Labour’s losing candidates in Holborn & Covent Garden – Richard Olszewski, Julian Fulbrook and Livia Paggia wait for updates at the count

THE leader of Camden Council says he lost his place at the Town Hall while helping his colleagues survive the local elections.

Richard Olszewski had been accused of a ‘chicken run’ when he left his home ward of Fortune Green – the territory in the north west of the borough taken in full by the Liberal Democrats this week – to stand in Holborn and Covent Garden, which has been solidly Labour for decades and was once seen as one of the party’s strongest seats.

But the move did not go down well with some locals who felt the leader and party were taking their support for granted, while issues around Gaza and immigration set a different tone for the contest in the borough’s most southerly ward.

The Greens, with candidates living locally, including Jim Monahan – the co-founder of the Covent Garden Neighbourhood Association and a prominent community campaigner since the 1970s – took all three seats when the local election scores were counted on Friday.

Cllr Olszewski told the New Journal after the result: “I’m personally disappointed to have lost out but when you face the electorate, everyone who does has to accept the risk that you are going to lose. However, my aim was to retain Labour control of Camden because I think we have a fantastic manifesto to deliver over the next four years, as we have been since 2010.

“I campaigned in a way to help my Labour colleagues across the borough win their seats and I think this is a mark of leadership. You lead to serve the borough as a whole, and you have to take the risks.”

He said his change of ward had been for his opponents an “obvious point on which to attack me”, but he added: “As leader, I needed to be present in every part of the borough both in terms of representing the council and being there for all the communities, as well as all the political campaigning that was required.

“That would have been very difficult to do if I had stayed trying to defend a highly marginal seat. It would have prevented me from being able to go around the borough. Obviously, that was a risk I took in order to campaign effectively.”

Cllr Olzewski was in the thick of the defence of Highgate on election day – doorknocking with Sir Sadiq Khan – and had been at campaign events at every ward considered marginal over the past few weeks.

Fortune Green, as it turned out, looked less like a ‘highly marginal’ contest and more like a Liberal Democrat stronghold, with a one-sided result in which Labour were a long way behind the victors. In fact, the final results map makes it hard to see where Cllr Olszewski could have moved to where there was both a vacancy and a near-guaranteed win.

The new councillors for Holborn & Covent Garden: James White, Hamza Chowdhury and Jim Monahan

In Holborn and Covent Garden, the party had lost the services of Awale Olad, popular locally and a spirited scrutiny committee chair who made headlines challenging executives from Lime bikes and Thames Water, as well as local police.

He had been one of the only Labour councillors over the course of the last term to have made a council chamber speech criticising the bombing of Gaza, in which he accused Israel of “unspeakable war crimes” during a debate on pension investments.

Another local Labour councillor to step down, Sue Vincent, appeared on a leaflet telling residents to vote Green – seen as a symbol of how the party’s left wing felt disenfranchised by Labour nationally and locally.

Her replacement as a candidate, Livia Paggi, seen as a future star for Labour and chosen to give a speech on the main stage of the manifesto launch, also lost, and the result in Holborn and Covent Garden was described as the ‘forced retirement’ of Julian Fulbrook. The latter’s personal vote was clear in the final scores but not enough to fend off the Green Party.

Livia Paggi was a new Labour candidate in Holborn & Covent Garden and had been chosen to do one of the lead speeches at the campaign launch last month

Cllr Olszewski said: “Local elections are inevitably affected by the national scene, that’s a historical fact. A political party’s position in a local authority can rise and fall as their party does nationally. We had issues raised with us about national politics or even global politics that are impacting on us.

“We heard people tell us that and what we said to them was, ‘we understand what you are saying to us’ but we asked them to consider the facts about who runs the council. I would often say: ‘It’s a pretty good council isn’t it?’ – and people would say it is.”

He said that he felt Camden was the “best council in the country”, illustrated by outstanding ratings in all departments, bar housing, from independent regulators, and that he had high hopes for the manifesto pledges that his Labour colleagues would act on in the coming years.

Richard Olszewski during the counting of the votes

And Mr Olszewski said he remained fully behind Holborn and St Pancras MP Sir Keir Starmer‘s leadership at the top.

“He was elected to lead a Labour government for five years and he’s getting on with the job,” he said. “The fact is he inherited a mess, a broken economy, wrecked public finances, wrecked public services, it’s going to take time to turn that around.

“Already, the Labour government has been delivering on its manifesto, helping private renters for example, which is very important in Camden, lifting the two-child benefit cap, improving the lives of more than 4,000 families in Camden, and strengthening rights for workers – all Labour values.”