Littlemore ward is entirely within the Rose Hill and Littlemore county division, and by-elections are taking place to both of those units following the co-ordinated resignations of two Labour councillors in May. Michele Paule, who has sat on the county council since 2021, has stood down on health grounds. The county council by-election will be combined with a city council by-election to replace Nadine Bely-Summers, who narrowly gained the city-centre Holywell ward from the Greens in 2018 and transferred to safer pastures here in 2021. Bely-Summers’ successor will need to seek re-election at the next city council elections, which are in 2024; Oxford is one of the few English councils which re-elects half of its membership every two years, so there are no city council elections here in May this year.

The ward is represented on the City Corporation by the Alderman and two Common Councilmen. Since the last City elections in March 2022 one of the two Common Councilmen for Bread Street has been Emily Benn, Tony Benn’s granddaughter. Emily has served as a Labour councillor in Croydon in the past and has stood three times for Parliament as a Labour candidate, but elections in the City don’t work like that; even politicians who are well-known for being partisan in other fields will normally seek election in the City as independent candidates, as Benn did. This memo was seemingly not received by Harini Iyengar, who stood in Bread Street in 2022 as an official candidate of the Women’s Equality Party and finished last out of four candidates. In the case of South Derbyshire, the Tory collapse on the district council had already started before 2021 with a damaging split in the party; the splinter group on the council voted out the Tory leader in 2020 and installed a Labour minority administration, which went on to win a majority in 2023. Roger Redfern lost his seat on the district council three months ago as Labour won Church Gresley ward by 60–40 in a straight fight with the Conservatives. Swadlincote South division also includes half of the Swadlincote district ward, which Labour won by 62–38 in May. There are some major changes to Merseyside’s local elections this year, as all the seats on St Helens council are up for election on new ward boundaries while the Liverpool council elections have been cancelled. Both of those councils are moving to whole elections every four years. Labour have secure majorities in St Helens, Knowsley and Sefton and the party run Wirral council (above) as a minority, with 28 Labour seats (one of which is vacant) against 23 Conservatives, 7 Green seats (one of which is vacant), 6 Lib Dems and 2 ex-Labour independents. If the 2021 results are repeated Labour will lose three seats: Bebington and Prenton wards to the Greens, and Pensby and Thingwall ward to the Conservatives. From May, you will need photo ID to vote in person at a parliamentary election in Great Britain or a local election in England. If you don’t have one of the accepted forms of photo ID, you can apply for a free Voter Authority Certificate or a postal vote from your local council elections office. Do it now and beat the rush.Defending for the Conservatives is Peter Berry, who represents the area on Thorpe St Andrew town council. Labour have selected the wonderfully-named Calix Eden. Brian Howe completes the candidate list for the Lib Dems. The only elections in Cheshire this year are for one-third of Halton council (Runcorn and Widnes), which is culturally closer to Merseyside than to Cheshire and accordingly has a secure Labour majority. The councillors up here were last elected in 2021 following boundary changes. Yorkshire Fareham council is one of the few English councils which re-elects half of its members every two years. Despite this, it has an odd number of councillors: the current composition is 25 Conservatives, 4 Lib Dems plus this vacancy, and an independent. The odd one out here is Portchester East ward, which — perhaps because of its position in a corner of the borough — has three councillors rather than the usual two. As a result Portchester East alternates between electing one and two councillors at each poll, which is an electoral cycle it shares with only one other ward in the country. Since 2004 this ward had been represented on Monmouthshire council by the Conservatives’ Bob Greenland, who was elected without a contest in 2008 and had large leads over the Lib Dems in 2004, 2012 and 2017. All of those local elections also resulted in Conservative-led government of Monmouthshire county council, the party winning an overall majority in 2004, 2008 and 2017 and ruling from 2012 to 2017 in coalition with the Lib Dems.

