Kensington election result: Failure of tactical voting brutally exposed by Tory gain in west London

The failure of tactical voting to propel referendum-backing MPs into the House of Commons was exposed most brutally in Kensington.

The affluent west London seat - which voted 69 per cent Remain in the 2016 referendum - fell back into the hands of Conservatives just two years after it became Labour’s most surprising gain in the 2017 election.

Felicity Buchan won the seat by just 150 votes, scooping 16,768 to 16,618 for Labour’s Emma Dent Coad.

And supporters of the short-lived Labour MP pointed angrily to tactical voting websites, some of which had recommended votes for Lib Dem Sam Gyimah, despite the party coming a distant third in the tightest Labour/Tory marginal in the last election.

The former Tory minister, who quit the party over Brexit just months after making an abortive bid to lead it, took 9,312 votes, some of which may have come from tactical voters who believed he was best-placed to take the seat.

The total tally for the referendum-backing Labour, Liberal Democrats and Greens came to 26,465 - 60.5 per cent of the vote, far outweighing Ms Buchan’s 38.3.

The result will revive questions about Lib Dems’ decision to field high-profile candidates in central London seats where the party had come in third in 2017, rather than standing aside to allow Labour to mount a serious challenge.

In the Cities of London & Westminster and Finchley & Golders Green constituencies, Liberal Democrat defectors from Labour Chuka Umunna and Luciana Berger managed to leapfrog their former party into second place. But both fell short of the votes needed to oust their Tory rivals.

In each of the seats, the combined Labour, Lib Dem and Green vote wold have been enough to deliver a comfortable victory over Conservatives.

Finchley & Golders Green was on the list of 60 Unite to Remain seats where Lib Dems, Greens and Plaid Cymru stood aside for one another to improve the chance of an anti-Brexit MP winning.

But Jeremy Corbyn refused to take any part in the pact, while Jo Swinson refused to stand down Lib Dem candidates in seats where Labour was best-placed to defeat Tories - even imposing a new candidate when her party’s choice in Canterbury voluntarily withdrew from the contest to help the pro-EU Rosie Duffield.

In Kensington, Labour and Lib Dems fought viciously, with Mr Gyimah accusing Ms Dent Coad of sharing responsibility for the Grenfell Tower fire.

One seat where tactical voting did come into effect on a big scale was Esher & Walton, where the Lib Dems’ Monica Harding came within 3,000 votes of toppling foreign secretary Dominic Raab.

Ms Harding put on almost 28 points to take Lib Dems from third place to within a whisker of claiming what would have been the shock scalp of the night, as Labour shed more than 15 points.

And in St Albans, Lib Dem Daisy Cooper may have benefited from tactical votes as Labour’s tally plunged by 14 points and hers surged by almost 18 as she replaced Conservative Anne Main.