Previewing the 7th May 2026 local elections Part V: London

Welcome to the annual Andrew’s Previews megapreview, covering everything that goes on in the ordinary local elections in Great Britain on 7th May 2026.

Because of its size, this Preview has been split into multiple parts. Part V covers the councils up for election in Greater London.

Links to other parts:
Part I (Introduction, Northern England)
Part II (Midlands, South West England)
Part III (Eastern England)
Part IV (South East England)
Part VI (Wales, Scotland, Concluding remarks)

London

We now turn to Greater London, where all the councillors in all 32 London boroughs are up for election at once. As such, the capital will form a major part of this year’s local elections. Also up for election here are four local authority mayors.

The 2022 London borough elections saw the Labour party put in a very good performance. They won overall majorities in 21 boroughs, compared to five Conservative and three Lib Dem councils, an overall majority for Aspire in Tower Hamlets, and two councils under no overall control. One of those is Havering, which in 2022 returned 23 Conservatives, 23 councillors from various Residents Associations, and 9 Labour councillors holding the balance of power; the Residents and Labour formed a coalition. There has been one by-election since, a hold for the Residents in Upminster ward. Havering is the eastern end of Greater London, taking in Romford, Upminster and a number of former GLC overspill estates which used to have a significant populist right vote and may well do so again this year. In many ways this is the least metropolitan of the London boroughs, and all other things being equal we might expect it to behave more like the Essex borough of Thurrock which it borders; but Thurrock doesn’t have organised Residents Associations, which introduce an extra level of uncertainty here. Another wrinkle is that Andrew Rosindell, the long-serving Conservative MP for Romford, is now in Reform UK. Havering will count its votes overnight.

It’s now nearly 18 years since anybody other than Labour won an election in Barking and Dagenham, and at the last London borough elections in 2022 a massive 69% of the votes were cast for Labour candidates. That doesn’t mean the borough isn’t in play. There have been strong votes here for the radical right before, most notably in 2006 when the British National Party won 12 seats despite only contesting seven of the borough’s then seventeen wards. Barking and Dagenham has seen a lot of demographic change in the two decades since then and its population is much less white and more diverse now, but some of that vote will still be there. Meanwhile Labour have some competition on the left here for once. In 2022 many wards in Barking and Dagenham only had Labour and Conservative candidates, and Labour were guaranteed 14 seats before a vote had been cast due to insufficient opposition candidates standing: this year every ward has a full slate of Labour, Conservative and Reform UK candidates, the Lib Dems are standing one candidate in every ward and the Greens (who have polled decently in a couple of recent by-elections here) have their targets. More choice for the electors is a good thing; as to whether this translates into a more politically diverse council, we shall have to wait and see.

The neighbouring Redbridge council has also seen major demographic change in this century, resulting in it swinging a mile to the left politically. Redbridge had a Conservative majority continuously until 1994 and again from 2002 to 2009, but Labour won a majority here for the first time in 2014 and increased their lead over the Conservatives to 58-5 at the 2022 elections. The council leader Jas Athwal was elected in 2024 as the Labour MP for Ilford South and resigned his council seat; the resulting by-election in Mayfield ward returned Ilford Independents candidate Noor Begum who had come a strong second to Athwal in the general election. Meanwhile Wes Streeting was run very close in Ilford North at the same election by another independent candidate, Leanne Mohamad. Despite the large Labour majority here, the party could be in trouble against an organised independent challenge.

One of the most unexpected results of the 2024 general election was the re-election of long-serving Conservative MP Iain Duncan Smith in the Chingford and Woodford Green constituency, after the prospective Labour candidate Faiza Shaheen was deselected at the last minute and ran a spoiler independent campaign which split the Labour vote. Mind, perhaps we shouldn’t have been too surprised given the 2022 results in Waltham Forest, in which Labour won 47 seats to 13 Conservatives who are strongly concentrated in wards within Duncan Smith’s constituency. Three of the Conservative councillors are now in Reform UK, while three Labour councillors have gone independent. It’s results in Leyton and Walthamstow which will determine whether Labour are re-elected here.

