There are five by-elections on 23rd July 2026, in the first week of the Burnham government, and none of them are in the North. Let’s start the week in the West Country:
Exmouth Brixington
East Devon council; caused by the resignation of Conservative councillor Cherry Nicholas.
Last week the outgoing Starmer government announced plans for local government reorganisation, which I won’t discuss in detail here because if you don’t have anything nice to say it’s probably best not to say anything. We shall simply note that the then local government secretary, Steve Reed, was unceremoniously booted out of government less than a week later; the old boss is back at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government with the return of Angela Rayner as the relevant Secretary of State.
Four of today’s five by-elections are in councils which already have unitary status. But we’re going to start this week with the other one. It’s July and the school summer holidays are upon us, which means that the tourists have descended upon south-west England.
Exmouth, the largest town in the East Devon district, is likely to be a bit busy at the moment. But the tourists might not visit Brixington, which is the north-eastern of Exmouth’s five East Devon council wards. This is a generally residential area which also takes in some countryside within the Exmouth parish boundary; some of this is covered by solar farms, while the small Bystock nature reserve is noted for its open water which should be full of dragonflies at this time of year.
Exmouth Brixington is one of those wards that comes up in this column over and over again, and this is the third by-election here in ten years. Since 2007 the Conservatives have held two out of three seats here, but only in 2015 and 2023 did they get a full house. The two previous by-elections, in October 2016 and May 2024, were also Conservative wins; scores on the doors here in 2024 were 37% for the winning Conservative candidate Aurora Bailey, 33% for the Lib Dems and 22% for Labour.
Since that East Devon council by-election the voters of Exmouth have been called out twice for other polls. In July 2024 Exmouth was added to the parliamentary map with the creation of the Exmouth and Exeter East constituency, which returned Conservative candidate and former Royal Marine David Reed. Reed had got the Conservative nomination after Simon Jupp, the outgoing MP for the previous East Devon seat which included Exmouth, decided not to stand here but instead to take on the Lib Dems’ Richard Foord in the Honiton and Sidmouth constituency; that was not a good decision on Jupp’s part. In the May 2025 Devon county council election Brixington was part of the large two-seat Exmouth division, which split its representation between Reform UK and the Conservatives with the Lib Dems not far behind.
Having already successfully defended one Exmouth Brixington by-election in this term, the Conservatives now have to repeat the trick following the retirement of Cherry Nicholas. She has been an Exmouth town councillor for this ward since 2011; Nicholas was elected to East Devon council in 2015, lost her seat to the Lib Dems in 2019 and got it back in 2023. Her son Darryl Nicholas was the winner of the 2016 by-election here, although he stood down in 2019.
Defending this seat for the Conservatives is Lee Mason, who has recently moved back to his native Exmouth from Portsmouth where he was previously a long-serving councillor: Mason represented Cosham ward on Portsmouth council from 2003 until 2023. The Lib Dems’ Andrew Colman was a previously a councillor for this ward from 2019 and 2023 and is hoping to return. This time there is no Labour candidate, but we do have contests on an all-male ballot paper from Mike Rosser for the Greens and from Reform UK’s Paul Thomas, who was an unsuccessful candidate for the county council last year in Exmouth and Budleigh Salterton Coastal.
Parliamentary constituency: Exmouth and Exeter East
Devon county council division: Exmouth
ONS Travel to Work Area: Exeter
Postcode district: EX8
Andrew Colman (LD)
Lee Mason (C)
Mike Rosser (Grn)
Paul Thomas (RUK)
May 2024 by-election C 586 LD 513 Lab 339 Grn 136
May 2023 result C 734/673/662 LD 579 Lab 559 Ind 518/471 Grn 434
May 2019 result C 662/633/632 LD 652/627 Lab 381
Previous results in detail
Longwell Green
South Gloucestershire council; caused by the resignation of Conservative councillor Kristopher Murphy.
