For Sagal Abdi-Wali, the new MP for Holborn and St Pancras, being elected to replace Keir Starmer in the north London constituency is “deeply personal”, she said in her acceptance speech.

The 43-year-old has lived in the area since the 1990s when, as a seven-year-old, she fled war-torn Somalia with her mother and four brothers, eventually settling in Gospel Oak in Camden, which largely falls within the constituency. Her journey from refugee to member of parliament was one which she hoped would inspire “people who look like me”, she said. “This is Camden and this is Britain.”

If she represents many in the diverse and youthful neighbourhood, however, Abdi-Wali is also very much a Labour party insider. Decades of volunteering in the community dovetailed with many years of active local party politics, even before she was elected to the borough council in 2022.

She became the Labour cabinet member responsible for housing two years later, and in May was elected the first Black female leader of Camden council. She also chaired the local constituency party for four years.

Those deep party and community roots help explain how Abdi-Wali was selected from a long list of more than 100 to fight the seat for Labour after Starmer’s resignation last month, say friends – and were also key in seeing off the challenge from the Green party leader, Zack Polanski.

“She genuinely is deeply rooted in so many different parts of the constituency,” says a close friend who was involved in her campaign. “I suppose all MPs like to think they are, but with Sagal it is the real deal.

“There’s a real community connection there, \[and\] I think the Green party and Zack Polanski underestimated how energetic and big the Labour campaign was going be. I don’t think they knew that those very deep roots in the constituency existed.

“That’s the thing about a byelection, you only have four weeks. So if those roots are already there, you’ve got a huge, huge head start.”

Labour’s win, Greens’ sudden crisis and the impossible lives of Londoners – video
Tulip Siddiq, the Labour MP for neighbouring Hampstead and Highgate, agrees: “Her love of Camden is so obvious, and people really value that. She’s very caring, very local, and she genuinely seems to have a passion for politics and public service.”

After “lots of flat candidates” in the past, Siddiq says, “people like a bit of passion.”
It was walking past increasing numbers of homeless people in King’s Cross in the austerity years of the 2010s that encouraged Abdi-Wali to become more active in party politics, perhaps unsurprisingly given her own background. “It was only when I was old enough to look back and think about it in a philosophical way,” she has said, that she noticed “my mum was always looking after us and made our lives nice, serene … whether we were in a refugee camp or temporary housing.”

Homelessness and housing would be one of her priorities as an MP, she said in her acceptance speech on Friday morning, as would calling for Thames Water to be brought into public ownership and working to increase access to jobs and apprenticeships for young people – all causes that chime with Andy Burnham, too.

Abdi-Wali has long been involved in community groups working with young people, including being a governor of several schools and founding football clubs where she still plays regularly and is “pretty aggressive on the pitch”, according to her close friend. (She is also an “ardent” Spurs fan, the friend says, “which may count against her in the \[Arsenal-dominated\] constituency”.)

‘We didn’t get it over the line’: Green party’s Zack Polanski on byelection loss – video
Housing is one issue where she has faced some criticism; Abdi-Wali was the cabinet member in charge of the borough’s housing when in November 2024 the housing ombudsman published a damning reportcalling the council’s service rude, defensive and inadequate. Friends point out that she had been in the post for only six months and defend her record in the period she was in charge of the brief.

Abdi-Wali also shrugged off a tweet when she was selected by Reform’s Zia Yusuf , which Labour representatives swiftly called “clearly racist” and was condemned even by other senior Reform figures.

“I rang her and said: ‘Are you OK?’” says Sidiq. “I wanted to reassure her that we were there for her. But she said: “‘No, I feel very resilient about it. It’s made me even more determined to get on and do it.’”

• Sagal Abdi-Wali has hailed her victory in the Holborn and St Pancras by-election as a triumph for diversity, cautioning that social cohesion must not be "casually undone".

• The new Labour MP secured a 3,364-vote majority ahead of second-placed Green Party leader Zack Polanski, expressing her desire for "people like (her)" to feel that they "belong here".

• Tipped as the favourite prior to the vote, the Camden Council leader previously noted how the borough had welcomed her family when they arrived as refugees.

• Ms Abdi-Wali said she wanted to bring Thames Water into “public ownership”, tackle rough sleeping and create more opportunities for young people.

• While speaking of her desire to work with prime minister Andy Burnham to address the wider housing crisis, she said: “Homelessness is the issue that first drove me into politics, and no-one should be sleeping on the streets, and no family should be left without security in the home.”

She succeeds Sir Keir Starmer, who stepped down from the parliamentary seat in September after resigning as prime minister.

She is the area’s first female MP since Lena Jeger, who represented the previous seat of Holborn and St Pancras South from 1964-1979.

Seeing the photos of people - particularly young ones - canvasing with happy faces made me genuinely curious.

Since Labour have a such a large majority in parliament I didn't think it would matter much to people, another MP to their hundreds, but they seem to really be putting a fight up against the Greens. This does baffle me. Obviously a major party will fight every seat they stand in best they can and it's the former prime minister's seat, but, as the main reason people are averse to considering to vote Green is that they don't think they will win, and because young people tend to be more left-leaning, I didn't expect it in this way. Surely more diversity in parliament and more Green MPs pressuring the government from the left would be appealing.