Newham council has a similar dynamic to Redbridge in that Labour have been challenged here in recent years by a Newham Independents slate, who have won three of the eight council by-elections which have taken place in this borough since 2022. This includes an easy independent win in the most recent by-election, in Plaistow South ward last September. The Green Party also got a foothold here in 2022 by gaining the brand-new (in every sense) Stratford Olympic Park ward. But it’s the Newham mayoralty which is important for political control here, and Labour are defending a large majority: in 2022 Rokhsana Fiaz was re-elected for her second term in the first round with 56% of the vote, with the Conservatives best of the rest on 12%.

Fiaz is standing down and the defending Labour candidate is Forhad Hussain, who is seeking to return to elected politics after some years away: Hussain, who is an engineer by trade and is currently working on the Lower Thames Crossing project, previously served as a councillor for Plaistow North ward from 2010 to 2018 and served in the cabinet of former mayor Sir Robin Wales. One of the candidates for Plaistow North this time round is the Conservatives’ mayoral candidate Terri Bloore, who is standing for election for the first time. The Green Party have selected Areeq Chowdhury, a researcher in the technology sector who was elected in 2022 as a Labour councillor for Canning Town North ward before defecting to the Greens; another councillor on the ballot is the Newham Independents’ Mehmood Mirza, who finished in fourth place with 8.5% at the last Newham mayoral election as an independent candidate and subsequently won a 2023 by-election in Boleyn ward, where he is also seeking re-election; the Lib Dem candidate Laura Willoughby, who is also standing for the council in Stratford Olympic Park ward, is a former Islington councillor with an MBE to her name who runs a “mindful drinking” movement promoting low- and non-alcoholic drinks; the Christian Peoples Alliance, who had Newham councillors many years ago, have nominated pastor Bharath Swamy who is also standing for the council in Wall End ward; Reform UK’s Clive Furness has 21 years of previous service as a Newham Labour councillor, latterly representing Canning Town North ward from 2002 to 2018; and Kamran Malik, who stood in the 2010 and 2014 Newham mayoral elections before serving two spells in prison for providing immigration advice and services which he was not qualified to provide, is now eligible to stand as a councillor again (it’s more than five years since his last imprisonment) and he is back on the Newham mayoral ballot for his Communities United Party.

Crossing the Lea from Newham we come to the 21st Century Rotten Borough of Tower Hamlets, which looks set to be just as rotten this time round. In 2022 the elected mayoralty was recovered by the monstrously corrupt Lutfur Rahman, who had served his five-year disqualification after being ejected by the Election Court in 2015 for the most fraudulent UK election campaign of modern times. Rahman defeated the outgoing Labour mayor John Biggs by 47-33 in the first round, a margin which closed to 55-45 in the runoff. His Aspire party also won an overall majority on Tower Hamlets council, with 24 councillors against 19 Labour, 1 Green and 1 Conservative. There has been one by-election since then, in Bow East ward in September 2024, which had no Aspire candidate - Aspire’s support is concentrated in the borough’s Bangladeshi community, and Bow East has a low Bangladeshi population - and which Labour held with the Greens in second place. In this election Bow East ties with Lansbury and Whitechapel wards for the distinction of having the country’s longest ballot paper: all three of those wards have 22 candidates chasing three seats.

