Harborough, Oadby & Wigston.

Harborough, Oadby and Wigston is a network of mid-sized Leicestershire towns rather than a seat built around a single centre. Wigston is the largest at roughly 33,700 residents, followed by Oadby at about 24,000 and Market Harborough at a shade under 24,000, with the Kibworths and Great Glen smaller again and the remainder rural and dispersed. The Census records a population near 98,600, a median age of 43, and a population that is about three-quarters White and a little over a third degree-educated. Local services are split across two district authorities -- Oadby and Wigston Borough Council, which holds ten of the seat's wards, and Harborough District Council, which holds the other seven -- so the constituency straddles a council boundary throughout.

That split shows in the ward arithmetic. Across the thirty-nine most-recent ward contests the Liberal Democrats took twenty-four, the Conservatives twelve and the Greens three, a pattern that points to Liberal Democrat strength at the very local level, particularly around Oadby and parts of Market Harborough. The parliamentary picture reads differently. At the 2024 general election -- the first fought on these 2023 boundaries -- the Conservatives held the seat on 36.9 per cent against Labour on 32.2 per cent, a margin of under five points. Neil O'Brien, the sitting Conservative MP since 2017, sits within that narrower Westminster contest rather than the Liberal Democrat advantage seen in the wards.

On the figures available the seat looks competitive rather than settled: a single-digit Westminster margin sits above a local map tilting elsewhere, leaving the direction-of-travel genuinely open. Recent local coverage has been largely administrative in character, dominated by council planning -- successive Local Plan consultations and a cross-boundary development proposal that has drawn organised local objection -- alongside routine service news. Taken together, the picture is of a quiet, services-focused constituency where the gap between a tight national result and a Liberal Democrat-leaning local base keeps the seat contestable.