Previewing the City of Chester by-election and the five local by-elections of 1st December 2022
“All the right votes, but not necessarily in the right order”
There are six by-elections taking place on 1st December 2022, with five seats up for grabs on our local councils and one seat available in the House of Commons. Without further ado, we take a Parliamentary Special to a historic city…
City of Chester
House of Commons; caused by the resignation of Labour MP Christian Matheson.
It would be remiss of me to start a piece about Chester without bringing you my photograph of what is reputed to be the second-most photographed clock in England. Indeed, given that the Elizabeth Tower of the House of Commons has been shrouded in scaffolding for much of the last few years, this particular clock might have been temporarily promoted to number 1. This is the Eastgate Clock, erected in 1899 to mark (albeit two years late) the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria.
The four faces of the Eastgate Clock sit on top of an arch which carries Chester’s city walls over Eastgate Street. The arch dates from the eighteenth century; the wall here is mediaeval or later and the buildings around it still lie on their mediaeval footprints, but this site is older than it looks. Eastgate lies on the site of the original east gate of the Roman fortress of Deva Victrix, and Eastgate Street is a Roman road.
Deva was the origin of modern Chester, being founded in the mid-70s as a fortress on the uncertain fringes of the Roman Empire. The Romans’ truce with the Brigantes, whose stronghold was what is now northern England, had broken down, and the emperor Vespasian sent the Legio II Adiultrix to subdue the region. The legion chose for this task a strategic site on a hill overlooking the River Dee, which at the time was navigable up to a harbour on the Roodee.
Roman forts were built to a standard plan, with an outer wall in the shape of a playing-card with rounded corners (the photograph above shows the north-east corner, with the modern Shropshire Union Canal rounding it) and with gates in all four walls. Deva was no exception to this rule, but it was an unusually large fort with its outer wall enclosing 62 acres. Inside the walls were everything needed for the legion to keep going: barrack-blocks, stores, a large house for the commanding officer and a headquarters building (the principia).
The modern Eastgate Street, Bridge Street and Watergate Street all started off as Roman streets between these buildings. The other thoroughfare feeding into the road junction at Chester Cross, Northgate Street, came later and runs through the site of the principia building. The west wall of Deva roughly followed the modern Nicholas Street, while the north and east walls now form part of the modern Chester city walls. Nothing remains of the original southern boundary of the Roman fort except for the foundations of the angle tower at the south-east corner, which are visible next to Little St John Street.
Opposite the angle tower on the other side of that road can be seen what is left of Chester’s Roman amphitheatre. Originally this would have seated around 7,000 soldiers and other Cestrians to watch all kinds of sport. Much of the site is buried under later buildings, so the modern retaining wall that runs through the arena has been painted to give visitors an impression of what the place might originally have looked like. My photographs don’t really do the mural justice.
The Roman city of Chester was the fort and the civilian settlement outside it; and in a very literal sense the fort and the city are still the same thing. The Old English word ceaster is a generic name for any Roman fort, and forms a major element in modern placenames such as Manchester, Doncaster, Leicester and even Wroxeter; but all of those locations have an extra part to their name, something to mark them apart from all the other abandoned forts. Chester also used to have this: the Venerable Bede wrote of “the city of the Legions, which the Angles call Legacæestir, and the Britons also more correctly Carlegion”. But in both the English and Welsh languages the modern name of the city, “Chester” or “Caer”, has lost its disambiguator. It’s simply “the fort”.
Even after the Romans quit these shores, Chester remained as a thriving city. One reason for this was that it was a port: immediately to the west of the city was a harbour now known as the Roodee. This harbour silted up long ago, leaving behind an open field within a bend of the Dee. Since at least 1539 this has been the site of Chester Racecourse, which is recognised by Guinness as the oldest racecourse still in operation; it’s also the shortest racecourse in England with one lap of the course covering 1 mile and 1 furlong. Spectators who are too stingy to pay the entrance fee can get a great view of the action from the city walls.
