The Green Party has won its first seat on a council at the heart of the Channel migrant crisis after Rupert Lowe's Restore Britain split the vote.

Ingrid Dodd won a by-election in Dover, Kent, for Zack Polanski's party by just 34 votes last night from Reform UK's James Defriend.

It came after Restore's Jeremy 'Jez' Hermer came fifth with almost 300 votes, while the Conservatives, who held the seat for decades, came third. 

The division allowed the populist Left Greens to come through the middle for a narrow win that shows how damaging the split on the Right can be.

Mr Hermer told Kent Online: 'The result is exactly what we wanted. We wanted to poll more than we did in the Manchester mayoral election (8.7 per cent) and we've done that. It is those incremental steps that we're looking for.

'Of course, we would have liked to win, but it wasn't to be. To be honest, I thought Reform would win, but I'll take the result quite happily.'

And Mr Lowe, the former Reform MP, wrote on X that his party was 'on the march' and would be standing in more elections.

'To those who screech that those voters arrogantly belong to someone else? I say this - earn it,' he added.

'We all had our chance to put forward our offering to the electorate. Jez did exactly that, and won substantial support for doing so.

'I offered to work with Reform on the correct policy platform. They refused. The offer remains on the table, but the Reform leadership have made it clear they will not work with us. That is their choice.'

In another local by-election Labour clung on to a seat on Wandsworth Council in south-west London, winning the Trinity ward by 127 votes from the Tories.

The council, known as a favourite of Margaret Thatcher for pioneering her local government reforms in the Eighties, was won by Labour in 2022 for the first time in almost half a century. But the Tories have run it as a minority administration since last year.

A win in the by-election would have given Kemi Badenoch's party a proper majority, but candidate Otto Jacobsson picked up 1,431 votes to Shirin Georgiani's 1,558. Reform's Josh Stanton came last with 51 votes.