Labour won a knife-edge contest in north London by the tiniest of margins getting over the line by just 15 votes.
After a full recount, its candidate David Pinto-Duschinsky gained 15,855 votes, with Conservative Ameet Jogia on 15,840.
The result, like many across Britain, may have been swayed by Reform UK with its candidate Joshua Pearl gaining 3,038 votes.
Liberal Democrat Clareine Enderby got 1,966 votes, Imtiaz Palekar, of George Galloway’s Workers Party of Britain 1,518 votes, Ben Rend of Rejoin EU 233, and Social Democrat Jane Gibson 139 votes.
The vote was declared at just before 9am, having been delayed for several hours by the recounting.
Mr Pinto-Duschinsky and Mr Jogia had campaigned on a range of issues including the scourge of antisemitism.
The wafer-thin margin of the defeat makes the seat one of the most, if not the most, marginal in the country.
Mr Pinto-Duschinsky is the son of a holocaust survivor and had worked as an adviser to the late Labour chancellor Alistair Darling.
The seat was vacated by Tory Matthew Offord who stood down before the election.
In his speech after becoming the new Labour MP, Mr Pinto-Duschinsky said he would work “tirelessly” for the people of Hendon.
He also addressed antisemitism and said Sir Keir Starmer had helped to “tear up its roots”.
This marginal seat has always been in the hands of the party in Government since its re-creation in 1997. It was won that year by Andrew Dismore who held it until 2010.
When Gordon Brown was ousted that year, Mr Offord won the seat for the Conservatives by just 106 votes.
So, Labour have long had their sights on this constituency.
But Mr Offord increased his majority to 3,724 in 2015, before it fell to just over a thousand in Theresa May’s snap June 2017 election, but then extended it to 4,230 in 2019.
Unusually for a parliamentary constituency, it has an almost equal make-up of Jewish people, just over 15 per cent, and Muslim people slightly more than 16 per cent.