Back in the day, the area east of Bristol was the King’s Wood - a royal forest, which in mediaeval times meant an area set aside for hunting which might not necessarily be wooded. This was the time when Barr’s Court was constructed, a stone manor house surrounded by a moat dating from 1340. The manor house is long gone. By 1740 it had been demolished and its stone had been reused for a farmhouse on the site, which now itself lies in ruins. Three of the four sides of the moat, however, still exist - now nestled incongruously in the middle of a housing estate, between a primary school and an Indian restaurant.
This is part of Longwell Green, a large housing estate on the eastern edge of Bristol which has good road links: it lies just outside the A4174 ring road, which connects Keynsham to the south to the motorway to the north. Longwell Green is in the top 100 wards in England and Wales for residents in “intermediate” occupations, at 16.1% of the workforce, and it has high rates of owner-occupation.
The relatively young age of the houses here means that Longwell Green’s famous daughter is also relatively young. Claudia Fragapane is a former gymnast who has two World Championship bronze medals and five Commonwealth gold medals to her name. Four of those came at the 2014 Glasgow Commonwealth Games, at which Fragapane set a record for the most gold medals won by an English female competitor at a single Games. Will we see anything like this at the 2026 Glasgow Commonwealth Games, whose opening ceremony takes place tonight?
Longwell Green last appeared in this column in February 2024 as part of our preview of the parliamentary by-election in the Kingswood constituency. That seat disappeared in boundary changes five months later and this area was transferred into the North East Somerset constituency, which was renamed as North East Somerset and Hanham in consequence. In July 2024 North East Somerset and Hanham was won by Labour’s Dan Norris, who was Mayor of the West of England at the time and had also been the MP for the predecessor seat of Wansdyke between 1997 and 2010. He defeated the previous Conservative MP for North East Somerset, Jacob Rees-Mogg.
Norris has been absent from the Commons since April 2025 after he was arrested by Avon and Somerset police on suspicion of multiple sexual offences. The police investigation is still ongoing at the time of writing, although there were reports earlier this month that a file had been submitted to the Crown Prosecution Service. Should Norris be charged, he would not be the first MP to face sexual charges in this Parliament. Last week the Conservative MP Patrick Spencer was acquitted by a jury at Southwark Crown Court of sexually assaulting two women, and Spencer has been readmitted to the Conservative whip.
At local level, Labour are the junior partners to the Lib Dems in the coalition that runs South Gloucestershire council. The 2023 elections here returned 20 Lib Dems and 17 Labour councillors against 23 Conservatives and an independent; three subsequent by-elections have resulted in two holds for Labour and one for the Lib Dems.
It’s now the Conservatives’ turn to defend a South Gloucestershire by-election after Kris Murphy handed in his notice in order to join the Royal Navy. He had served for three years as a councillor for Longwell Green, which has been safe Conservative in local elections for decades. When the ward was last contested in 2023 Longwell Green gave 48% to the winning Conservative slate, 30% to the Lib Dems and 21% to Christine Price, an outgoing Conservative councillor for the ward who stood for re-election as an independent candidate. Curiously, Labour didn’t stand here on that occasion.
Defending this seat for the Conservatives is Graham Hardwell, who works in the care sector and sits on Oldland parish council which covers the majority of this ward. The Lib Dems’ Jim Corrigan has already stood in two South Gloucestershire council by-elections in this term without success - will it be third time lucky for him? There’s no independent candidate this time, but we do have interventions from Reform UK’s Stephen Burge who was their parliamentary candidate for Filton and Bradley Stoke two years ago, from Jack Friend for Labour and from Rachael Ward for the Greens.
Parliamentary constituency: North East Somerset and Hanham
ONS Travel to Work Area: Bristol
Postcode districts: BS15, BS30
Stephen Burge (RUK)
Jim Corrigan (LD)
Jack Friend (Lab)
Graham Hardwell (C)
Rachael Ward (Grn)
May 2023 result C 1442/1170 LD 906/621 Ind 626
May 2019 result C 1545/1369 Lab 677/605 LD 330/293
Previous results in detail
Grays Riverside; and
Grays Town
Thurrock council, Essex; caused respectively by the resignations of Reform UK councillors Joe Soper and Marc Stanley.
