U.K. elections

Labour’s final push to seize territory from Tories in local elections

With four days to go until polling, Labour volunteers are busily unloading huge boxes of campaign leaflets at their overcrowded election HQ in Battersea, south London. As fast as the latest material arrives in vans from the printers, it disappears out of the door again, as canvassers grab handfuls and fan out across the streets of Wandsworth.

This is the most important, closest and most keenly fought local election battle here in decades and canvass returns suggest the result is poised on a knife edge. “I would say the chances are 50/50,” says Simon Hogg, the Labour leader on Wandsworth council, which has been held by the Conservatives since 1974.

For Labour to storm this Tory fortress – Wandsworth was Margaret Thatcher’s favourite council and it boasts the country’s lowest council tax – would be a massive story. “It would be a political earthquake,” Hogg says. “And I think we can do it. More and more people are coming over to us in wards we have not won since the 1960s and 70s.”