Holborn and St Pancras: Labour Held the Seat, but the Greens Have Arrived

A win that feels like a warning

Labour won. That is the headline from Holborn and St Pancras, and in the narrow sense it is all that matters: Sagal Abdi-Wali took Keir Starmer's old seat with 12,292 votes, saw off a challenge from the leader of the Green Party, and gave Andy Burnham's young government its first electoral victory. But elections are never only about who won. They are about the numbers beneath the headline — and those numbers should worry Labour far more than the result suggests.

Abdi-Wali secured 45% of the vote. Zack Polanski, the Green leader who had made this by-election a personal crusade, took 33% — 8,928 votes. Labour's majority, a towering 11,572 at the 2024 general election, shrivelled to 3,364. The Greens tripled their share from 10% two years ago to roughly a third of the vote: their second-best performance at a Westminster by-election, in a seat Labour has held since it was created in 1983. Turnout was 38.6%, well below the 54% of the general election — but even allowing for by-election apathy, the direction of travel is unmistakable.

!The Palace of Westminster at night, home of the House of Commons Credit: The Palace of Westminster. The by-election was the first electoral test of Andy Burnham's premiership. Photo: Diliff (CC BY-SA 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons).

Burnham's first test — passed, barely

Start with what this means for Burnham. The new prime minister — in office since July after Starmer lost the support of his party — needed this seat. Losing the former leader's constituency in his first electoral test would have been a catastrophe, the kind of result that ends premierships before they begin. He avoided it. His allies will point to Abdi-Wali's victory speech, in which she acknowledged voters willing to "give Andy Burnham a chance", and claim the public is prepared to judge the new government on its own terms.

There is something to that. But it is worth being precise about what the voters of Holborn and St Pancras actually did. They did not endorse Burnham's Labour with enthusiasm; they held their noses and held the seat. Labour's vote share fell from the 49% Starmer won in 2024 to 45%, and the 13-point swing to the Greens is the kind of number that, repeated nationally, would redraw the electoral map. In a constituency that has returned Labour MPs at every election since 1983, with at least 40% of the vote each time, a third of voters just chose a different left-wing party — led by a man whose principal qualification, in Labour's telling, was celebrity and controversy.

Burnham's central political task, as Reuters' reporting has framed it, is to repair his party's damaged appeal among core voters in big cities after two bruising years in government under Starmer. On the evidence of Thursday night, that repair job has barely begun. The voters Labour lost to the Greens did not come home; they dug in.

The Greens' best night

For the Greens, this is the paradoxical defeat that feels like a breakthrough. Polanski came to Holborn and St Pancras declaring that his party had "momentum" and could win. He did not win. But tripling the party's vote in a Labour fortress, finishing a clear second, and recording the Greens' second-best Westminster by-election result is the kind of performance that transforms a party's sense of what is possible.

Consider the context. The Greens' strategy under Polanski has been to position the party as an "eco-populist" movement, explicitly pitching to disillusioned Labour voters on the left. That strategy, as reporting on the campaign noted, had been working — until Burnham's arrival as prime minister began to sap its momentum. Thursday's result suggests the sapping has limits. Even with a new, more left-leaning Labour leader in Downing Street, a third of this deeply Labour constituency preferred the Greens.

Polanski himself was defiant in defeat, telling reporters he could "of course" carry on as leader and that his candidacy had not been a mistake. He framed the campaign as an opportunity to present Green values — rent controls, the climate crisis, nationalising Thames Water — and said he had relished the contest. His critics inside and outside the party will note that a party leader losing a high-profile by-election he chose to contest is rarely cost-free. But the numbers give him a genuine defence: no Green leader has ever come this close in a seat like this.

The shadow over the campaign

It is impossible to analyse this result without acknowledging what dominated its final days: the fallout from the Green Party conference's backing of a motion declaring Zionism to be racism. Polanski, who is of Jewish background, allowed the motion to go ahead but did not vote for it himself. The episode drew fierce criticism, including from former Green leader Caroline Lucas, who called the motion "flawed from top to bottom" and the vote "dangerous" and "divisive".

This column will not re-litigate the rights and wrongs of that conference vote — that is a separate argument, and it has been had. What matters for the by-election analysis is the political effect, as Verity reported from Brighton. Did the controversy cost Polanski the seat? It is plausible that it cost him some votes among Jewish voters and liberal professionals uncomfortable with the motion. But the brute fact remains: he still took 33%. If the motion was supposed to be electorally fatal, the voters of Holborn and St Pancras declined to deliver the fatal blow. That in itself is a datum worth sitting with — it suggests the controversy, while intensely felt in Westminster and the media, did not define the election for most voters, who were weighing housing, the cost of living and the government's record.

There is a second, subtler effect worth noting. Abdi-Wali's victory speech leaned heavily into themes of belonging and pluralism. A child refugee from Somalia who arrived in Britain in the 1990s, she spoke of hope that "for people who look like me... their path too belongs here", declaring "this is Camden, and this is Britain." It was, among other things, a pointed answer to Reform UK's Zia Yusuf, who had suggested during the campaign that she was not British. In a week when questions of identity and belonging swirled around the contest, Labour's candidate offered an inclusive patriotism — and it worked.

The Conservatives' small consolation

Spare a thought, too, for the result's footnotes — because footnotes sometimes matter. The Conservatives finished a distant third with around 7% of the vote, but for the first time in this parliament they beat Reform UK in an English by-election. In a seat where the right was always going to be an afterthought, that is a morsel of comfort for a party that has spent the parliament watching Reform eat its lunch in poll after poll.

It would be wrong to overstate it: third place with 7% is not a revival. But in the grim arithmetic of Conservative politics right now, any evidence that the Reform advance can be checked is seized upon. The party will bank it and move on.

What it means for 2029

Step back, and the strategic picture is this. Labour's main rival in national polls remains the populist right in the form of Reform UK. But Holborn and St Pancras is a reminder that the government faces a two-front war: Reform on one flank, the Greens on the other. Burnham's project depends on reassembling the coalition that delivered Labour's 2024 victory — and Thursday showed that the left flank of that coalition is still missing. For wider European context, see Verity's analysis of France's school protests, Italy's electoral overhaul, and Lescure's message to Britain.

The next general election is not due until mid-2029. That is both a comfort and a threat for Labour: time to win voters back, but also time for the Greens to build on a breakthrough. Polanski has shown that a confident, populist Green Party can take a third of the vote in Labour's heartland. The question for Burnham is whether he can give those voters a reason to come home — or whether, by 2029, second places like this one start turning into firsts.

Labour held the seat. Nobody should pretend otherwise. But in politics, as in football, there are wins that feel like defeats — and this was one of them. Read more opinion and analysis on Verity, or return to the homepage.