a reliable if sometimes low-turnout bank of Conservative votes. Nor did voters seem to be put off by revelations about the existing Reform (ex-Conservative) councillor for Hendon, Mark Shooter, who stood accused of being a “rogue landlord” for renting cramped bedsits to, among others, the then future Green Party leader, Zack Polanski.
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Returning to the Local Government Act 1972, Section 89 establishes what is called the “six month rule”. If a vacancy occurs in a council seat that is up for election in less than six months’ time, the seat remains vacant until it comes due to be contested in the ordinary local government calendar. The next London borough council elections being scheduled for 7 May 2026, the six-month cut-off comes down on 7 November.
There are, at the time of writing, no by-elections pending before that date. If Hendon is indeed the last by-election in the current term, the next OnLondon by-election coverage will take a broad look at the last three-and-a bit years and what we can learn in advance of the full borough elections next year.
Follow Lewis Baston on Bluesky. Photo from Barnet Conservatives X/Twitter feed.
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