Newcastle city council’s leader, Nick Forbes, who is a close ally of Keir Starmer and sits in the shadow cabinet, has been deselected from standing in May’s local elections, putting his political future in jeopardy.
Forbes has run the city’s council for more than a decade and also sits on Labour’s ruling national executive committee (NEC), but he will be unable to remain in his post if he cannot stand for re-election as a councillor.
At a selection meeting for his Arthur’s Hill ward on Tuesday evening, Forbes was defeated by Abdul Samad, a local activist, by 13 votes to four.
Forbes said he was “immensely sad that Labour party members have chosen a different candidate” to stand for the ward he had represented for 22 years.
He suggested he could try to find an alternative seat, saying: “A number of party members have already approached me asking if I will stand in a different ward.” Forbes said he would now “take some time to consider these options”.
Forbes’s allies have described his defeat as being inflicted by the “hard left” and pointed out that the ward selection meeting was held late, limiting his opportunities to find an alternative potential seat.
But one local activist, who declined to be named, told the Guardian it was “not about left or right,” but about choosing a local candidate who would focus all their energy on the ward, “someone who’s actually prepared to be here, be a lot more hands on.” They added: “We feel for a long time that hasn’t been the case, and we wanted our voices heard.”
A senior Labour source in the north-east pushed back against the idea that the leftwing campaign group Momentum had been involved, describing Samad, a 25-year-old recent master’s graduate, as unaligned with a particular faction. Forbes “basically just lost a vote. That’s what happens in democratic politics,” the source said.
Forbes’s defeat comes against the background of a power-struggle over the direction of wider Newcastle politics.
Two Labour sources said Forbes’s deselection was connected with a clash with the party’s former chief whip Nick Brown. One said Brown had organised efforts to challenge Forbes as leader of the council after a falling out, and that Forbes had known his seat was under potential threat. “It’s obviously damaging and embarrassing. Nick is very accomplished but he did not organise well.”
Brown, the MP for Newcastle upon Tyne East since 1983, was moved out of his longstanding role of opposition chief whip during Starmer’s reshuffle in May 2021.
Of Newcastle’s 78 council seats, 26 are up for grabs in May. Local Labour activists fear the infighting could favour opposition parties including the Conservatives, who continue to target seats in the north-east. “This is not in the interest of the party, locally or nationally, or the city,” one said.