We now come to two by-elections on the north bank of the Thames Estuary, to replace Reform UK councillors who submitted their resignations just two weeks after being elected to Thurrock council in May. Joe Soper and Marc Stanley both cited personal reasons for their resignations, with Soper indicating that he was focusing on helping a family member through serious illness while Stanley’s resignation statement indicated that his personal circumstances had changed.
Soper and Stanley were elected for the two wards in Grays, a town which lies on the north bank of the Thames estuary a few miles downstream from the Dartford crossing. This town was once known as Grays Thurrock, with “Grays” coming from the late 12th-century Norman landowners the de Grai family and “Thurrock” being derived from an Old English word for “bilge”, which would have been a reference to the marshy land on the Thames riverside. Over time the name “Thurrock” came to refer to the wider area, and the full name of “Grays Thurrock” town has fallen into disuse.
The bilge area on the riverside has been drained and turned into housing, which forms the majority of the Grays Riverside ward. This ward also extends to the north of the London, Tilbury and Southend railway line to take in an oil depot run by Goff Petroleum, which supplies heating oil to East Anglia and the South East, and the more picturesque surroundings of the Chafford Gorges nature park. This covers a series of disused chalk quarries, which are of interest to scientists both for their wildlife and for their geology. Grays Riverside ward also includes the main offices of Thurrock council, next to Grays railway station.
To the north of the station is Grays Town ward, which covers the town centre and housing to the east and north. This is centred on St Thomas of Canterbury primary school - for those who remember my rant about the name “Thomas à Becket” last week, this is an acceptable name for Becket - and also includes the secondary school of Hathaway Academy, named after the adjacent Hathaway Road. Hathaway Academy’s former pupils include Russell Brand, whose first acting role was in a school production of Bugsy Malone here.
Grays is recognised by the ONS as part of the London Travel to Work Area, and its demographics look far more like a London ward than an Essex ward. In the 2021 census Grays Riverside ward, which then had slightly different boundaries, was in the top 10 wards in the Eastern region for black residents (15.3%) and in the top 100 wards across England and Wales for residents born in the 2004 EU eastern expansion states (9.9%) or in Romania or Bulgaria (7.9%). The ward is economically dominated by the transport and storage sector in the Port of London, which employs 12.5% of the workforce. Grays Thurrock, the predecessor ward to the present Grays Town, had demographics which were similar but not quite so extreme.
The present ward boundaries only came in for the May 2026 local elections, in which both Grays wards were part of the very large Reform UK majority on Thurrock council - although only narrowly so. Reform UK won the three seats in Grays Riverside with 33% of the vote, against 29% for the Green Party and 26% for Labour: the final Reform UK councillor had a majority over the Greens of just 17 votes. Grays Town ward was more of a two-party fight, with Reform UK’s winning score being 35% against 32% for Labour - whose slate included the defeated council leader Lynn Worrall - and 16% for the Greens; here the Reform UK majority for their third-placed councillor, Marc Stanley, was 55 votes. Both predecessor wards had consistently voted Labour in the period 2004-24, often with large majorities. The Commissioners are still in place following Thurrock council’s recent bankruptcy, so any political change which the new Reform UK leadership might be able to put through could be limited.
The 2026 Thurrock results will have been noted with some concern by Thurrock’s Labour MP Jen Craft, who gained the seat from the Conservatives in 2024. Craft, who was educated at Grays Convent high school within Grays Town ward, had previously given up a civil service career in order to become a full-time carer for one of her children who has Down’s syndrome. She has ongoing health challenges herself, having been diagnosed with OCD and bipolar disorder when she was in her 20s.
Reform UK’s defending candidate in Grays Town ward is John Pearson, who was one of only four unsuccessful Thurrock council candidates for the party in May when he contested West Thurrock and South Stifford ward. He is looking to hold off Labour’s Amin Hoque, who stood in May in Aveley ward. The Green candidate here is Rhea Nathan. Also standing here are Joglur Rahman for the Conservatives, Simon Lancaster for the Lib Dems and independent candidate Neil Speight, a former independent Thurrock councillor who is trying to get straight back onto the council after losing his seat in Stanford-le-Hope in May.
