Labour Expected to Hold Holborn and St Pancras as Votes Are Counted
Labour was on course to keep Holborn and St Pancras as votes were counted in the early hours of 9 October.
The count is taking place at Camden Council's headquarters, after polls closed on 8 October. The declaration is expected in the early hours of Friday The Guardian.
Reporters at the count described signs of an imminent Labour win. Votes will be counted over the next few hours, which is normal overnight procedure for a Westminster byelection, a special vote to fill one empty seat, held on a Thursday The Guardian.
Fifteen candidates stood in the contest. Officials verified 27,309 ballot papers, putting turnout, the share of eligible voters who cast a ballot, at 38.76% BBC. Polling day was 8 October. Under House of Commons Library guidance, the timetable from the formal writ to polling day is 21 to 27 working days, a window that allows the poll to fall on a Thursday. The contest had already entered the parliamentary record, with Commons Chamber Hansard for 15 September 2026 noting the Green party in the Holborn and St Pancras by-election.
The baseline is the seat last won by Keir Starmer. He took Holborn and St Pancras with 18,884 votes, or 48.9 per cent The Times. His majority, the gap to the second-placed candidate, was 11,500 at the 2024 general election, down from nearly 28,000 votes in 2019 The Guardian. The leftwing independent who challenged Starmer in the constituency in 2024 is not standing in this byelection and has endorsed Zack Polanski.
Polanski campaigned in the seat rather than attend the Green Party conference vote in Brighton on Zionism policy. The motion adopted there said Zionism should be treated as any other form of racism and called for Israel to be replaced by a single Palestinian state. Four of the party's five MPs then publicly rejected the adoption of that policy. The Greens enter this count having overcome a larger Labour majority to win Gorton and Denton in February 2026.
The broader context here is one of competing pressures on both leading sides. For Labour, the arithmetic favours keeping the seat, yet the fall from the 2019 majority to 11,500 in 2024 sets the lead the party must defend on lower byelection turnout. For the Greens, Gorton and Denton shows such majorities can be overturned in current conditions, while the endorsement from the 2024 independent challenger pulls part of the non-Labour left vote behind Polanski.
Looking at what this means for Westminster calculations, the split inside the Greens over the Brighton motion makes any result harder to read. A Labour win would show the party can hold off a focused Green challenge in inner London after a tough policy week for its rival. A closer than expected result would keep attention on where independent and protest votes go, and on whether swift pushback by four Green MPs contains or increases the electoral cost.