Lutfur Rahman is standing for re-election on the Aspire ticket for his fourth term of office (including the voided 2014 election), and he is bottom of the alphabetical ballot paper. This time Labour have selected veteran councillor Sirajul Islam, who is leader of the council’s Labour group where he represents Bethnal Green East ward; Islam is not seeking re-election to the council after 24 years in office, so this election is very much win or bust for him. The Liberal Democrats are seeking to defend third place from last time with their new candidate Mohammed Abdul Hannan, a telecom network engineer who is also standing for the council in Whitechapel ward; the Conservatives’ Dominic Nolan, who is also a council candidate in Canary Wharf ward, is an actuary who has previous local government experience, serving from 2017 to 2021 as a Fife councillor for St Andrews before he moved to London for work; Hugo Pierre of the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition, who is also on the council ballot in Whitechapel, is back for another go after standing unsuccessfully for mayor in 2018 and 2022; the Tower Hamlets Independents, a new party who have impressively fielded a near-full slate of council candidates, have nominated barrister Zami Ali; the Reform UK candidate is John Bullard who is also standing for the council in Bromley North ward; the Greens have entered the fray with their candidate Hirra Khan Adeogun, who co-leads an environmental charity and is also a council candidate in Bromley North; and independent candidate Terence McGrenera, a journalist who campaigns on housing matters, last came to the attention of this column when he stood in a 2019 by-election for Lansbury ward for his then political party - The House Party.

Tower Hamlets will count the mayoral votes on Friday, with the council elections to declare on Saturday. Hopefully there won’t be a repeat of the chaos we saw at the 2014 count here, when the result for Bromley South ward wasn’t declared until 8:30pm on the Monday after the election.

To the north of Tower Hamlets we have a further mayoral election in Hackney, another very safe Labour council but this time with little history of recent electoral fraud. The 2022 council elections here returned 50 Labour councillors, 5 Conservatives who have a base in the Hasidic enclave of Stamford Hill, and 2 Greens.

At the same time the Labour mayor Philip Glanville was re-elected for his third term of office in the first round with a 59-17 lead over the Greens’ Zoë Garbett. Glanville was then forced to resign in 2023 over his association with Tom Dewey, who had been elected in May 2022 as a Labour councillor for De Beauvoir ward but resigned almost immediately: the reason for this resignation was not disclosed at the time, but Dewey was subsequently prosecuted for possessing indecent images of children. The mayoral by-election to replace Dewey took place in November 2023 and was won by Labour’s Caroline Woodley with 50% of the vote against 24% for the Greens’ Garbett and 14% for the Conservatives. Labour then embarrassingly lost the by-election to fill Woodley’s previous council seat in Cazenove ward to the Conservatives, while a more recent by-election in Stoke Newington ward in September 2024 was gained by the Green Party. That put the Greens up to four seats on the council, while four other Labour councillors have walked out and three of them have formed the Hackney Independent Socialist council group.

In this year’s local elections Hackney has the shortest mayoral ballot paper, with five candidates standing. Labour incumbent Caroline Woodley is seeking re-election for a second term of office. Her main challenge is again likely to come from Zoë Garbett, who is co-leader of the Green Party group on Hackney council: Garbett, who was the Green candidate for Mayor of London in 2024 and joined the ranks of the London Assembly shortly afterwards as a replacement for Siân Berry, is hoping to make it third time lucky here after finishing as runner-up in 2022 and in the 2023 by-election. The Conservatives’ Tareke Gregg stood in two Hackney council by-elections in 2024 and failed to crack 100 votes in the second of them in Stoke Newington ward; the Lib Dems’ Eva Steinhardt came to London in 2017 as a postgraduate student and lives on a houseboat in the borough; and the only male candidate is Reform UK’s Vahid Almasi, who runs a financial crime consultancy firm and works in a senior anti-fraud role for a well-known high street bank. All of the mayoral candidates other than Labour’s Woodley are also standing in the council election: Garbett is seeking re-election in Dalston ward, Gregg is standing for Clissold ward, Steinhardt is on the ballot for Springfield ward and Almasi is a candidate in Hoxton East and Shoreditch. Hackney is staggering its count, with the mayoral votes to be counted overnight followed by the council election on Friday.

Neighbouring Islington might be one to watch at this election. This council has also had issues with a Labour councillor who resigned after a very short term in mysterious circumstances which have subsequently become less mysterious. Ollie Steadman, who won a May 2024 by-election in Hillrise ward, lasted just two months before handing in his notice and a second by-election had to be held in August 2024 to replace him; Steadman is now awaiting trial on blackmail and communications offence charges arising from the so-called Westminster honeytrap scandal.