It’s taken quite some time for the Guildford Conservatives to organise this by-election following Billington’s death in May, and one wonders whether they might have delayed too long given the party’s recent downturn in the national polls. They will have the benefit of facing a number of opposition candidates, which increases the chances of a freak vote split. The list of famous people associated with mining areas is often dominated by sportsmen, but possibly the most famous former pupil of Oakdale Comprehensive School (now Islwyn High School) was too young to have gone down the pits. Joe Calzaghe was born in London and spent some of his early life in his father’s native Sardinia, but he grew up in this corner of South Wales before embarking on a stellar boxing career. Calzaghe retired from the ring in 2009 with a perfect record of 46 wins from 46 professional fights, having unified three of the four super-middleweight world titles and spent more than a decade as WBO super-middleweight world champion before moving up to win more world titles at light-heavyweight. This from a lad who was bullied at high school, and left Oakdale Comprehensive without taking any GCSEs. If you got your GCSE results last week and they weren’t what you hoped for, remember that you’ve got a long life left to either put that right or make your mark in some other way. Over the same period Plympton Chaddlewood ward has normally been a safe Conservative area, but that suddenly changed in 2021 when the Green Party contested the ward for the first time. From literally nowhere the Greens came very close to winning, and they then built on that performance to gain Chaddlewood ward from the Conservatives in May 2022 with a large majority: 58% for the Green Party, 35% for the Conservatives.

We should note here that the Conservatives have often put in particularly poor by-election performances in recent years along the High Speed 2 route, a record which includes the Chesham and Amersham parliamentary by-election two years ago. The Gerrards Cross part of this ward will transfer into Chesham and Amersham at the next general election; for now, Denham is wholly part of the Beaconsfield parliamentary seat which is safely Conservative. As one Tony Blair found out when he stood there as a Labour candidate in a 1982 by-election; in those days you needed 12.5% of the vote to save your deposit, and he didn’t manage that. The Tillingbourne valley used to be a major industrial area, with the river providing a reliable source of water power. This industry included the Chilworth gunpowder factory, which was established in 1625 and supplied explosives to the East India Company and other customers for nearly three centuries. Further up the valley is Shere, which has a lot of unspoilt Tudor architecture and is a favourite location for artists and film-makers. Shere is the centre of a large parish which includes Gomshall and some beautiful North Downs landscape. St Helens is the smallest of England’s 36 metropolitan boroughs in terms of council size, with a total of 48 councillors. All of them were up for re-election in May with new ward boundaries being introduced; this resulted in an increased Labour majority with 35 council seats against 4 Lib Dems and three seats each for the Conservatives, Greens and independents. Moss Bank ward was left almost untouched by the boundary changes so we can read its political history over quite a long period: it was a safe Lib Dem ward until the Merseyside Lib Dem vote evaporated in 2010 on the formation of the Coalition, and has been a safe Labour ward since then. In May the Labour slate polled 52% here with the Conservatives and Lib Dems on 17% each. The village of Devauden itself is the location where John Wesley first preached in Wales, doing so on the village green in 1739. The ward also includes a number of other small villages, as far west as Llangwm. This was historically hunting territory, and to some extent still is: the village of Itton at the southern end of the ward is home to the foxhounds of the Curre and Llangibby Hunt. Before this column leaves Plymouth, a tribute is due to Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher of the Local Government Elections Centre, who for many years have been professors of politics at Plymouth University. The study of British local elections owes an immeasurable debt to Rallings and Thrasher, who have collected and analysed local election results from this country for decades. Their dataset is second to none with over 900,000 candidacies, and I do refer to it quite a lot on the occasions when I need to consult results from before my own records start in 2002. Michael Thrasher has generously described this column in my hearing with the words “wonderful reports”, and I’d like to return the favour by putting on the record here my thanks to Rallings and Thrasher for their decades of hard work. I look forward to hearing their insights and analysis for many years to come. Moor View

