Andrew Teale’s council by-election previews for 14th April 2022
“All the right votes, but not necessarily in the right order”
There are four local by-elections on 14th April 2022, Maundy Thursday, with two independent defences and two Conservative defences. In a week in which we were reminded of the consequences of breaching COVID lockdown rules, let’s start on the road to Barnard Castle:
West Auckland
Durham council; caused by the death of Conservative councillor Mark Roberts.
Welcome to the land of the Prince Bishops, who give their name to the town of Bishop Auckland. West Auckland is a large village just to the west of Bishop Auckland, hence the name, located on the A68 Darlington-Corbridge road at the point where it crosses the A686 road from Bishop Auckland towards Barnard Castle. A bypass for the A68 is in the proposal stage. The West Auckland division also includes the smaller settlements of St Helen Auckland and Witton Park together with some developments which have spilled over the Bishop Auckland town boundary. Those developments include Heritage Park, the football stadium which is home to the non-league football side Bishop Auckland FC.
Bishop Auckland play in the Northern League Division One alongside their bitter rivals West Auckland Town, who may be eight divisions below the Premier League but nonetheless have a glorious past in international football. In 1909 Sir Thomas Lipton, a sporting enthusiast who founded the Lipton’s Tea empire, wanted to create an international football competition. He invited club sides from England, Italy, Germany and Switzerland to compete in Turin. Except that the FA wanted nothing to do with it, so the English invitation fell on the coalminers of West Auckland for reasons which have never been satisfactorily explained. West Auckland went on to win the Lipton Trophy in 1909, beating FC Winterthur 2–0 in the final; two years later they went back to Turin and successfully defended their title, winning the final 6–1 against a bunch of amateurs called Juventus. After that West Auckland were allowed to keep the Sir Thomas Lipton Trophy, which hasn’t been contested since.
This column might not cover international elections, but at least we do have recurring contests. West Auckland had been a reliable Labour area this century, although the Conservatives came fairly close to winning in 2008.
This ward is part of the Bishop Auckland constituency, which was a Conservative gain in the 2019 general election; and the Conservatives followed up on that in 2021 to split the ward’s representation. The vote shares in West Auckland last year were 44% for Labour and 43% for the Conservatives, with both parties winning one seat each. Mark Roberts, who had been runner-up in here in 2017, was the new Conservative councillor, while long-serving Labour councillor Robert Yorke was re-elected at the top of the poll.
The ward’s other Labour councillor Christine Wilson didn’t seek re-election in 2021. To replace her Labour had selected Helen Goodman, who was the Labour MP for Bishop Auckland from 2005 to 2019. Despite being much higher up the alphabet than Yorke, Goodman finished a very long way behind him, from which we might conclude that Yorke had a large personal vote or Goodman had a large negative personal vote. Of course, both of those might be true at the same time.
The 2021 elections saw Labour lose overall control of Durham county council for the first time in a century. They won 53 seats, against 24 Conservatives, 22 independents, 17 Lib Dems, 5 Derwentside Independents, 4 councillors for the regionalist North East Party, and a Green councillor. An anti-Labour coalition was formed under a Lib Dem leader, ending a century of Labour rule.
This by-election is for the Conservative seat in West Auckland. Mark Idwal-Roberts, to give him his full name, suddenly passed away at the end of January just eight months into his first term of office. Roberts combined his day job at Durham University (where he read theology in the mid-1990s) with serving his constituents in West Auckland, working closely with his Labour ward colleague Robert Yorke. On Roberts’ death, Yorke paid generous tribute to him from across the political divide.
Roberts’ death has resulted in a by-election in a very marginal ward which should be closely watched. The defending Conservative candidate is Lyndsey Fox, who is a Spennymoor town councillor. Labour have selected George Smith, the chair of West Auckland parish council; he manages an electrical contracting business. Completing the ballot paper is local resident Nick Brown, who was the Brexit Party candidate for Bishop Auckland at the 2019 general election; Brown is contesting this by-election as an independent candidate.
Parliamentary constituency: Bishop Auckland
ONS Travel to Work Area: Durham and Bishop Auckland
Postcode district: DL14
Nick Brown (Ind)
Lyndsey Fox ©
George Smith (Lab)
May 2021 result Lab 1023/731 C 993/921 Ind 302/248/163
May 2017 result Lab 808/759 C 686/359 Ind 254 UKIP 239
May 2013 result Lab 772/682 Wear Valley Ind Group 408 UKIP 349 C 204
Previous results in detail
Heybridge West
Maldon council, Essex; caused by the disqualification of independent councillor Chrisy Morris.