In between those two by-elections the former Labour party leader Jeremy Corbyn was re-elected in his Islington North constituency as an independent MP. Corbyn is now the leader of Your Party, who haven’t got their act together enough to actually stand official candidates in this year’s Islington election: they have endorsed three independent candidates, but that’s not quite the same thing.

Labour are defending a large majority in Islington from 2022, when they defeated the Greens by 48-3. Four Labour councillors have since quit the party and joined forces with the Greens to form an Independent and Green group on the council; they have also formed the Islington Community Independents slate, which is standing nine candidates. This relative lack of left-wing independent activity suggests that the Greens might be the main challengers here.

One council where the Greens have recently gained a foothold is Haringey, which includes the Tottenham constituency of the justice secretary David Lammy. Labour led the Lib Dems here in 2022 by 50-7 and have held five out of six by-elections since then; but the most recent poll here was a Green Party gain in St Ann’s ward in April 2025. The Green Party have also picked up a defector from Labour here, and they have joined forces with two other ex-Labour councillors in a Green Socialist Alliance group on the council.

Further up the Lea Valley, Labour won all three parliamentary seats for Enfield in 2024 but they lost ground here in the 2022 borough elections, with the Conservatives cutting the Labour majority to 38-25. Three Labour councillors have since gone independent. It will be interesting to see what happens here this time, particularly given the announcement of a potential new town at Crews Hill - which would be located within the present Whitewebbs and Ridgeway wards, and might well trigger a boundary review here in the near future.

Mind, for the Conservatives in outer north London Barnet forms a more iconic target. The former political home of Margaret Thatcher voted Labour in 2022 for the first time, with a 41-22 lead over the Conservatives; since then both parties have successfully defended three by-elections each. Defections mean that there is now a Green, an independent and a Reform UK councillor, while the former Conservative council leader Daniel Thomas has recently resigned his seat in Finchley Church End ward and then turned up shortly afterwards as the Welsh leader of Reform UK. There has not been time to hold a by-election for Thomas’ council seat, which remains vacant going into this election. Labour performed well here in the 2024 general election, winning all three of Barnet’s parliamentary seats.

Next to Barnet lies another closely-fought outer London council: the borough of Harrow, which was an against-the-trend Conservative gain in the 2022 elections. The Conservative lead on the council is 31-24. Harrow is the only London borough where there have been no by-elections in this council term so no further information is available from that source, but in July 2024 the Harrow East Conservative MP Bob Blackman was not only re-elected but was the only Conservative MP to poll more than 50% of the vote, gaining a 4% swing in his favour from Labour in a result completely out of kilter with everything else that was going on. This is clearly an artefact of the swing to the Conservatives among British Hindus in recent years, and it will be interesting to see if this persists now that Rishi Sunak is no longer running the show.

Next to Harrow we have Hillingdon borough, which combines right-wing areas of outer London like Uxbridge with more working-class areas like Hayes and with the daily chaos that is Heathrow Airport. This borough was quite close in 2022, but the Conservatives were re-elected with a 30-23 lead over Labour; the Tories then held the Uxbridge and South Ruislip parliamentary by-election the following year following the final disgrace of Boris Johnson, but Labour then gained the seat at the 2024 general election. There has only been one Hillingdon council by-election in this term, a Conservative hold in Hillingdon East ward. The Tories might well be worried about the Reform UK threat here, particularly in the rather isolated Harefield Village ward at Greater London’s north-west corner; Labour might be worried about the threat from the Hayes Independent Party, a Labour splinter group which currently has five councillors. In the event of a close result we might have to wait until June for certainty as to who will be running the show, because the election in Hillingdon West ward has been postponed following the death of a Reform UK candidate.

