Category: Very safe Labour seat

Geography: Greater London. Part of the Brent council area.

Main population centres: Wembley, Kenton, Kingsbury.

Profile: A residential seat with a growing Asian population, the sizeable majority of the population here are non-white. High ethnic population in UK constituencies is normally associated with deprived inner city seats, but Brent North is most owner-occupied residential suburbs, a seat of upwardly mobile successful Asians.

Politics: Brent North was once a safe Conservative seat, represented by the eccentrically bewhiskered former schoolmaster Sir Rhodes Boyson. It has shifted radically towards Labour since those days, it had the biggest swing to Labour in the country in the 1997 landslide, and a further swing of almost 10 per cent to Labour at the following election in 2001 - presumably through the absence of the ideosyncratic Boyson and the growth in ethnic minority voters who, even when in an affluent seat like Brent North, are not inclined to vote Tory.