The Conservatives won a Greenwich Council by-election last night – providing a shot in the arm for the beleaguered party’s general election hopes in the borough.
Roger Tester won the Mottingham, Coldharbour & New Eltham poll with a majority of 258 – retaining it for the Tories. Tester picked up 1,359 votes, compared with 1,101 for the Labour candidate Nikki Thurlow.
Mark Simpson from Reform UK picked up 232 votes, while the Greens’ Matt Stratford got 101 votes. Ulysse Abbate, for the Liberal Democrats, came last with 90 votes. The turnout was 27.34 per cent.
Tester will now join Labour’s Cathy Dowse and local Conservative leader Matt Hartley as the three councillors for the ward, which is in the far south of the borough.
It is also at the heart of the new Eltham & Chislehurst constituency, where another former Tory councillor, Charlie Davis, is hoping to unseat Labour’s Clive Efford on July 4. Abbate and Simpson will also be standing.
The by-election was called after the death of Conservative councillor John Hills in April. Hills, who was 86, had served at the town hall since 2000.
Tester had been a councillor in the area for four years until 2022, when he lost out to Dowse in a close battle that saw Hills elected with a majority of just ten votes.
After the result was announced in Woolwich Town Hall at midnight, Tester paid tribute to his opponents for a “good clean election campaign”.
“These are very sad circumstances because John Hill is irreplaceable and a great loss,” he said. “But I’m very happy to have won and I won’t let anyone down.”
The result means Greenwich returns to having three Conservative councillors against 51 for Labour and one for the Liberal Democrats.
Hartley told The Greenwich Wire that the Tories had campaigned on local issues, and that Tester would “do John’s memory proud”.
“People know that Roger is someone who always delivers and focuses on fixing problems,” he said. “He was a brilliant councillor before and lots of people wanted to make sure they had a hard-working local voice.
“This is a very imbalanced borough. There’s 51 Labour councillors. This was one of three Conservative seats that were returned at the last election, and I think a lot of people think that it’s very unhealthy.”
Hartley said the local issues included crime and traffic. “There’s a real feeling that the council is very remote from the very south of the borough,” he said. “We’re a long way away from where decisions are made and that the council is pushing through unpopular traffic schemes in west and east Greenwich against residents’ wishes there, but ignoring and delaying action on traffic problems in places like Mottingham and New Eltham, that causes a lot of concern.
“We are giving the general election campaign absolutely everything we’ve got. We’ve just shown we can beat Labour in Greenwich.”
Davis called it a “brilliant” result and added: “It shows that we can win in Eltham & Chislehurst. And the next three weeks we’re gonna be out campaigning every day speaking to people about the issues that matter, putting our positive plan forward for the area and we’ll see what happens on July 4.”
The result came the day after Rishi Sunak had been ridiculed for an ITV interview where he said going without Sky TV was a sacrifice his family had made when he was a child in the early 1990s.
Davis would not be drawn on the gaffe, saying: “Anything else doesn’t matter. We are focused on the local issues.”
Eltham & Chislehurst candidates: Ulysse Abbate (Liberal Democrat), John Courtneidge (Independent), Charlie Davis (Conservative), Clive Efford (Labour), Sam Gabriel (Green), Christian Hacking (Independent), Mark Simpson (Reform UK), Sean Stewart (Workers Party), Arnold Tarling (Independent)
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