Crossing to the other side of Heathrow Airport brings us to Hounslow, where Labour are defending a large majority of 52-10 over the Conservatives. This has now fallen to 41-10: Labour lost a by-election in Syon and Brentford Lock ward last year to an independent, six Labour councillors have quit the party with five going independent and one ending up in the Greens, and three Labour councillors have recently died and one more has resigned leaving four vacant seats. As can be seen from the map, the Conservative vote in this borough is strongly concentrated in Chiswick; Labour might instead see Reform UK as their main threat, particularly in the Feltham area. Hounslow is now represented in the London Assembly by a Liberal Democrat, as part of the South West constituency, but the Lib Dem strength in south-west London lies elsewhere. Sadly we won’t get the chance to vote for Umesh Kumar, who put in nomination papers to stand simultaneously in Heston East ward for the Lib Dems and in Heston West ward for Reform UK: unfortunately, standing in simultaneous elections to the same council is against the rules, and once Kumar was rumbled the returning officer disqualified him in both wards.

Labour may be struggling with Hindu voters at the moment, but they retain stronger support in London’s Sikh community and this contributes to the large Labour majority in Ealing. The 2022 result here gave 59 Labour councillors against 6 Lib Dems and 5 Conservatives; the Lib Dems have since picked up a Conservative seat in a by-election in Hanger Hill ward plus a defection gain from Labour. Ealing will declare its results overnight.

Three-party politics in Brent - in 2022 Labour won 49 seats against 5 Conservatives and 3 Lib Dems - has now become four-party politics after five Labour councillors crossed the floor to the Green Party in December. Labour has also lost defectors here to independent, to Your Party and even to the Conservatives. What the voters of Wembley and Willesden make of all this is yet to be seen.

Next to Brent is the borough of Camden. Labour did well here in 2022, winning 47 seats against 4 Lib Dems, 3 Conservatives and one Green Party councillor - that was Siân Berry in Highgate ward, but she has since left the borough to become the MP for Brighton Pavilion. By-elections since 2022 have seen wins for all four parties, with the Lib Dems taking seats off Labour in Hampstead Town and West Hampstead wards. There are no defections at all to report here, which makes a refreshing change. Camden is the borough which which contains the Holborn and St Pancras constituency of the Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, so any Labour losses here would be particularly embarrassing for the party.

The Prime Minister’s central London constituency borders the city of Westminster, which returned a Labour majority in 2022 for the very first time. It was a fairly close result, with Labour defeating the Conservatives by 31-23. The Tories have since taken two by-elections off Labour in West End and Vincent Square wards, while Reform UK have taken a defector off both parties. With 29 councillors remaining out of a possible 54, Labour cannot afford many further losses here.

Westminster’s elections often feature notable candidates. This year’s Conservative slate includes the former Bedfordshire Police and Crime Commissioner (and losing Conservative candidate in the Mid Bedfordshire by-election) Festus Akinbusoye in Abbey Road ward, the former Shrewsbury and Atcham MP Daniel Kawczynski in Maida Vale ward, and the former Evening Standard editor (and sister-in-law of David Cameron) Emily Sheffield in Bayswater ward. Not to be outdone, the Green Party have nominated Ted “Hapax legomenon” Loveday, who was the star player on the Gonville and Caius, Cambridge team which won University Challenge in 2015, on their slate in Little Venice ward. Votes here will be counted overnight.

Also declaring its results overnight is the one London borough where the Conservatives can probably feel absolutely secure in their majority. This is Kensington and Chelsea, which is surely far too affluent to vote Reform UK; the borough might now have two Labour MPs, but that was in landslide conditions for the Labour Party. Things were more normal here in 2022 when the Tories won 35 seats against 13 Labour and 2 Lib Dem councillors. The Labour group has since fallen apart, and bizarrely one of their councillors has ended up in the very right-wing outfit Advance UK.

The ruling Labour group has managed to remain relatively united in our last North London borough Hammersmith and Fulham, reducing from a 40-10 lead over the Conservatives to 36-10 thanks to two defections to the Greens, a third councillor going independent and the recent resignation of a fourth councillor which has left a vacant seat in Hammersmith Broadway ward. Three by-elections since 2022 have resulted in two Labour holds and one Conservative hold. This is an overnight count.