In Grays Riverside ward the defending Reform UK candidate Jason Mitchell has hit the headlines during this campaign for dubious social media posts from some years ago: this didn’t come out in the run-up to May’s election when Mitchell was the runner-up in Chafford Hundred West ward. The Greens have changed candidate to Pauline Weir, who wants to hold the Reform UK administration to account if she is elected. Labour have selected Jo Potter, who was an unsuccessful candidate in May for Chadwell St Mary ward. Grays Riverside has a shorter candidate list, with the Conservatives’ Srikanth Panjala - who is a former Labour Thurrock councillor, and was a Labour candidate in the district as recently as May - completing a ballot paper with four options.
Grays Riverside
Parliamentary constituency: Thurrock
ONS Travel to Work Area: London
Postcode districts: RM16, RM17, RM18, RM20
Jason Mitchell (RUK)
Srikanth Panjala (C)
Jo Potter (Lab)
Pauline Weir (Grn)
May 2026 result RUK 716/657/650 Grn 633/562/516 Lab 569/520/482 C 238/186/174
Previous results in detail
Grays Town
Parliamentary constituency: Thurrock
ONS Travel to Work Area: London
Postcode district: RM17
Amin Hoque (Lab)
Simon Lancaster (LD)
Rhea Nathan (Grn)
John Pearson (RUK)
Joglur Rahman (C)
Neil Speight (Ind)
May 2026 result RUK 1004/998/970 Lab 915/895/770 Grn 464/400 C 317/277/232 LD 183
Previous results in detail
Cuxton, Halling and Riverside
Medway council, Kent; caused by the death of Conservative councillor Phil Filmer.
We’ll finish for the week in a Kentish ward - but not a Ward of Kent, because that would be on the eastern side of the River Medway. It’s on the western side of the Medway valley that we find the villages of Cuxton and Halling, which lie to the west of the Medway towns.
This is the area where the navigable Medway estuary punches through the chalk of the North Downs, and large parts of this ward are within the North Downs National Landscape. Halling’s economy was traditionally based on chalk quarrying and a cement factory. The major quarry here has now been flooded to create St Andrews Lake, a centre for watersports.
Further down the estuary is the village of Cuxton, whose name has been shortened over the centuries from its original form of Cucklestone. Here the parish church - dedicated to St Michael and All Angels - briefly had as its rector in 1610 one William Laud, who would go on to become Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633. Laud was a key ally of Charles I and he introduced controversial religious and liturgical reforms, which made him a marked man when the English Civil War broke out shortly afterwards: in 1640 Laud was arrested and imprisoned in the Tower of London. Following an inconclusive impeachment trial in 1644, which clearly demonstrated that Laud was innocent of the charges laid against him, Parliament passed an Act of Attainder under whose terms Laud was executed in January 1645.