Two bridges cross the Dee either side of the Roodee, both of which have some historical significance too. The Grosvenor Bridge, which carries the main road towards Wrexham, was when it was built in 1832 the largest single-arch stone bridge in the world. The Dee Bridge, which carries the railway line towards North Wales, collapsed in 1847 — nine months after its opening — while a train was passing over it. The investigation into that accident found that the bridge’s design was flawed, with the collapse caused by the failure of the cast iron used in its construction. The Dee Bridge was subsequently rebuilt in a stronger material, wrought iron — which is good news for the train crossing it in this photograph.
Chester Racecourse and Chester Cathedral were founded at almost the same time, although the cathedral took over a pre-existing abbey which had been dissolved. This still has a lot of Norman stonework in its red sandstone, but the cathedral was severely bashed about by the Civil War and was extensively restored in the 19th century. Much of the impressive stained glass is even more modern than that. Behind the high altar lies what’s left of the broken shrine of St Werburgh, a Mercian princess of the 7th century who is regarded as Chester’s patron saint.
On my research visit over the weekend the cloister and chapter house were filled with Christmas trees and the organist was up in his loft practising some carols. It’s that time of year, you know — there’s only 23 shopping days left after today.
The Normans refortified Chester. Within five years of the 1066 conquest Chester Castle had been erected, and the Earls of Chester quickly established a strong position within Norman England as the most important of the Marcher Lords, protecting the western frontier of England from the Welsh. Such was their initial success that the Domesday survey of England covered a large part of what is now Flintshire, reflecting the Earls’ holdings. Cheshire became a county palatine, with the Earl having powers not dissimilar to those of the king.
Indeed, in time the Earldom and the monarchy became one, as every Prince of Wales since the 14th century has held the subsidiary title of Earl of Chester. One of the first acts of Charles III following his accession three months ago was to create William and Kate as the current Earl and Countess.
Not much of the mediaeval Chester Castle survives: it was comprehensively redeveloped in the late eighteenth century as a series of imposing neoclassical buildings. The largest of these is Chester Crown Court, which has been the venue for a number of famous trials including that of the Moors Murderers in 1966.
The modern Chester city walls form an almost-complete circuit of two miles around the city, but there is a break in the walls next to the River Dee. Which brings us to one of Britain’s administrative anomalies. Backing onto the Crown Court and facing the Dee is the old Cheshire county hall, which was the headquarters of Cheshire county council. That council was abolished in 2009. Its successor, Cheshire West and Chester council, then sold the building to the University of Chester which now uses it as its Riverside Campus for teaching in education, health, children’s services and social care.
The presence of County Hall in Chester city centre created a problem, because in the Victorian era Chester became a county borough — somewhere where the county council’s remit did not run. The solution to this was that Chester Castle became a civil parish of its own, surrounded by but not part of the county borough, for the sole purpose of allowing the county council to administer its own offices. The reason for this arrangement disappeared when Chester county borough was abolished almost half a century ago, and the county council itself no longer exists, but nobody has ever seen fit to abolish Chester Castle parish which is still in operation to this day. The 2001 and 2011 censuses both recorded a resident population for Chester Castle parish of zero, so if an election is ever needed to the parish this might be a bit of a challenge to organise.
The county borough never included the full extent of Chester’s built-up area. Hoole, a Chester suburb to the north-east of the town along the main road towards Manchester, wasn’t incorporated into the city until 1954. A mile west of the Roodee, the village of Saltney is an integral part of Chester’s built-up area but is over the border in Wales. This caused all sorts of problems when COVID restrictions in Wales and Cheshire were different, notably so for the non-league football club Chester FC, which plays its football in the English league system but whose stadium is in Wales. In January 2022 the club was threatened with legal action for admitting spectators to the ground; at the time this was legal in England but was a breach of Welsh COVID rules.
In between Saltney and the city centre can be found Curzon and Westminster, which — as one look at the mansions overlooking the Roodee from the far side of the river would suggest — is a high-status area. The north-western suburb of Blacon is a complete contrast: this is Chester’s council-estate ward, and even after a few decades of Right to Buy 39% of Blacon’s households were still socially-rented in 2011. The city’s eastern and northern suburbs, Great Boughton, Hoole, Newton and Upton-by-Chester, fall within those two extremes.