Over the river, via whichever Thames bridge is open this week, we come to Wandsworth which until 2022 was the land where Normal Rules Did Not Apply. After decades of the local Conservatives defying political gravity here, Labour took overall control of Wandsworth in 2022 with 35 seats against 22 Conservatives and independent councillor Malcolm Grimston of West Hill ward. The Conservatives have got one seat back since then, in a 2024 by-election in the marginal West Putney ward; there are quite a lot of other marginal wards in Wandsworth, and it wouldn’t take much for the council to swing back. Wandsworth is counting overnight, and its elections team have a reputation for delivering swift and efficient results; but London election results always take a while to finalise, and a new dawn may well have broken by the time that the counters have finished here.

In London Assembly elections Wandsworth is paired with Merton, based on Morden and Wimbledon, which has a small Labour majority: the 2018 election returned 31 Labour councillors, 17 Lib Dems, 7 Conservatives and 2 residents’ councillors for Merton Park ward. The Conservatives actually polled more votes than the Liberal Democrats across the borough, but they were in second place nearly everywhere which is fatal in a first-post-the-post context: the only ward the Tories carried was Village, the super-affluent area around the All England tennis club. The Labour councillors are concentrated in the Mitcham and Morden parliamentary seat, while the Wimbledon constituency was a Lib Dem gain in the 2024 general election; the only two by-elections in the borough since 2022 were on the undercard of that poll, with Labour holding seats in Figge’s Marsh and St Helier wards. Merton counts its votes overnight.

There will be another overnight count in the neighbouring borough of Richmond upon Thames, which is famously the only London borough to include territory from both sides of the river. The Liberal Democrats swept the board here in 2022, topping the poll in all 18 wards; the council seats split 48 to the Lib Dems, 5 to the Green Party, and one to veteran Conservative councillor Godfrey Samuel. He died in 2023, and the Liberal Democrats then gained the resulting by-election in Hampton North ward to leave Richmond and Twickenham as a Tory-free zone. All five of the Green Party councillors won without Lib Dem opposition as part of an electoral pact, which has now broken down: this has prompted the Greens to stand a full slate of 54 candidates this time, but an error by the election agent means that 39 of them will appear on the ballot paper with a Green Party emblem against their name but no description. Confused? You might be.

The neighbouring borough of Kingston upon Thames is mostly the constituency of the Lib Dem party leader Sir Ed Davey, so any Lib Dem backslide here could be embarrassing - and there will be quite a turnover of councillors at this election with 19 Lib Dems standing down. The 2022 results here gave 44 seats to the Lib Dems against 3 Conservatives and 1 councillor from the Kingston Independent Residents Group: that’s James Giles in Green Lane and St James ward, who has since thrown his lot in with a number of left-wing and pro-Palestine MPs: he managed George Galloway’s win in the 2024 Rochdale by-election before becoming one of the people involved in setting up Your Party. The Kingston Independent Residents Group have since gained a by-election from the Lib Dems in Giles’ ward and picked up a defector to become the official opposition here, but time will tell whether campaigning on Gaza works as well in Kingston as it did in Rochdale. King George’s and Sunray ward is the only London ward, and one of only two wards in England at this election, which has no Reform UK candidate; rumour has it that the party were intending to stand there they but missed the nomination deadline.

Next-door Sutton is one of the longest-standing Lib Dem councils in the country with continuous majority control since 1990. Despite this, and despite the Lib Dem gain of both of the borough’s Parliamentary seats in 2024, Sutton’s demographic is an increasingly poor fit for the Liberal Democrat vote: it’s much less affluent than Kingston and Richmond. Although, to be fair, that’s not difficult. The Conservatives have been talking up their chances in Sutton for years without ever managing to get over the line: in 2022, which was the closest borough election here for years, the Lib Dems just held their majority with 29 seats against 20 Conservatives, 3 Labour councillors and 3 independents in Beddington ward. The Lib Dems rather easily defended two seats in by-elections last year, while a 2024 by-election in St Helier West ward saw the defending Labour vote collapse and a gain for the Conservatives. The St Helier estate is another area of outer London where Reform UK might fancy their chances this year. Sutton will count its votes overnight

