Labour’s Fleur Anderson retains Putney MP seat

UPDATED: Wandsworth Council announced on 17 July that it had failed to account for over 6,500 votes. The overall results did not change. See end for details.

The Labour Party’s Fleur Anderson has been elected to a second term as MP for Putney.

Anderson saw her vote increase by 4.7 per cent to 49 per cent of voters, and increased her majority to over 10,000. It came amid a low turnout however: just 43,000 49,000 out of 72,500 voters votes.

That was a turnout of 58.9 per cent which was a drop of over 18 per cent over the last election in 2019 and the lowest since 2001 of 67.9 per cent, a fall of nearly 10 per cent on the last election. Nationally, turnout was also the lowest for 20 years at 59.8 per cent.

The Conservatives’ Lee Roberts came second with just over 10,000 11,500 votes – a drop of 13 per cent on the previous election, reflecting the 20 per cent shift away from the Conservatives across the country.

Third came the Liberal Democrats’ candidate Kieren McCarthy with 5,189 5,943 votes – a fall of nearly five per cent on 2019.

The biggest winner in terms of numbers however were the Green and Reform Parties. Green candidate Fergal McEntee received 3,189 3,721 votes, nearly tripling the number of votes he received in 2019; and Reform’s Peter Hunter won 2,681 3,070 votes; an overall vote share of 6.3 per cent.

There were an unusually high numbers of candidate at this election – an average of just over seven per seat – and Putney was no exception with seven candidates. The Workers Party’s Heiko Bernard Khoo came sixth with 433 491 votes and 1.0 per cent of the vote, and the Rejoin EU candidate Felix Burford-Connole came last with 0.7 per cent of the vote.

General election results

It was a highly unusual election overall: Labour emerged with a massive majority of 172 seats and 411 of the total 650 Members of Parliament.

That was despite the party receiving fewer votes than in 2019 (9.7m compared to 10.3m) when it had one of its worst election defeats in recent history. It total vote share was also only slightly by 1.6 per cent to 33.8 per cent.

The big loser was of course the Conservative government, which saw its vote share drop by a massive 20 per cent and as a result, thanks to our current “fast past the post” voting system, that led to 252 Tory members losing their seats and leaving just 121 behind.

The biggest winner, apart from the Labour Party, was the Liberal Democrats, which won 72 seats across the country – the largest number since it was in government as the Liberal Party over a century ago.

Despite coming third overall in overall votes – more than half a million more than the Liberal Democrats – the Reform UK Party only won five seats in the House of Commons.

The one way in which the voting system clearly reflecting voter attitude was in the targeting of key members of the previous government. Former prime minister Liz Truss – the shortest-serving PM in history and held responsible for an economic collapse in 2022 – most dramatically lost her 26,000-seat majority, losing out to Labour’s Terry Jermy in the South West Norfolk constituency, with a 44 per cent drop in support.

No less than 12 cabinet ministers lost their seats, including Defence Secretary Grant Shapps (-19.4%), Education Secretary Gillian Keegan (-32.1%), Commons Leader Penny Mordaunt (-28.4%), former Brexit secretary Jacob Rees Mogg (-24.5%), Justice Secretary Alex Chalk (-12.4%), Science Secretary Michelle Donelan (-23.4%) and Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer (new constituency).

The good news is that the new influx of MPs represents the electorate of the UK more strongly that ever before. This election produced the largest ever number of women MPs – 263, representing just over 40 per cent of all MPs. And a record number of 87 ethnic minority MPs were also elected, making the UK’s most diverse parliament.

UPDATE: On 17 July, Wandsworth Council announced that due to a “spreadsheet issue” it has failed to count 6,558 votes. The revised results are below. A news story explaining more is now live.

[Revised result] Putney election results

Original Putney election results