Upton-by-Chester is the location of one of the UK’s most-visited tourist attractions. Chester Zoo has been operating on this site since 1931, and welcomed more than 2 million visitors in 2019 alone. The zoo has done its bit for the current by-election, hosting a candidate hustings earlier this week with a focus on the environment. Channel 4 have broadcast a documentary series on the zoo’s running for over ten years now, and it’s not the only Chester-based programme on that channel. Hollyoaks, the soap opera set in a fictional Chester suburb of that name (although it’s actually filmed in Liverpool), is about to broadcast its 6,000th episode.
Among the villages around Chester located within this parliamentary seat, one has a railway connection to the big city. Capenhurst is a small village with a lot of industry, notably in the form of a factory which enriches uranium for the nuclear power market. Its station, close to the factory, has half-hourly trains to Chester and to Liverpool as part of the Merseyrail network.
Chester has returned MPs to Parliament since the reign of Henry VIII, who put to an end a system whereby Cheshire went unrepresented in the Commons because of its status as a county palatine. For centuries one of the city’s two MPs was usually a Grosvenor. It’s difficult to get far in Chester without encountering the name Grosvenor, because the family of that name have been investing in and doing good works in the city for centuries. The current head of the Grosvenor family, the 7th Duke of Westminster, is one of the richest men in the country as the head of a property empire which includes much of Mayfair in London. Anybody who has played Monopoly will know that landing on Mayfair can cost you a small fortune in rent, and the Duke’s large fortune shows that that’s true in real life too.
The redistribution of 1885 cut Chester’s representation from two MPs to one and expanded the franchise, but even then the Duke of Westminster could influence the city’s elections through the large number of electors in Chester who were his tenants. This was blamed for the defeat in 1886 of the city’s Liberal MP Walter Foster, a doctor and medical professor. Foster had been elected for the city in 1885, defeating the Conservative candidate Robert Yerburgh by 300 votes; a year later, with the Liberals split over Irish Home Rule, Yerburgh prevailed by 2,540 votes to 2,483, a majority of 66.
Robert Yerburgh went on to serve as MP for Chester for nearly 30 years. He was a barrister who was probably in the unusual position for the time of having a wife who was wealthier than he was. Elma Yerburgh was the daughter of the Blackburn brewer Daniel Thwaites, and she inherited the Thwaites brewery upon her father’s death in 1888.
The Liberal landslide of 1906 was just strong enough to unseat Yerburgh, who lost by the narrow margin of 47 votes (3,524 to 3,477). The Liberal candidate who won Chester that year was Lord Melchett. Yes, really. Alfred Mond, as he was known at this point, was the son of the noted chemist Ludwig Mond. He went on to become a director of his father’s chemical businesses Brunner Mond and Mond Nickel, and ended up as the first chairman of ICI. Mond combined this with a long political career, which started here in Chester: he went on to serve in the Lloyd George cabinets as First Commissioner of Works and Minister of Health. He was also a prominent Zionist, and a town in Israel (Tel Mond) is named after him.
Alfred Mond left Chester in January 1910 for a safer seat in Swansea, and to date he was the last Liberal MP for Chester. The seat reverted to the Conservatives’ Robert Yerburgh who won both 1910 elections narrowly: his majorities were 202 votes in January and 106 votes in December.
By now Robert Yerburgh’s health was deteriorating, and his heart troubles wouldn’t have been helped by an episode in 1914. When the First World War broke out Robert and Elma were seeking better health in the German spa town of Bad Nauheim, which turned out to be a bad move. They were detained as prisoners of war for several weeks, before being eventually allowed to return to England via Switzerland. Yerburgh resigned from the Commons in early 1916, having been promised a peerage; however, he died before the paperwork to send him to the Lords was ready.
The resulting 1916 Chester by-election was subject to the wartime political truce, which meant that the Conservative candidate was elected unopposed. In a surprising move the Tory nomination went to Sir Owen Philipps, who had previously been a Liberal MP: he represented the Pembroke and Haverfordwest District of Boroughs from 1906 to December 1910. Philipps was another prominent businessman, being a major figure in the shipping industry: he controlled the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, which was on an aggressive growth spurt. By 1927, when it took over White Star Line, the Royal Mail Steam Packet was the largest shipping group in the world.
