Saturday, March 05, 2011

By-election in Leicester South

This afternoon Sir Peter Soulsby, the MP for Leicester South, won the contest to be the Labour candidate in the city's first Mayoral election. He immediately announced that he will be resigning his Westminster seat to concentrate of this contest.

Well, I did warn you.

David MacLean, the Leicester Mercury's political correspondent, tweeted the voting figures in the Labour selection.

In the first round (they used AV, of course) they were:

Rita Patel 28
Abdul Osman 64
Veejay Patel 85
Ross Willmott 104
Peter Soulsby 248
Rita Patel eliminated

And in the second round:

Abdul Osman 69
Veejay Patel 85
Ross Willmott 104
Peter Soulsby 269
Peter Soulsby wins


As David went on to say, the question now is who will be Labour's candidate in the by-election. He suggests it will be either Ross Willmott or Rory Palmer.
 
That by-election will be a test for the Liberal Democrats too. This is a seat what we held between 2004 and 2005. If we come sixth here we really will be in trouble.
 
The good news is that the premises we used last time should still be available.

4 comments:

dreamingspire said...

The population of Leicester Unitary Authority is around 300,00. So who were the electorate for this Mayoral election that garnered only just over 500 votes?

Jonathan Calder said...

This was an internal Labour contest to choose the party's candidate. The public vote will take place on 5 May.

Mark said...

Could be an interesting by election - there was a Lib Dem to Lab swing of 5% last year - and the Tories were a pretty close third.

dreamingspire said...

I wonder how many members each political party has among that UA popn of 300K...