We travel south to the marshes of Essex. The town of Maldon lies at the head of the Blackwater estuary, close to the confluence of the Blackwater with the River Chelmer. Immediately across the Blackwater from Maldon lies Heybridge, a northern suburb of Maldon which is large enough to a town in its own right. Heybridge and Maldon now form a single urban area, which straddles the two rivers.
Heybridge West ward is the northern end of that urban area, taking in a large housing estate off the Holloway Road to the the west and housing off Colchester Road to the east. In between is a rather industrial area along the Chelmer and Blackwater Navigation, which was once the home of the agricultural machinery factory of E H Bentall and Co. The eponymous Edward Bentall was a major figure here in Victorian times, serving from 1868 to 1874 as Liberal MP for Maldon.
Maldon was one of the most rural constituencies to return a Labour MP in the Attlee landslide (Tom Driberg), but at parliamentary level it is now very safely Conservative. John Whittingdale, who served as Culture Secretary in the second Cameron government, has been the MP here since 1992. For much of this century Heybridge West ward has been so strongly Conservative it’s been difficult to find candidates to stand against the Tory slate: the ward was uncontested in 2007, and in 2011 the only other party to stand here were the BNP. The ward is part of the Heybridge and Tollesbury division of Essex county council, which was very safely Conservative in last year’s county elections.
However, things have not been going so smoothly for for the Conservatives here at Maldon council level. The 2019 elections to Maldon district council, which covers a smaller area than the constituency, saw the Conservative majority on the council sharply cut to just three seats by an independent surge. The Tory group has since split, and the independent councillors are now in control of Maldon’s leadership.
Heybridge West was one of the wards to fall in 2019. Independent candidate Michael Edwards topped the poll with a 60–40 lead over the Conservatives, and a second independent, Chrisy Morris, won the ward’s other seat with a majority of six votes over the outgoing councillor Ian Dobson.
Now, readers might remember the infamous Handforth Parish Council Planning and Environment Committee video and the bad behaviour exhibited there. Handforth had Jackie Weaver’s authority over the virtual waiting room and the power of the viral internet to eventually shame its disruptive councillors into resigning. Maldon council didn’t have those advantages, which caused a problem in dealing with the increasingly disruptive and aggressive behaviour of Chrisy Morris. This is a week which has seen a number of politicians from the Prime Minister downwards suffer the consequences of breaking the law, but the residents of Downing Street (at the time of writing) have some way to go to match Chrisy Morris. His entry in the Councillors Behaving Badly file is an extensive one.
Matters started to come a head regarding Morris’ behaviour in June 2021, when the council asked an independent barrister to investigate complaints from council staff of sustained vindictive behaviour. The barrister’s report went to the Maldon council standards committee in September 2021. After a stormy meeting, the committee agreed the investigation’s findings and recommended sanctions against Morris, including removing him from all council committees.
This proposal went to the full council meeting on 4 November 2021. As you can see from the recording above, that meeting descended into farce as a result of seriously disruptive behaviour by Morris; after half an hour the council chairman had had enough, the meeting was wound up and the police were called. Within a week the council leader Wendy Stamp and her deputy had resigned, after Stamp’s husband was beaten up and with reports of councillors and council staff receiving abuse and threats of violence on a daily basis. A second attempt by full council to sanction Morris, at the December 2021 council meeting, had to be abandoned in similar circumstances to the first.
Relief for Maldon council eventually came in the form of the law. In February 2022 Chrisy Morris went on trial before a jury at Chelmsford crown court, which found him guilty on one count of breaching a non-molestation order against a woman in July 2019. Judge Timothy Walker sentenced Morris to eight months in prison, suspended for 18 months. This sentence disqualifies him from being a councillor for five years, because we hold our councillors to higher standards than we do our MPs. The council’s returning officer, no doubt with a sigh of relief, wasted no time in publishing a notice of vacancy.
Two new independent candidates have come forward to replace Morris. The ruling independent group on Maldon council have endorsed Simon Burwood, a former chairman of Heybridge parish council; the other independent is the current parish council chairman, hotelier Richard Perry. The Conservatives have selected Nigel Miller. Also standing are Paula Spenceley for the Liberal Democrats and Matthew Wallis-Keyes for Labour. More information on the candidates is available from Maldon Nub News here (link).