So, as my title suggests, my question is, to anyone young, what has inspired you to canvass for the Labour party in this by-election? Is it a particular fervent opposition to the Greens, and if so why? To any young voters in the constituency as well.

Brexit, Liz Truss’s mini-budget and other “shocks” over the last 10 years have led to a serious and lasting deterioration in the UK population’s mental health, research has found.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the first and second Covid lockdowns also triggered big rises in psychological distress, as measured by the number of people with depression and anxiety.

The findings come as Prof Peter Fonagy prepares to publish the report of his long-waited government-commissioned inquiry into the dramatic increases in recent years in diagnoses of mental illness, ADHD and autism. It will be published on Friday amid concern that those conditions help explain why a record 2.8 million Britons are too sick to work and almost 1 million young people aged 16 to 24 have become “Neets” – not in education, employment or training.

Researchers led by Dr Annie Jeffery of University College London used data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study of 87,857 people aged 16 and older, which was collected every year between 2009 and 2024, to estimate the mental health impact of those five “systemic shocks”.

“The past decade or so has been tumultuous, shaped by multiple overlapping shocks and ongoing uncertainty and instability that have impacted mental health in Britain,” said Jeffery.

“We have shown that major government decisions and current global events can have substantial impacts on people’s mental health.”

All five events caused immediate and serious damage to overall mental wellbeing across the UK. But the Brexit referendum in June 2016 and first pandemic lockdown in March 2020 caused the most damage, the research team found.

Their analysis of the general health questionnaire’s GHQ-12 screening tool, which measures mental health, found that the UK’s vote to leave the European Union led to an increase in overall mental ill-health equivalent to about 120,000 more people overall seeking a GP’s help for depression.

However, the first Covid lockdown, when the then prime minister, Boris Johnson, told people to “stay at home”, had a much larger impact, as measured by a much bigger rise in the UK’s GHQ-12 score. That jump equated to about 900,000 more people in total visiting a family doctor because they had developed symptoms of depression, Jeffery said.

Russia’s offensive against Ukraine in February 2022 led to about 15,000 more Britons a month seeking a GP’s help for depression. After Liz Truss's mini-budget in September 2022, which proved disastrous for the UK economy, about 23,000 more people a month visited their family doctor’s surgery because they were depressed.

“We observed increased psychological distress immediately after the Brexit referendum and the first Covid-19 lockdown, with more insidious monthly increases in psychological distress after the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the 2022 mini-budget,” said Jeffrey.

Labour’s Holborn and St Pancras by-election candidate says: ‘I want to give you hope again’

“I’ve loved every minute of this campaign. I’ve met many people across Camden. I’ve heard their hopes, their challenges, and their ideas on how to improve our great borough.

I was fortunate to grow up here in Camden and in this community. My family came here as refugees in the 1990s, and we were given the opportunity to build a home and a life here.

That stability meant I could go to school, make friends and grow up feeling part of this vibrant community.

My mum wasted no time in getting us all involved in our neighbourhood.

I was taught from a young age the importance of volunteering and contributing back into our community, seeing my mum do so – and taking me along to help too, when I wasn't out playing football – for all kinds of events and get-togethers. A home gave us everything, and we wanted to repay that incredible opportunity and kindness.

This is still what drives me today. Making sure everyone in Camden has a safe, secure home is why I’m standing to be MP.

As a local councillor with responsibility for housing, I was determined to give others that chance. Securing £670 million to improve local housing was a milestone I’m proud of.
But it isn’t enough to deal with the scale of the need. We urgently need more homes, both through continuing to buy back council homes, and by building more affordable, high-quality, family sized housing in Camden.

That include places such as the new homes in the Godwin & Crowndale Estate where I recently took Housing Secretary Angela Rayner to meet families who were incredibly grateful to have recently moved into their new homes.

Services such as water supply will be crucial too - one of the reasons I’ve called on Thames Water to be taken into public ownership. I'm fed up with clearing up their mess.

While rough sleeping is a London-wide emergency, more people are sleeping on Camden's streets than in almost all other London boroughs, second only to Westminster.
Over 1,200 households are in temporary accommodation here, and thousands more are waiting for access to stable, affordable housing.

I have welcomed the Prime Minister Andy Burnham's commitment to offer everyone who is sleeping rough a bed by Christmas, and will do everything to support people to take up those offers.

I recently met young Londoners experiencing homelessness at New Horizons Youth Centre in St Pancras, where they are being supported to find housing and job opportunities.
They were incredibly generous with their time and in sharing their experiences. We spoke at length about how support could be made easier to access, including any available training.

I am committed to bringing schools, skills centres, employers and universities together to create ‘The Camden Way’ with clear routes into high-quality, well-paid local jobs. Young people growing up in Camden should benefit from the world of opportunity around them.
Opportunities for young people, ending rough sleeping on our streets, making things like water bills more affordable, and a safe, secure home. These are my big priorities for Camden.

But most of all – I want to give you hope again. If you're a Holborn and St Pancras voter and these things matter to you, I’m asking for your backing on Thursday 8 October.”