Grimston kingmaker as Wandsworth delivers hung council

Wandsworth Council has no overall control for the first time in its modern history. The Conservatives won 29 seats and Labour 28 – both one short of the 30 needed for a majority. The result leaves Malcolm Grimston, the independent councillor for West Hill who has represented the ward for more than 30 years, holding the balance of power.

Grimston, a nuclear energy academic at Imperial College who left the Conservatives in 2014, topped the poll in West Hill with 4,081 votes — more than double the next candidate. He has consistently refused to align with either main party. Whether he does so now will determine who leads Wandsworth Council for the next four years.

The Conservatives made significant gains across the borough, winning seats in five wards previously held by Labour: Battersea Park, St Mary’s, Trinity, Wandle, and West Putney. The net result was a six-seat swing – CON up from 23 to 29, Labour down from 34 to 28 – but not enough for a majority.

The biggest single result of the night came in West Putney, where the Conservatives won all three seats – a ward they held only one seat in at the last election. Nick Austin, who won the ward’s 2024 by-election before a period of suspension from the party, topped the poll with 2,745 votes.

Simon Hogg, Labour’s council leader, held his own seat in Falconbrook, but faces the prospect of leading his party in opposition. Labour’s losses came despite Hogg’s personal vote – the party’s overall vote share fell from 42.5% to 33.6% across the borough.

Putney as the decider

In Putney, the Conservative surge was pronounced. West Putney flipped entirely – the Conservatives taking all three seats from a ward that returned two Labour councillors in 2022. East Putney held its existing shape, CON 2-1, with former council leader Ravi Govindia returning by just 20 votes in one of the tightest individual finishes of the night.

Thamesfield, the Liberal Democrats’ most ambitious target, held for the Conservatives, though the Lib Dems polled 29.9%: their strongest showing in the ward in decades and 16 points up from 2022. Not enough. Roehampton held for Labour, all three seats, though the Conservative vote fell sharply and Reform polled 15%.

And West Hill returned Grimston, as it has done every four years since 1994. This time he arrives at the council as the most consequential councillor in Wandsworth’s modern history.

The national picture

Wandsworth’s result sits within a broader national pattern of Labour collapse, though with a distinctly London character.

Nationally, as results came in through the night, Reform were up 309 councillors and Labour down 229, with the Conservatives also falling, down 114. Election analyst Sir John Curtice told the BBC there was a “pretty clear board picture,” with Reform “in poll position”: their vote relatively evenly spread and Conservative and Labour losses towards the worse end of what they had expected.

Outside London, the story is Reform. Reform went from near-zero local presence in 2022 to polling 27%+ nationally, projected to take control of county councils in Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk – a historic realignment in England’s rural heartlands. Across much of the so-called red wall, Labour faced heavy losses in places like Tamworth and Wigan, which once formed the bedrock of their English local government presence.

In London, the picture is different. The Green Party and Reform UK both sought to make gains in the capital, but it is the Greens who have been the more potent force in inner London boroughs, eating into Labour’s vote in the student-heavy, renting-class wards: exactly the pattern seen in Tooting Broadway and Falconbrook. The Greens are up eight points in vote share nationally but this is not translating into many councillors — the same story as Wandsworth, writ large across the country.

Labour has also lost its majority in Southampton, now under no overall control, with Reform gaining seven seats, the Greens four and the Lib Dems two. Oxford, meanwhile, is under no overall control with Labour the largest party despite losing five seats to the Greens.

Wandsworth, then, is neither an outlier nor a perfect fit for the national story. The mechanics are the same – Labour squeezed from multiple directions, losing ground to insurgents it cannot easily counter. But where nationally it is Reform doing the most damage, in Wandsworth’s inner London wards it was the Greens who gutted the Labour vote.

The result – no overall control, a knife-edge arithmetic, an independent holding the balance – is more dramatic than most. But the underlying forces are playing out in council chambers across England this morning.

A remarkable election

Labour won Wandsworth for the first time since 1978 in 2022. Tonight, they lost it – not to a Conservative majority, but to a fragmented electorate and a 30-year independent who nobody can quite predict. The question of who runs Wandsworth now rests with one man in West Hill, and he hasn’t said.

A full analysis of the results — where the votes went, what the numbers mean, and why the squeeze on Labour from both left and right decided the night — is published separately. [Read it here →]