23AUG

Reform up 3.1 points, out of St Neots

2 min read

19:09UTC

Reform UK polled a higher share in St Neots Eynesbury than it did in May and lost the ward anyway, by 17.6 points.

← Back to Reform loses three wards, wins Clacton Jump to analysis ↓

PoliticsAssessed

Key takeaway

The Liberal Democrats won St Neots Eynesbury by absorbing other parties' voters rather than Reform UK's.

Reform UK improved its vote share in St Neots Eynesbury on Thursday 20 August and lost the seat. Its 3.1-point rise on May left it on 647 votes and 30.3%, beaten by 17.6 points, because the Liberal Democrat share over the same comparison climbed 29.8 points ¹.

St Neots is a Cambridgeshire town, and Reform had held this ward since 7 May, 105 days. Huntingdonshire District Council counted 2,138 ballots on Thursday and declared the Liberal Democrats elected on 1,024 of them, 47.9% ².

Thirty points do not come out of Reform's pile. They come from Conservative, Labour and Green voters picking whichever challenger looked most likely to win locally, which is the same arithmetic the Conservatives used to retake Old Catton in Norfolk in July , and which failed elsewhere in that set where the challenge stayed split . Thirty per cent of a divided field wins a ward. Thirty per cent of a two-way field loses it, and a party can hold its voters intact while that happens.

For Reform the practical consequence is a defence calendar rather than a decline. Every ward it swept in May now comes back one at a time, on summer turnouts, against opponents who have had four months to work out who among them is best placed to stand.

Deep Analysis

In plain English

A 'swing' in an election usually means voters switching directly from one party to another. Here, the jump in the Liberal Democrat vote share, 29.8 percentage points, is far bigger than the small 3.1-point rise in Reform's own share. That gap suggests most of the movement came from supporters of other parties consolidating behind the strongest challenger, not from former Reform voters changing their minds. This pattern, sometimes called a 'squeeze', happens when voters who would accept any of several parties over the front-runner concentrate their support on whichever one has the best chance of winning, even if it is not their first choice.

Deep Analysis

Root Causes

A 29.8-point rise in one party's share against a 3.1-point rise in the incumbent's own share means most of the movement came from voters who backed other candidates in May and switched to whichever challenger looked best placed to unseat Reform, rather than from a straight two-party swing.

That kind of consolidation depends on voters already knowing, from the May result, which party ran second. St Neots Eynesbury's May result evidently signalled the Liberal Democrats as that challenger clearly enough for other parties' voters to move behind them by August.

What could happen next?

Meaning
A squeeze this lopsided, 29.8 points against Reform's own 3.1-point gain, is the clearest sign in this set of results that anti-Reform tactical voting is organising around a single challenger.

Source Landscape

This story draws on neutral-leaning sources

Consensus view: The Liberal Democrats have built their by-election reputation since the 1980s and 1990s on hyper-local, target-seat campaigning, a method associated with the party's former chief executive Chris Rennard, which concentrates opposition-minded voters behind whichever challenger already runs second rather than growing support everywhere at once.

St Neots Eynesbury's 29.8-point rise in the Liberal Democrat share, against Reform's own more modest 3.1-point gain, fits that squeeze pattern.

Counter-view: A single ward result cannot show whether the squeeze reflects a deliberate national method or a strong local candidate and a weak Reform campaign in this specific ward. Without comparable data from neighbouring wards contested the same day, the mechanism cannot be confirmed either way.

Key tension: Whether the scale of the Liberal Democrat swing reflects a repeatable campaigning method or a one-off local result that happens to fit a familiar pattern.

Sources:PollCheck·Huntingdonshire District Council

Mentions:Liberal Democrats →Reform UK →Norfolk →Old Catton →

First Reported In

Update #16 · Reform loses three wards, wins Clacton

PollCheck· 23 Aug 2026

Read original →

Different Perspectives

Ian Davidson, Acting Returning Officer for Clacton

Davidson's office printed a 90cm ballot paper for the record 34-candidate field, with nothing in electoral law capping candidate numbers or the £500 deposit each pays. He expects the paper's size to raise printing costs and slow the count into the early hours, a strain that follows from the major parties' boycott, not from turnout.

Scottish Labour members

Members now choose between Michael Marra and Joe Fagan after Monica Lennon fell one MP nomination short of the three-MP, three-MSP threshold, a bar set by MPs and union officials rather than the wider membership. Whoever wins takes office having faced only one rival on the members' ballot.

Labour Party

Labour gained Penistone East from Reform on 20 August but lost Harraby South to Reform the same night, a wash that undercuts any claim of momentum. The party can point to beating Reform in a genuinely fought contest, but not to a pattern running only in its favour.

Liberal Democrats

The Liberal Democrats took two of Reform's May wards, Almondbury on 13 August and St Neots Eynesbury on 20 August, the latter on a 29.8-point rise in their own vote share. Both results let the party claim it is the beneficiary when voters turn against Reform, not Labour or the Conservatives.

Reform UK

Reform UK can point to winning Clacton unopposed by the other major parties and to taking Harraby South from Labour, a ward it had never previously contested. That gives the party two results to cite even as three previously held wards changed hands elsewhere in August.

Sinn Féin

Sinn Féin's John O'Dowd ruled out a Stormont walkout on 11 August despite calling the DUP increasingly difficult to work with, closing a question Conor Murphy had left open a fortnight earlier. Only Sinn Féin or the DUP can collapse the joint First Minister office, so the denial gives up the party's own leverage in budget talks.