Camden’s continuity candidate is exactly what Polanski needs

Last week, left-wing MP Clive Lewis warned that Labour hadn’t reckoned with the Starmer years. Then, days later, the party handed him his evidence.

According to the Camden New Journal, the Holborn and St Pancras selection was the most predictable candidate selection of recent times. Labour’s shortlist ran to three names and all three were sitting Camden Labour councillors. Sagal Abdi-Wali, Camden’s council leader, won a hustings held behind the locked doors of a church in Euston. Within the hour, campaigners were reportedly already out with leaflets bearing her photo and a ready-made slogan. That is not a party letting its members decide. It is a party ratifying a decision it had already made.

None of that is a comment on Abdi-Wali herself, who by all accounts has spent years on housing casework that most councillors would rather leave to officers. It is a comment on a selection process that gave members three near-identical continuity candidates and called that a choice. Left Field’s argument here is with the machine, not the person operating within it – the same distinction Clive Lewis was careful to draw when he called out the Starmer years. His point, that Labour keeps mistaking the absence of internal debate for unity, could not have asked for a better illustration.

That matters for what comes next, because the record Abdi-Wali is standing on is the same record Green Party candidate Zack Polanski will be running against.

Camden Labour’s pitch writes itself – £670m committed to council home repairs, plus a near-£30m retrofit programme cutting bills for around 3,000 homes. It is a big number, and it is true. It is also not the number that tenants waiting for a home actually experience. The council’s own housing strategy records more than 8,000 households on Camden’s waiting list, with the number of people stuck in temporary accommodation more than doubling since 2016.

Camden’s Green group made exactly this contrast at May’s local elections, when their manifesto called for a taskforce on empty council homes and the sale of a council asset to fund emergency housing instead – a smaller, sharper offer against Labour’s bigger, blunter figure. That same election saw Labour lose a third of its council seats while narrowly holding the council, with the Greens the largest opposition group left standing. Camden, in other words, is not safe Labour territory that happens to have a byelection in it. It is a borough where the council majority itself is already thinner than the party likes to admit.

Then there’s Euston. As Camden council leader, Abdi-Wali is the councillor with direct responsibility for what the regeneration around HS2’s London terminus delivers for the area. It is exactly the kind of infrastructure promise – new homes, new jobs, years away and permanently at the mercy of a scheme that has become a byword for cost overruns and delay. It’s the kind of promise a Green campaign built on scepticism of grand projects and undelivered outcomes can turn into a very simple question: after years of disruption, what has this actually built, and for whom?

None of this requires Polanski to run against Abdi-Wali the person. It requires him to run against the machine that selected her in three days from a shortlist of three and had the leaflets ready before the result was announced. Labour’s problem in Holborn and St Pancras was never going to be its candidate’s competence. It is that the party still cannot tell the difference between control and confidence – the exact charge Clive Lewis MP levelled at it, that is now playing out in the seat that will decide whether anyone outside Labour is still listening.