Congratulations to Dave Hodgson, who has just been elected as the new Liberal Democrat directly-elected mayor of Bedford.
Dave won through after second preferences were taken in to account, beating the Conservative candidate Parvez Akhtar by 2,012 votes. Labour were eliminated in the first round where they came fifth, despite having the current MP for the town. The full results are available here. The by-election was caused by the sad death of the former Independent mayor Frank Branston.
Dave is well known to party activists as the former Membership Development Officer for the English Liberal Democrats. He stood down from the job at the start of the year to concentrate on making sure that the Liberal Democrats became the biggest party in the unitary elections in June. This we did, and now it has been topped off with him being elected as mayor.
Congratulations to everyone who worked so hard to achieve the result, in particular to Christine McHugh who was the previous candidate and this time's election agent, (as well as being Dave's wife).