But unlike Alfred Mond’s business empire, Philipps’ turned out to be built on sand. The Royal Mail line had been loss-making since 1926 and covered this up by opaque accounting while continuing to pay dividends. By 1929 the reserves were exhausted and the directors were forced to ask for a renegotiation of their government loan repayments. The Treasury ordered an audit of the company’s accounts which revealed the truth, and the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company went into liquidation owing £10 million (at 1929 prices) to its creditors. In an Old Bailey trial in 1931 Lord Kylsant, as Sir Owen Philipps had by now become, was found guilty of falsifying one of the company’s trading prospectuses and sentenced to twelve months’ imprisonment. Kylsant’s barrister in that trial was the Liberal MP and future party leader Sir John Simon; leading the prosecution case was Sir William Jowitt, who fourteen years later would succeed Simon as Lord Chancellor. The conviction was upheld by the Court of Appeal, and Kylsant spent ten months in Wormwood Scrubs.
Owen Philipps/Lord Kylsant had stood down as MP for Chester in 1922. By this point it was a very different constituency to the one he had first been elected for. Chester had been disenfranchised as a borough by the 1918 redistribution, and was now the centre of a county constituency which included all of what would become the city’s suburbs (except Welsh Saltney) and some nearby villages to make up the numbers. Exactly which villages have been in this constituency has varied over the years, but otherwise the City of Chester constituency (as it was now renamed) is little altered since 1918.
From 1885 to 1918 most of Chester’s suburbs and surrounding villages had formed part of the Eddisbury constituency, which covered a large swathe of western Cheshire but no large towns. With the exception of the 1906 Liberal landslide, this was a Conservative seat throughout this period. The Tory MPs for the seat were local squires Henry Tollemache (1885–1906) and Harry Barnston (Jan 1910–1918); the Liberal MP from 1906 to 1910 was Arthur Stanley, who would later serve throughout the First World War as governor of the Australian state of Victoria.
In 1922 the expanded Chester constituency was handed over by Sir Owen Philipps to another Conservative with an interest in a shipping line. Sir Charles Cayzer, 3rd Baronet, had rather more success in business than Kylsant as a director of the Clan Line, which by the 1930s was the largest cargo line in the world — this time with sound finances.
Cayzer was only in his mid-twenties when he took over the City of Chester constituency, having previously survived two years in France during the First World War. Given the mortality rate among young upper-class officers of his generation during that war, that was quite an achievement. Sir Charles went on to have a long career as MP for Chester, only being seriously threatened in 1929 when he held off the Liberal candidate Aubrey Herbert by just 162 votes (13,454 to 13,292).
When the Second World War broke out Cayzer rejoined the Army and was commissioned into his old regiment, the 19th Hussars. On 18th February 1940 he was found dead at his country estate, Kinpurnie Castle in Angus, along with his butler; both of them had gunshot wounds to the head. It appears that Sir Charles Cayzer shot his butler before taking his own life.
Again, the resulting 1940 City of Chester by-election was uncontested due to the wartime political truce. The city’s new Conservative MP was Basil Nield, a barrister who at the time was in his mid-thirties. Nield was in the Officers’ Emergency Reserve, which meant he was often away on active service during the war years: he was mentioned in despatches and awarded a military MBE.
Nield held his seat easily against the Attlee landslide of 1945, and became a KC the same year. The highlight of his parliamentary career was introducing the bill which became the Adoption of Children Act 1949, which significantly reformed and liberalised the law relating to adoption. Nield’s legal career also continued to develop, and in 1956 he was appointed a judge and became Recorder of Manchester. This meant he had to leave the Commons.
This time, the resulting City of Chester by-election of 15th November 1956 was contested. The Liberals reselected their candidate from the previous year’s general election John Seys-Llewellyn, a barrister who had taken part in the Nuremberg Trials. The Labour candidate was Lewis Carter-Jones, a teacher who would later have a long parliamentary career as MP for Eccles. Despite getting a 5% swing to Labour, Lewis-Jones wasn’t elected here; the City of Chester was a safe Conservative seat at the time which duly elected John Temple.
John Temple spent over 17 years as a backbench Conservative MP, only being seriously threatened in the Wilson landslide of 1966 when his majority fell to 2,803. In February 1974 he passed the seat on to 29-year-old Peter Morrison.
