Making his fourth bid for the Assembly, Mr Le Brun was elected as the island’s newest deputy overnight after topping the poll in the island-wide by-election.
He won 953 votes, only 62 more than second-placed Carl Meerveld, on a turnout of just 17.32%, the lowest in any by-election of modern times, with fewer than one in 10 adults taking part. Minutes after the result was declared, at just before 12.50am, Mr Le Brun said he was both elated and relieved to have won voters’ backing, after previously failing to win a seat in the general elections of 2016, 2020 and 2025.
‘I feel emotional. I was actually worried that I’d just burst into tears. I think I might have if it had been earlier and we weren’t so tired,’ he said.
‘I’m relieved that this part of it is over. But it’s like one battle after another. This was the first battle – just getting in. It’s taken me 10 years, but I’ve done it. Now I can work on stuff.’
When polling stations closed at 8pm, the Guernsey Press exit poll indicated that Mr Le Brun would be elected, and also correctly projected that Mr Meerveld and Forward Guernsey’s Julie-anne Headington would place second and third respectively.
But it took nearly five hours for officials to complete the count, despite the low turnout, with much of that time taken up investigating a slight anomaly between voting figures submitted by one of the parish polling stations and the number of ballot papers counted at election headquarters at Beau Sejour. A declaration had been imminent at 11pm and was eventually delivered at 12.50am.
Mr Le Brun believed that his persistence as a candidate and a slightly different campaign style may have made the difference this time.
‘I don’t like giving up on things and I don’t like to be told I can’t do something,’ he said.
‘If you tell me I can’t do something, I’ll try harder to do it, and I’ve done it and it’s a pretty good example not to give up on things. If you believe in something and you work hard enough for it, you’ll get it. I have done a lot of face videos this time.
‘I’ve seen some others come up that were just anything they could think of, but I spoke about some specific areas and put together videos short enough that they were engaging and not too long or boring. I steered away from doing that in the past because I’m not a fan of my face being on the internet. Maybe people also saw me as more authentic.’
Mr Le Brun immediately set his sights on the vacant seat which is set to become available on the Employment & Social Security Committee after Deputy David Dorrity said yesterday that he was intending to resign.
He previously served as a non-voting member of ESS during the previous States term.
He pledged to be a champion for ‘working-class people’ during the remaining three years of the currently Assembly.
‘Ultimately, I want the island to be somewhere where our children can grow up and have a decent quality of life,’ he said.
‘Even with higher costs on things over here, which we have got, we could still have a better quality of life.’
He will attend his first meeting of the States Assembly on 20 May.
There were 110 spoilt papers, which may have been an expression of some voters’ disapproval of holding a by-election to fill the 38th deputy’s seat just a few months after the general election.
Full results
4,759 (17.32%)
Ross Le Brun 953
Carl Meerveld 891
Julie-anne Headington 634
Tamara Menteshvili 440
Sam Haskins 407
Andy Taylor 388
Nikki Symons 371
Stephen Rouxel 230
Jonathan Wilson 162
Luke Graham 88
Rob Harnish 79
Spoiled papers 110
Blank papers 6
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