Attainder was a concept of English common law under which traitors or other people who fell foul of the King and/or Parliament could be executed, have their lands and goods forfeited, and have their heirs disinherited under the doctrine of “corruption of blood”. Many prominent figures have had Acts of Attainder passed on them over the years, including King Richard III (posthumously, after his death at Bosworth) and a number of other leading figures in the Wars of the Roses, Henry VIII’s fifth wife Queen Catherine Howard, Guy Fawkes and his fellow Gunpowder Plot conspirators, and the Duke of Monmouth for leading the 1685 Monmouth Rebellion. An Act of Attainder passed in 1746, attainting the Earl of Kellie and others in response to the 1745 Jacobite uprising, has become notorious for the length of its title which runs to 419 words:
“An Act to attaint Alexander Earl of Kellie, William Viscount of Strathallan, Alexander Lord Pitsligo, David Wemyss Esquire commonly called Lord Elcho Eldest Son and Heir Apparent of James Earl of Wemyss, James Drummond Esquire Eldest Son and Heir Apparent of William Viscount of Strathallan, Simon Fraser Esquire Eldest Son and Heir Apparent of Simon Lord Lovat, George Murray Esquire commonly called Lord George Murray Brother to James Duke of Athol, Lewis Gordon Esquire commonly called Lord Lewis Gordon Brother to Cosmo George Duke of Gordon, James Drummond taking upon himself the Title of Duke of Perth, James Graham late of Duntroon taking on himself the Title of Viscount of Dundee, John Nairn taking upon himself the Title or Style of Lord Nairn, David Ogilvie taking upon himself the Title of Lord Ogilvie, John Drummond, taking upon himself the Style or Title of Lord John Drummond Brother to James Drummond taking on himself the Title of Duke of Perth, Robert Mercer Esquire otherwise Nairn of Aldie, Sir William Gordon of Park, John Murray of Broughton Esquire, John Gordon the Elder of Glenbuckett, Donald Cameron the Younger of Lochiel, Doctor Archibald Cameron Brother to Donald Cameron the Younger of Lochiel, Ludovick Cameron of Tor Castle, Alexander Cameron of Dungallon, Donald Mac Donald of Clanronald Junior Son to Rhonald Mac Donald of Clanronald, Donald Mac Donald of Lochgarie, Alexander Mac Donald of Keppoch, Archibald Mac Donald Son of Col. Mac Donald of Barisdale, Alexander Mac Donald of Glencoe, Evan Mac Pherson of Clunie, Lauchlan Mac Lauchlan of Castle Lauchlan, John Mac Kinnon of Mac Kinnon, Charles Stewart of Ardsheil, George Lockhart Eldest Son and Heir Apparent of George Lockhart of Carnwath, Lawrence Oliphant the Elder of Gask, Lawrence Oliphant the Younger of Gask, James Graham the Younger of Airth, John Stewart commonly called John Roy Stewart, Francis Farquharson of Monalterye, Alexander Mac Gilivrae of Drumaglash, Lauchlan Mac Intosh Merchant at Inverness, Malcolm Ross Son of Alexander Ross of Pitcalny, Alexander Mac Leod Son to Master John Mac Leod Advocate, John Hay Portioner of Restalrig Writer to the Signet, Andrew Lumsdale otherwise Lumsdain Son to William Lumsdale otherwise Lumsdain Writer in Edinburgh, and William Fidler Clerk in the Auditor’s Office in the Exchequer of Scotland, of High Treason, if they shall not render themselves to One of His Majesty’s Justices of the Peace on or before the Twelfth Day of July in the Year of our Lord One Thousand Seven Hundred and Forty-six, and submit to Justice.”
The last person to be attainted by Parliament was Lord Edward Fitzgerald in 1798, for leading a rebellion in Ireland. Fitzgerald had already died in the rebellion, so the effect of the Act was to confiscate his estate. The process was last attempted in 1820, after Queen Caroline had been accused of adultery: a Pains and Penalties Bill (a milder version of the same idea, which did not involve the death penalty) was narrowly passed by the Lords, but Lord Liverpool’s government decided not to present it to the Commons after realising that it would likely be voted down there. The penalties of attainder, forfeiture and corruption of blood for treason were finally abolished for England, Wales and Ireland by the Forfeiture Act 1870, which still has the effect of banning persons convicted of treason from holding public office or voting in the UK. It wasn’t until 1949 that similar law changes came in for Scotland.
Cuxton and Halling makes the top 60 wards in England and Wales for residents employed in the construction sector (15.4%), which is perhaps appropriate given that many of the major communication links to and from Kent pass through Cuxton. Cuxton and Halling railway stations are on the Medway Valley line, which is one of the few Southeastern routes that does not radiate from London: passengers from here heading to the capital will need to change trains at Strood. Climbing up the hillside above the village is the Chatham and Dover main line towards London, which has no station here.
And crossing both of those railway lines and the river at right-angles are the eight traffic lanes of the M2 motorway and the two tracks of High Speed One, which thunder high above the river on the three Medway Viaducts. The original M2 viaduct, which opened in 1963 at a cost of £2.5 million, now carries only the eastbound carriageway of the motorway: the westbound viaduct and the railway viaduct both date from 2003, when the current UK rail speed record of 208 miles per hour was set here by a specially-modified Eurostar train. The two road bridges relieved the old Rochester Bridge carrying the A2 between Rochester and Strood, which even in the 1950s was generating traffic jams notorious enough that they were mentioned by Ian Fleming in a James Bond novel.
