Sunday, May 06, 2007

More Lib Dem councillors than ever in Abingdon

Well we did it.

We gained the three Vale of White Horse DC seats and four Abingdon Town Council seats that slipped our fingers four years ago after the boundary changes.

Abingdon now has 14 out of 14 Vale councillors and 21 out of 21 Town councillors.

We can't claim a record for the clean sweep - we did that in 1999 - but we can claim that we now have a record number of Lib Dem councillors in the town, thanks to the boundary changes four years ago.

In the ward where I live the missus, Samantha Bowring to you, and Beth Fleming, beat two local Tory stalwarts to gain the town's most marginal ward.

The count was hard work but fun. We weren't sure we'd won. We knew we were close but that it would come down to the marginals. The Tories turned up expecting to gain seats in Abingdon and win the Vale.

As the verification started it became clear that we were edging them in the marginal wards and that we were even in contention over in Grove which we weren't expecting.

The Tory faces got longer and longer as it became clear they had lost.

In the end we gained five seats and lost one to them in Kennington.

The final result across the Vale was 34 Lib Dem, 17 Con, not bad for a council we've run for twelve years now.

Good news for Evan Harris - we took 53% of the votes across the Vale wards in his constituency and 51% if you include the Kidlington results.

Not so good news for the Tory leadership on the Vale whose strategy failed completely and a little surprising that Ed Vaizey, Tory MP for Wantage, let seats slip in his patch.

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