Parliamentary constituency: Maldon
Essex county council division: Heybridge and Tollesbury
ONS Travel to Work Area: Chelmsford
Postcode district: CM9
Simon Burwood (Ind)
Nigel Miller ©
Richard Perry (Ind)
Paula Spenceley (LD)
Matthew Wallis-Keyes (Lab)
May 2019 result Ind 423/283 C 277/224
May 2015 result C 754/734 Lab 496 Ind 453 BNP 407
May 2011 result C 726/596 BNP 184
May 2007 result 2 C unopposed
May 2003 result C 383/352 Maldon Distrct Independent Democratic Alliance 174 Lab 157 Grn 150
Previous results in detail
Bisley and West End
Surrey Heath council; caused by the resignation of Conservative councillor David Mansfield.
We cross London to come to an iconic location in Surrey, a few miles west of Woking. The Surrey Heath district still contains large amounts of actual heathland, hence the name; and much of this heathland is located within Bisley and West End ward.
The heath contains large amounts of rare flora and fauna, together with rather large amounts of spent ordnance. Since 1890, when they moved here from Wimbledon Common, Bisley has been home to the National Rifle Association of the United Kingdom, a charity with the objective of promoting and encouraging marksmanship. The NRA owns the National Shooting Centre, the UK’s premier location for marksmanship competitions: shooting events were held here for the 1908 London Olympic Games and the 2002 Manchester Commonwealth Games. The name “Bisley” for the site is a bit of a misnomer, as most of the ranges and nearly all of the associated buildings cover territory which is part of Pirbright parish, over the border in Guildford district; but some of the ranges do extend into West End and Bisley parishes.
Bisley and West End were separate wards at the time of the 2011 census. Bisley came in the top 40 wards in England and Wales for the “inactive: other” economic category, which is due to the presence within the village of the low-security Coldingley prison. An institution of a different kind is Gordon’s School, a state-sector boarding school in West End which was founded in 1885 as a memorial to General Gordon of Khartoum; its presence meant that West End made the top 100 wards in England and Wales for schoolchildren and full-time students. Judging from the list of notable former pupils on the school’s website, Gordon’s excels in sport. Possibly the most well-known Old Gordonian of recent times is Jake Ball, the rugby player who went on to win 50 caps at lock for Wales between 2014 and 2020.
Bisley and West End wards were merged in 2019 to create a ward which, unusually, comes in two parts; this is due to Bisley parish having a detached part. Both predecessor wards were safe Conservative in the years leading up to 2019, but that was a notably poor year for the Surrey Conservatives. They still topped the poll in this ward, but only with 35%; and one of the ward’s three seats went to independent candidate Graham Alleway, who polled 32%. The Liberal Democrats came third with 17%.
This ward is part of the Lightwater, West End and Bisley county division, which saw a sharp swing to the Lib Dems in 2021 but is still just about safe for the Tories. Despite this the Conservatives did generally do better in Surrey Heath last year than they had in 2019, holding all six of the district’s county council seats and taking two district council by-elections off the Lib Dems. However, this has been offset by two of their Surrey Heath councillors walking off to form a new Camberley Independents group, so the Conservatives are back to 18 seats and a majority of one. The opposition consists of eight remaining Lib Dems, four independents, two Greens, the two Camberley Independents and a Labour councillor. That makes this a crucial by-election: if the Conservatives lose this seat, Surrey Heath will go into no overall control. Which could be embarrassing for the local MP given his current government post: Michael Gove is the cabinet minister responsible for local government.
This crucial by-election is to replace David Mansfield, who had sat on Surrey Heath council since 2011; he was originally elected for the predecessor Bisley ward, and he was also the local county councillor from 2017 to 2021. Mansfield has recently retired from work for the second time, and he is relocating to south-west England.
Defending for the Conservatives is Tony Henderson, the chairman of West End parish council. In a straight fight he is opposed by Liz Noble, a chartered accountant who was runner-up here in last year’s county elections.
Parliamentary constituency: Surrey Heath
Surrey county council division: Lightwater, West End and Bisley
ONS Travel to Work Area: Guildford and Aldershot
Postcode districts: GU15, GU16, GU18, GU21, GU24
Tony Henderson ©
Liz Noble (LD)
May 2019 result C 922/857/792 Ind 841 LD 457/411/332 UKIP 245 Lab 182
Previous results in detail
Brockworth East
Tewkesbury council, Gloucestershire; caused by the resignation of independent councillor Louise Gerrard.
