The Green Party has won its first seat on a council at the heart of the Channel migrant crisis after Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain split the vote.
Ingrid Dodd won a by-election in Dover, Kent Zack Polanski‘s party by just 34 votes from Reform UK’s James Defriend.
It came after Restore’s Jeremy ‘Jez’ Hermer came fifth with almost 300 votes, while the Conservativeswho held the seat for decades, came third.
The division allowed the populist Left-Greens to come through the middle and achieve a narrow victory, showing how damaging the split on the right can be.
Mr Hermer told Kent Online: ‘The result is exactly what we wanted. We wanted to poll more than in the Manchester mayoral election (8.7 percent) and we did that. It’s those incremental steps that we’re looking for.
‘Of course we would have liked to win, but that was not to be. To be honest, I thought Reform would win, but I’m happy with the result.’
And Mr Lowe, the former Reform MP, wrote on X that his party was “on the march” and would stand for more elections.
‘To those who scream that those voters are arrogant of someone else? I say this: Earn it,” he added.
Recovery leader Rupert Lowe wrote on X that his party was ‘on the march’ and would stand for more elections
‘We have all had the opportunity to present our offer to the electorate. Jez did just that, and received significant support for it.
‘I have offered to work with Reform on the right policy platform. They refused. The offer remains on the table, but the reform leaders have made it clear that they do not want to work with us. That’s their choice.’
In another local by-election, Labor retained a seat on Wandsworth Council in south-west London, winning the Trinity ward by 127 votes from the Tories.
The council, known as Margaret Thatcher’s favorite for her groundbreaking local government reforms in the 1980s, was won by Labor in 2022 for the first time in almost half a century. But the Tories have run the country as a minority government since last year.
A victory in the by-election would have given Kemi Badenoch’s party a decent majority, but candidate Otto Jacobsson received 1,431 votes to Shirin Georgiani’s 1,558. Reform’s Josh Stanton came last with 51 votes.