Croydon in 2022 became the latest (and probably the last) council to go over to the elected mayoral system, following a well-publicised bankruptcy in the 2018-22 term. That happened on Labour’s watch, and the 2022 mayoral election turned in a very close result. In the first round the Conservatives’ Jason Perry led with 35% of the vote against 33% for Labour and 10% for the Lib Dems; in the runoff Perry defeated the Labour candidate Val Shawcross by 50.4% to 49.6%, a majority of 589 votes out of nearly 77,000. Mayor Perry has had to work not only with the Commissioners but also with a hung Croydon council, as the Conservatives won 33 seats to 34 for Labour, 2 Greens and a Lib Dem. Four by-elections since then - including one for the council seat won simultaneously by Perry - have resulted in no change, and this is one of the few councils which has seen no defections in the last four years. Croydon council has very few marginal wards, but the closeness of the mayoral result last time makes the borough’s second mayoral election hard to call.

Conservative mayor Jason Perry, who has had to impose heavy council tax rises over the last four years to try and get the borough’s finances back on track, is seeking re-election for a second term of office. The Labour candidate is Rowenna Davis, a former teacher and political journalist who is also seeking re-election to the council in the marginal Waddon ward. The Lib Dems have reselected Richard Howard, who was third in the 2022 mayoral ballot and subsequently stood in the 2024 general election in the Croydon South constituency. Another returning candidate from 2022 is the Greens’ Peter Underwood, who has contested a number of elections since May 2022 with his best performance being second place in a November 2022 by-election in Selsdon Vale and Forestdale ward; the Taking the Initiative Party candidate, who was on the 2016 New Year Honours list for founding Peckham BMX Club and for services to youth sport in South London, is called Michael Pusey MBE on the ballot paper or CK Flash when he’s working as a DJ; in a move which led to some ructions in the local party the Reform UK candidate is Ben Flook, who had been a Conservative candidate in the 2024 general election when he stood in Chesterfield; the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition have nominated Ben Goldstone; and we have an independent candidacy from Jose Joseph, a market trader who stood on the Labour slate for Croydon council in 2022 and was also briefly in Reform UK earlier this year.

The count here is being staggered, with the mayoral election to be declared on Friday and the council elections on Saturday. At least this is a scheduled delay, whereas the 2022 Croydon count ran so late that it had to be adjourned twice and the final results didn’t trickle out until Sunday evening.

The Conservatives are resting on stronger majorities in the two Kentish outer London boroughs. Despite this, Bromley council is home to the only Reform UK local councillor elected as such in London to date: that’s Alan Cook, who gained a by-election from the Conservatives last year in Bromley Common and Holwood ward. The Tories still have a strong majority after winning 36 seats in 2022 (against 12 Labour, 5 Lib Dems, 3 Chislehurst Matters councillors and 2 independents), but Reform UK have picked up two more seats here by defection and will be looking for more at this election.

Similar comments apply in our final Outer London borough of Bexley, if not more so. Bexley borough is dominated by lower middle-class voters, and it has similar demographics to neighbouring Dartford where Reform UK swept the board in last year’s Kent county elections. In local elections Bexley has been a two-party state throughout this century, with the Conservatives leading Labour by 33-12 in the 2022 election; but the Tories’ lead in votes then (47-41) was much less than might be assumed from the seat totals, and it wouldn’t take much for a Reform UK intervention to cause some chaos here. Votes here will be counted overnight. The ballot paper in Sidcup ward includes a candidate who has been on quite the political journey: Laurence Williams, who since 1994 has previously stood for election to Bexley council as an independent (twice) and on the tickets of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, the UK Independence Party, the English Democrats, the Christian Peoples Alliance, the continuing Liberal Party and the continuing SDP, and who has contested other elections for the Christian Party, the Welsh nationalist group Gwlad and Rejoin EU, is now standing in his home Sidcup ward - on the Green Party slate, making a total of ten political parties in 32 years. Who will take him on next?