For our final by-election of the 2021–22 municipal year we return to territory this column last covered in November, by considering a strong contender for the most dangerous Quaint British Tradition. Every Spring Bank Holiday, a number of people who really should know better race 3 or 4 kilograms of the best Double Gloucester cheese down Cooper’s Hill, above Brockworth in Gloucestershire. With the hillside having a 1-in-3 slope, and with the cheese travelling fast enough to injure anyone who gets in its way, someone always gets hurt at the Cooper’s Hill Cheese Rolling.
Cheese-rolling here has been going on for centuries by and for the people of Brockworth, a village on the arrow-straight road going east out of Gloucester. This was once the Roman road of Ermine Street running towards Cirencester, and just outside the ward boundary are the remains of a Roman villa at Great Witcombe. In modern times Brockworth was the home of the Gloster aircraft factory, which closed in the 1960s and whose site has now been redeveloped.
Despite being much closer to Gloucester and Cheltenham, the parish of Brockworth is part of the local government district and parliamentary seat of Tewkesbury. Brockworth’s location just outside Gloucester, with good road links, has led to strong population growth in recent years. Tewkesbury council got new ward boundaries in 2019 as a result of which Brockworth parish went up from three councillors to four; the LGBCE don’t like drawing wards with more than three councillors, so this meant that the parish had to be divided into two new wards. Accordingly Brockworth East ward came into being.
Brockworth seems to have a high councillor attrition rate. The old Brockworth ward had four by-elections in the period 2003–19, with one going to a now-defunct residents’ party, two to the Liberal Democrats and the last one, in May 2014, to the Conservatives. The Conservatives followed up by winning all three seats in Brockworth in 2015. In May 2019 both Brockworth wards returned two independent candidates, with shares of the vote in East ward being 38% for the independents, 24% for the Conservatives, 15% for UKIP and 13% for the Liberal Democrats. However, the Conservatives held the Brockworth division in the 2021 Gloucestershire county elections with a swing in their favour.
The two independent councillors elected for Brockworth East in 2019 were Louise Gerrard and Sara Stevens. Stevens stood down from Tewkesbury council in June last year, and the resulting by-election — which wasn’t held until November — resulted in a huge win for independent candidate Charlotte Mills, a Brockworth parish councillor. Mills polled 68% of the vote, the Conservatives trailing in a poor second with 15%.
Louise Gerrard has now resigned from Tewkesbury council in her turn, resulting in the second Brockworth East by-election in five months. This time the defending independent candidate is Charlotte Mills’ husband Jason, a soldier who holds the rank of Lance-Corporal in the King’s Royal Hussars. Jason Mills is a Brockworth parish councillor, but his employment and certain other interests also have to be declared by Charlotte on the register of interests for Tewkesbury councillors; this is because we hold our councillors to higher standards than we do our MPs. The Conservatives have selected Marc Barwick, who is a pilot and qualified flying instructor. Completing the ballot paper is Gilbert Yates for the Lib Dems, who returns from last year’s by-election.
That completes Andrew’s Previews for 2021–22, as there are no by-elections in the two weeks after Easter. Brockworth East is the sixty-fifth council by-election of 2022, to add to 172 contests previewed in this column between June and December 2021; on top of that we have brought you seven parliamentary by-elections and two by-elections for police and crime crime commissioners. It’s been a huge amount of work at possibly the busiest point of the local electoral cycle, but as always it’s been fun to travel around the country bringing you stories of how local democracy works, or sometimes fails to work, in the most ordinary and the most diverse parts of Great Britain. I hope you’ve enjoyed it too.
2022 is the twentieth anniversary year of one of this column’s other hobbies, the Local Elections Archive Project. If you would like to show your appreciation for the work which goes into LEAP and the Previews, then you can: the donation button for the support of future Previews is ready for you (link), and back issues of the Andrew’s Previews books going back to 2016 are available to buy now (link).. The 2021 Previews paperback collection is well advanced and should be available soon.
Looking forward as the wheel of democracy continues to turn, because we are lucky enough to live in a country where democracy happens, there will be the usual bumper edition of Andrew’s Previews in advance of this year’s local elections on 5th May 2022 local elections, as we bring you analysis of councils to watch and the by-elections which are taking place. Stay tuned.
Parliamentary constituency: Tewkesbury
Gloucestershire county council division: Brockworth
ONS Travel to Work Area: Gloucester
Postcode district: GL3
Mark Barwick ©
Jason Mills (Ind)
Gilbert Yates (LD)
November 2021 by-election Ind 499 C 110 LD 87 Lab 35
May 2019 result Ind 352/324 C 227/184 UKIP 140 LD 120/70 Grn 89
Previous results in detail
Andrew Teale
