The election happened at a time of very high political tension, with a general election due in a few months. The GLC did not come into its powers until 1 April 1965, but spent the first year setting up its committee structure and arranging with its predecessor authorities to take over.
Electoral arrangements
New constituencies to be used for elections to Parliament and also for elections to the GLC had not yet been settled, so the London boroughs were used as multi-member 'first past the post' electoral areas. Westminster was joined with the City of London for this purpose. Each electoral area returned between 2 and 4 councillors.
The first election to the Greater London Council took place a month before the first election to the 32 London borough councils on 7 May 1964.
Results
General election of councillors
The Labour Party won a majority of seats at the election.
When the GLC was being planned, it was expected to produce Conservative majorities.[1] However, many suburban Conservative-voting areas had successfully campaigned to be excluded from the Greater London boundaries.[2]
The large constituencies where the winner took all exaggerated Labour's win in votes into a near two-to-one lead in terms of seats. It also made it extremely difficult for the Liberal Party to win any seats.
With an electorate of 5,466,756, there was a turnout of 44.2%.[3][4] Labour did particularly well to win Bexley and Havering, but performed poorly in Enfield which they might have expected to win. In Tower Hamlets, the Communist Party of Great Britain came in as runners-up with 8% of the vote.
In addition to the 100 councillors, there were sixteen aldermen elected by the council. The eight aldermen with the least votes were elected to serve until 1967 and the other eight until 1970. The aldermen were elected on 27 April 1964.
The aldermen divided 11 to Labour and 5 to the Conservatives, and so the overall strength of the parties on the council was 75 Labour to 41 Conservatives after the aldermanic election.
Less than a month after the election, Marjorie McIntosh (Labour, Hammersmith) died and precipitated a byelection; however, given that the voters had elected the GLC and the new London boroughs, the parties were short of money and the Conservatives decided not to oppose the Labour candidate who was returned unopposed on 18 June. Oliver Galley (Conservative, Harrow, died in October 1965 and the Conservatives retained his seat at a byelection on 27 January 1966.[5] By the end of the term, there were two seats vacant due to the resignations of Sir Joseph Haygarth (Conservative, Barnet) and Mrs Mavis Webster (Labour, Waltham Forest).
There was one aldermanic by-election in 1965 caused by the resignation of Donald Soper (Labour). Frederick Lionel Tonge (Labour) was elected by the council on 6 July 1965, to serve until 1967.