Until 2023 the parishes of Cuxton and Halling formed the only single-member ward of Medway council, which covers the five Medway Towns plus a number of parishes to the west for which Strood - the only Medway Town west of the river - is the most convenient urban centre. Boundary changes for the 2023 election created the present ward by adding the Waterside area of southern Strood and a second councillor. Within this Waterside area we find Diggerland, in the shadow of the Medway Viaducts. This is not a museum dedicated to Gerrard Winstanley and his fellow political dissidents of the mid-17th century: Diggerland is one of a chain of UK theme parks in which members of the public can get their mucky paws on bulldozers, excavators and other heavy machinery.
The previous Cuxton and Halling ward had been safely Conservative and on topline figures from 2023 the expanded ward looked like it had continued in that vein with 44% for the Conservatives, 32% for the Greens and 21% for Labour; but much of the Conservative lead was a personal vote for the former Cuxton and Halling ward councillor Matt Fearn and not all of it transferred to his running-mate Phil Filmer. Filmer ended up winning the second seat just 44 votes ahead of the lead Green candidate.
Cuxton, Halling and Riverside ward is politically in the minority on Medway council, which is run by Labour. Labour also hold the local parliamentary seat of Rochester and Strood, which was gained from the Conservatives in 2024 by Australian-born Lauren Edwards who featured in this column when she won a Medway council by-election in December 2021. At that time Edwards was working as a financial regulator at the Bank of England; she also had extensive experience as a union rep.
This by-election is to replace Phil Filmer, who had only represented Cuxton, Halling and Riverside ward since 2023 but whose council service went back a long time before that. He was first elected in 1991 to the old Rochester-upon-Medway city council, serving as a councillor for All Saints ward until 1995 when he lost re-election in a different ward. In 2000 Filmer was elected to Medway council for All Saints ward, which was based on the Isle of Grain, and in 2003 he transferred to the successor Peninsula ward which he represented for 20 years. For most of that time Filmer sat in the Medway council cabinet with the frontline services portfolio; from 2021 to 2023 he was also Senior Warden of the Rochester Bridge Trust, a charity which has maintained Rochester Bridge since the 14th century. He died in May at the age of 74.
Defending this seat for the Conservatives is Richard Thorne, who is the chair of Halling parish council; Thorne is also seeking to return to Medway council, where he represented Strood South ward from 2019 to 2023. The Green Party have selected Trish Marchant, a healthcare engineer who gives an address in Gillingham on the far side of the Medway Towns; Marchant’s most recent election campaign was in a Medway council by-election in Gillingham South ward in February last year, and she was also the Greens’ parliamentary candidate for Gillingham and Rainham back in 2010. Standing for Labour is Iain Childs, who contested Rainham South East ward in 2023. Also on the ballot are Ronald Gillett for the Lib Dems and Reform UK’s William Burvill, who is chair of the party’s Rochester and Strood and will be hoping to join two previous Reform UK by-election winners on Medway council.
Coming up next week are six by-elections including the biggest poll to fill a casual vacancy that this country has ever seen, as Andy Burnham’s previous job of Mayor of Greater Manchester gets filled. You will not want to miss that.
Parliamentary constituency: Rochester and Strood
ONS Travel to Work Area: Medway
Postcode district: ME2
William Burvill (RUK)
Iain Childs (Lab)
Ronald Gillett (LD)
Trish Marchant (Grn)
Richard Thorne (C)
May 2023 result C 880/685 Grn 641/502 Lab 414/408 LD 76
Previous results in detail
If you enjoyed these previews, there are many more like them - going back to 2016 - in the Andrew’s Previews books, which are available to buy now (link). You can also support future previews by becoming a paid subscriber to this blog - which will also you get you early access to the Previews.
Andrew Teale
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