Labour has held Trinity ward, denying the Conservatives the single seat they needed for outright control of Wandsworth Council.
Shirin Georgiani won with 1,558 votes, a majority of 127 over the Conservatives’ Otto Jacobsson on 1,431. The result leaves the council exactly where May’s borough elections left it: 29 Conservative, 28 Labour and one independent. Malcolm Grimston, the independent councillor for West Hill, continues to hold the balance of power under the confidence-and-supply agreement that keeps the Conservative administration in office.
Turnout was 39.56 per cent, down just over fourteen points on the 53.65 per cent the ward managed in May.
Georgiani joins Kirsten Botting, elected for the Conservatives in May, as the ward’s second councillor. She becomes Trinity’s third Labour representative since the ward was created in 2022.
It is the second time in four months that Trinity’s voters have declined to hand the Conservatives what they needed. The by-election was called after Labour’s Lizzy Dobres, the party’s deputy leader on the council, resigned in July, two months after being elected. That timing handed the Conservatives a chance to convert their May gains into a working majority, and they have not taken it.
The administration now goes into a budget round needing to close a £137m gap across two financial years, rising to £154m if planned savings do not materialise, still governing on borrowed arithmetic.
Nobody changed their mind
The contest mattered enormously to the internal politics of Wandsworth Council. It does not appear to have mattered much in Trinity itself. Six in ten voters stayed at home, and the striking number in the result is not Labour’s or the Conservatives’. It is everyone else’s.
In May, when Trinity elected two councillors and every voter had two votes, the Greens, Liberal Democrats and Reform UK took 24.3 per cent of all votes cast between them. On Thursday the three of them managed 9.0 per cent, 294 votes in total.
The Greens fell hardest. Sylvain Magne took 168 votes, 5.1 per cent, against the 14.4 per cent two Green candidates polled in May. Dylan Henderson took 75 for the Liberal Democrats, down from 5.4 per cent to 2.3. Josh Stanton took 51 for Reform UK, down from 4.5 per cent to 1.6.
Both main parties rose as a result. Labour went to 47.5 per cent, up 8.5 points, the Conservatives to 43.6 per cent, up 7.6. Neither gained a single vote in absolute terms. Labour polled 1,867 fewer votes than in May and the Conservatives 1,734 fewer.
What the two parties did was get their own supporters back to the polling station. The nearest measure of a party’s committed vote in May is what its weaker candidate polled, those being the electors who spent both their votes on the same party. On that measure Labour brought 98 per cent of its vote back on Thursday, 1,558 against Jack Mayorcas’s 1,583. The Conservatives brought back 94 per cent, 1,431 against Jacobsson’s own 1,518. Four points, and the seat.
Nobody else brought anyone back. The narrowing showed on the doorstep as well as in the count: the Socialist Party of Great Britain, which was leafleting the ward for a spoilt-ballot campaign was non-existent in the end result.
Magne had argued during the campaign that a Green seat would be “the first step towards breaking the two-party trap”. The contest instead produced the sharpest two-party squeeze the ward has seen: Labour and the Conservatives took 91 per cent of the vote between them, against 75 per cent in May.
Who the new councillor is
Georgiani was born and raised in London in the 1980s and 90s and has been connected to Tooting for most of her life. Her grandparents lived in the area for decades, her son goes to school locally and her husband taught at a Balham school for years. Her parents came to Britain after the Iranian revolution, and she has described growing up in a politically aware household that shaped her belief in “the role of the state, what it should take care of and be responsible for”.
She works as a consultant at a law firm on public procurement, policy and governance. She was a member of the Youth Parliament at 16, campaigned at the Citizens Advice Bureau and has taught refugee women to manage household finances.
She stood in Wandsworth Town in May, finishing fifth, 95 votes off third place. Her campaign in Trinity was built on opposing what she called the Conservatives’ “cruel cuts”, and she accused the administration of “misleading residents” by “pretending the council has run out of money”. The cabinet’s savings this summer included holiday food vouchers for 10,000 children on free school meals, the youth bus and 253 planned council homes.
“Retaining a Labour councillor in Trinity is essential to protecting all the improvements made in the past four years,” she told Putney.news during the campaign.
For Jacobsson it is a third defeat. He stood in Tooting Broadway in January 2024, taking 542 votes, and in Trinity in May, finishing fourth on 1,518, 65 votes behind the third-placed Labour candidate.
So after a summer of bluster, claims and counter-claims, accusations and aggression, Wandsworth has ended up in exactly the same place.