Five years ago, the seaside resort of Worthing had no Labour councillors. This column covered the election of the first Labour councillor there, at the Marine ward by-election in August 2017. A full electoral cycle later, the once-large Conservative majority has disappeared to the extent that Labour are now the largest party on the council: they hold 17 seats against 17 Conservatives (who run the town as a minority), two Lib Dems, a Green and an independent. We have the realistic prospect of Labour going from nothing to majority in Worthing in less than five years. Plymouth is a port and a naval city, and always has been. The Royal Navy have been in situ in nearby Devonport for centuries; the civilian port on the Tamar estuary saw the departure of the Mayflower pilgrims in 1620, and continues to be an important point of entry to the UK with regular international ferries to Roscoff in Brittany and to Santander in Spain. Sir Edward Codrington resigned from the Commons in 1840. Now, one does not simply resign as an MP: instead you have to be appointed to an Office of Profit under the Crown which exists for the sole purpose of vacating your parliamentary seat. There are two such offices of profit in use today, the Chiltern Hundreds and the Manor of Northstead; but other similar offices have been used in the past. Codrington was the last MP to resign by being appointed as Steward of the Manor of East Hendred, and the appointment went through despite the fact that the Crown had actually sold that manor in 1823. It seems that nobody had told the Parliamentary authorities about this at the time, and at least seventeen later appointments were made to the Manor of East Hendred before the penny dropped. Codrington died in 1851, and the post of Steward of the Manor of East Hendred has been vacant ever since. On the same day Redfern was also elected to the county council, making safe a seat which the Conservatives had gained from Labour in 2017 by just 80 votes; shares of the vote here in 2021 were 59% for the Conservatives and 32% for Labour. This reflected the large Conservative majority for the local MP Heather Wheeler in December 2019 in the South Derbyshire constituency, which has the same boundaries as the council of that name. In 2021, the Conservatives won a clean sweep of all the county divisions in South Derbyshire.During Jarvis’ term the South Yorkshire mayoralty has been significantly beefed up, with new powers over transport, strategic planning and suchlike together with a salary. Jarvis has decided to concentrate on his Westminster role and he is not seeking re-election as mayor. We should be in a Conservative-majority period at the moment, but for some years now the Plymouth Conservatives have been in a state of civil war which makes the Republican group in the US House of Representatives look coherent and united. It’s a long story. Let’s join the action immediately after the 2021 local elections (mapped above), at which the Conservatives performed very well and Labour lost their majority on Plymouth council. All these shenanigans have left Plymouth council hung again. A further defection earlier this week left Labour as the largest party on the council; the latest composition following a further defection earlier this week gives 24 Labour councillors, 23 Conservatives plus two vacancies, five councillors in the Independent Alliance group (four ex-Conservative, one ex-Labour), two Greens (one of whom was elected as Labour), and an ex-Conservative independent. It’s a very fine balance. Any Conservative losses in these by-elections will mean that Labour increase their lead on the council, although they will remain short of the 29 seats necessary for a majority.

Now, unlike some other cities, Oxford’s ring road doesn’t necessarily mark the end of the urban area: large parts of Oxford’s south-east fringe are outside the ring road. This includes the former village of Littlemore, which has existed for a very long time but only got a parish church in 1838; its first incumbent was John Henry Newman, who later became a Roman Catholic cardinal and a saint. Newman gives his name to the local primary school. Littlemore ward also takes in the Oxford Science Park and the Kassam Stadium, home of Oxford United FC, both of which are on the southern edge of the city.The big prize in the South West will be the election to Somerset county council, which will become the unitary council for Somerset in 2023 when the districts under it are abolished. This last went to the polls in 2017 when the Conservatives won a large majority — 35 seats, against 12 Lib Dems, 3 Labour, 3 independents and 2 Greens. The county council is doubling in size this year, so multiply those figures by 2 for a par score. This Conservative majority is large but not particularly strong, and there are a lot of marginal divisions here. Folkestone and Hythe council wards: Hythe Rural, Hythe (part: part of Hythe parish), Romney Marsh (part: Dymchurch parish) Unlike in Oxford earlier, there is no crossover between the county and borough by-election candidates in Tamworth. For Belgrave ward the defending Conservative is Paul Thompson. The Labour candidate is Craig Adams, who stood for the council last year in Mercian ward. Charlie Taylor is standing as an independent candidate, and the ballot paper is completed by Adam Bayliss for the Greens and Ian Cooper for Reform UK. Counting for both Tamworth by-elections will take place on Friday morning. Watling South