Labour Holds Holborn and St Pancras — But Polanski's Greens Tripled Their Vote and Cut the Majority by Two-Thirds

LONDON — The most-watched by-election of the young Burnham era is in the books, and it reads like a warning wrapped in a victory. Labour held Holborn and St Pancras in the early hours of Friday morning — a seat the party has owned since its creation in 1983 — but Green Party leader Zack Polanski turned what was supposed to be a coronation into a genuine scare.

The numbers, as reported by Reuters and parliamentnews: Labour's Sagal Abdi-Wali took 12,292 votes, good for 45 percent. Polanski took 8,928, or 33 percent. The margin was 3,364 — a shadow of the 11,572 majority Labour piled up in this seat at the 2024 general election.

Read that again: more than two-thirds of the majority is gone. Turnout dropped too — 38.6 percent of voters showed up, down from 54 percent in 2024. Fewer voters came out, and far fewer of the ones who did voted Labour.

By-election turnouts almost always trail general elections, and 38.6 percent on an October night is not unusual. But the combination — a thinner electorate and a collapsed majority — means Labour won with far fewer votes than it banked in 2024, while the Greens added votes. That is the arithmetic that will keep Labour strategists up at night.

For the Greens, this was both a triumph and a heartbreak. Tripling your vote share from 10 percent to 33 percent is an extraordinary result in a Westminster by-election — parliamentnews notes it's the party's second-best performance in one — and Polanski personally went into Holborn and St Pancras to make this a national story about whether the Greens can take Labour from the left. He got closer than anyone expected. What he didn't get was a sixth seat in the House of Commons, which is the number that actually changes parliamentary arithmetic.

The winner is worth knowing. Abdi-Wali is the Camden Council leader, a Muslim woman in her 40s of Somali origin who arrived in Britain as a child refugee, Le Monde reports. She inherits a seat that has been Labour for more than four decades — Frank Dobson held it for 32 years, then Keir Starmer for 11 before the former prime minister stood down as MP and triggered this contest.

Further down the ballot, the other parties were playing for dignity. Conservative Ewan Cameron finished a distant third with 1,922 votes (7 percent), with Reform UK on 1,612 — which parliamentnews flags as a notable first: the first time the Conservatives have beaten Reform in an English by-election this parliament. Small consolation for a party that once treated central London seats as its own, but a data point in the long Tory-Reform fight nonetheless.

The bigger picture is what this was supposed to test. Andy Burnham took over as prime minister in July and has been shifting Labour leftward — on social issues, on public ownership of water and energy, and on Palestine — in part to stop exactly the kind of Green advance Polanski represents. Labour held the seat, which is the headline the government wanted. The trend lines are the headline everyone else will talk about.

That is what made the seat a national story rather than a local one. The Greens under Polanski have been pitching themselves explicitly as the left-wing alternative to a Labour government they say has drifted toward the center — and Burnham's answer since July has been to move left himself. Holborn and St Pancras was the first real electoral test of whether that strategy holds the line. The line held, barely, and the test showed how thin it has become.

Polanski, for his part, isn't going anywhere. He has insisted he will not resign as Green leader. "That's what leaders do," Polanski said, even as he faces pressure from within his own party. Senior Green figures had criticized him for not voting on a party conference motion about Zionism, and former leader Caroline Lucas described his absence as a "mistake" — though she later clarified she was not calling for his resignation.

That internal fight matters because the whole Green project right now is about proving the party can compete with Labour in its own territory. A by-election where the Greens triple their vote but still lose the seat will fuel arguments on both sides of that debate: proof of momentum for the faithful, proof of a ceiling for the skeptics.

For Burnham's Labour, the lesson is more immediate. You don't triple your vote share against an incumbent by accident. The Greens found something real in Holborn and St Pancras — young voters, left-wing voters, voters who feel Labour has moved but not enough. Labour kept the seat, kept its majority in the Commons, and kept the news cycle's first word. Whether it can keep the voters is the question this result really asks.

This story sits in the news section as straight coverage — for related international coverage today, see our report on Navi Pillay's Nobel Peace Prize win, and for a lighter look at the week, today's culture roundup. Sports fans can catch up on the Shakur Stevenson–Devin Haney fight news and the tributes to Mike Ditka.