Moving back into Inner London, Greenwich looks like being a fascinating contest at this election. The 2022 elections had a very large Labour lead, with the party carrying every ward and winning 52 seats to 3 for the Conservatives, but Labour have suffered some embarrassing by-election losses since then: in 2024 the Conservatives defended a seat in Mottingham and gained a seat from Labour in Eltham Town, while a by-election last year in Shooters Hill ward was lost to the Green Party. The Eltham wards also look like good territory for Reform UK. That area used to be the political stomping ground of Liz Truss, whose first election win came in the former Eltham South ward in 2006; this time round her husband Hugh O’Leary is making up the numbers as part of the Conservative slate for Woolwich Arsenal ward.

On paper, Labour start from an even stronger position in the final mayoral election in the capital, which takes place in Lewisham. It’s now 12 years since Labour lost an election of any kind in Lewisham, and the borough’s elected mayoralty has been continuously in Labour hands since it was established in 2002. The 2022 winner here was Damian Egan, who won in the first round with a 58-16 lead over the Green Party. Egan then resigned in 2024 to stand for Parliament in the Kingswood by-election, which he won, and his former deputy Brenda Dacres won the resulting mayoral by-election in March 2024 with 52% of the vote against 16% for the Greens and 12% for the Lib Dems. Four of the 54 Labour councillors elected here in 2022 have since defected to the Green Party, who have enjoyed a significant vote here in the past and will be eyeing this borough up.

Mayor Dacres is retiring after one term, and the defending Labour candidate here is Amanda de Ryk who has been the council’s cabinet member for finance for the last eight years. De Ryk is not seeking re-election to the council in her current Blackheath ward, so this is win or bust for her. The Green Party candidate Liam Shrivastava is one of the four Lewisham Labour councillors who have defected to the Greens since 2022; Shrivastava was elected then in New Cross Gate ward, but he is not seeking re-election there and is instead on the council ballot in Crofton Park ward. The Lib Dem candidate Josh Matthews has previous local government experience, having been elected to Cambridge council at an August 2019 by-election in Newnham ward; Matthews lost his seat in Cambridge in 2021, and he has since turned up in a couple of elections in Lewisham including standing as Lib Dem candidate for Lewisham West and East Dulwich at the 2024 general election. The Conservatives have selected Sylbourne Sydial, an entrepreneur, lawyer, content creator and motivational speaker who came to the UK from his native Jamaica in 1992; the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition candidate is Jay Coward, who is also standing for the council in New Cross Gate ward and will be hoping to improve on her sixth-place finish here last time; independent candidate Kayode Damali is a professional speaker who was a contestant in the 2018 series of The Apprentice; another independent on the ballot is Roger Mighton, who was also an independent candidate for mayor in 2022 and on that occasion finished in seventh and last place; and the Reform UK candidate is Pete Newman.

Similar comments apply in Southwark, but this borough also has the complicating factor of the Liberal Democrats whose strong local vote in the Bermondsey area - dating back to the Simon Hughes years - has not yet faded away entirely. The Dulwich end of the borough is also much more middle-class than anything to be found in Lewisham, although that hasn’t stopped the former Conservative vote here from collapsing; while the Greens have previously won a council seat in Peckham although that was a very long time ago. Labour are defending 52 seats from the 2022 results, the Lib Dems 11. One notable figure on the ballot here is the Conservative Party’s in-house electoral expert Lord Hayward, who is again standing as a paper candidate in Camberwell Green ward.

We’ll finish our spiral tour of London in a borough which was once synonymous with the “loony left” - although its current Labour administration is a much more sober affair. Lambeth returned 58 Labour councillors in 2022 against 3 Lib Dems and 2 Greens - who have now drawn level with the Lib Dems after a spectacular by-election gain from Labour last year in Herne Hill and Loughborough Junction ward. The Lambeth Greens will be hoping for more results like that.

Stay tuned for the final Part VI of this Preview, which will discuss Wales and Scotland before making concluding remarks. Part VI will also include our annual In memoriam section, paying tribute to all the local councillors who have passed away over the last 12 months.

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Andrew Teale