Nearly all of Morrison’s parliamentary career coincided with Margaret Thatcher’s leadership of the Conservative Party. He was a strong supporter of Thatcher, and ran her ill-fated final leadership campaign in 1990; at the time he was the Prime Minister’s parliamentary private secretary.
Peter Morrison had spent most of the Thatcher administration in government at junior ministerial rank, including a period as deputy chairman of the Conservative Party, but he never made it to Cabinet. Perhaps there was a reason for this. During his career rumours had been circulating within both the Whips office and his constituency that Morrison was homosexual and excessively interested in boys. Morrison always denied the allegations that were put to him, but the effect was to place an upper limit on his government career. At the time his alleged homosexuality was seen as more of a problem by the Whips, because it could lead to his being compromised by Soviet agents. In the twenty-first century multiple sources have discussed Morrison’s paedophilia, and the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse had some harsh words for the way the allegations against him were covered up. Whatever Morrison actually did or may have done, he’ll never answer for it now: he suffered a fatal heart attack in 1995, aged just 51.
Sir Peter Morrison was knighted shortly before he retired from the Commons in 1992, passing the seat on to the new Conservative MP Gyles Brandreth. Yes, that Gyles Brandreth. He was elected by just 1,101 votes, the closest result in the City of Chester since 1929; the Labour candidate David Robinson’s 42% of the vote was the best Labour performance to date in the seat. It was a harbinger of things to come.
Unfathomably for such a natural media whore, when Brandreth got into government in 1996 he was placed in the relative seclusion of the Whips’ office. From the backbenches he had previously piloted through Parliament the Marriage Act 1994, which liberalised the rules on marriage ceremonies by allowing them to be solemnised “on premises approved for the purpose by local authorities”, not just in churches or register offices.
Gyles Brandreth was swept away by over 10,000 votes in the Labour landslide of 1997, which in retrospect was a watershed in Chester’s politics. Chester had never voted Labour before 1997; since then it has only failed to vote Labour once. The new Labour MP for the city was Christine Russell, a Chester city councillor who at the time was working for the mental health charity Mind.
Russell’s majority fell to just 917 votes in 2005, and she lost her seat in 2010 when the Labour government fell. Enjoying a majority of 2,583 was the new Conservative candidate Stephen Mosley, another Chester city councillor who represented Handbridge and St Mary’s ward (south of the city centre on the far side of the Dee). In 2006 Mosley had been good enough to email me with a correction to the Local Elections Archive Project: the city council website had put a typing error in his vote total for 2004 which I had unwittingly copied. These things happen.
But Chester has not taken the path of many other 2010 gains and become a safe Conservative seat again. Unexpectedly and against the national trend, Stephen Mosley lost his seat to Labour in 2015, becoming the first Chester MP to serve only one term since the Liberals’ Walter Foster in 1885–86. When the votes came out of the boxes, Mosley had 22,025 but Labour’s Christian Matheson had 22,118, giving a Labour majority of just 93 votes. It was the third-closest result of the 2015 general election.
Chris Matheson subsequently went on to make one of the most marginal of seats into a safe Labour constituency. He was re-elected for a third term in December 2019 with 50% of the vote against 38% for the Conservatives’ Samantha George, a majority of 6,164 votes.
This good recent Labour performance also reflects good recent Labour performances in local elections. The local authority here is the appallingly-named Cheshire West and Chester council, which combines a lot of very Tory and very affluent countryside with the city of Chester. the industrial towns of Ellesmere Port and Northwich, and the Liverpool overspill town of Winsford. It’s a rather delicate political balance, and the council has been hung since 2015 with a precarious Labour minority administration in place throughout that period.
Cheshire West and Chester’s ward boundaries don’t match up with the parliamentary seat, which shouldn’t be surprising because the ward boundaries here have changed three times since the seat was last drawn up based on the December 2000 electoral register. The last local elections here were all the way back in May 2019. If we take as a best fit for the constituency the eight wards wholly within the seat plus the whole of Christleton and Huntington ward, then adding those nine wards together gives vote shares of 39% for Labour, 33% for the Conservatives and 12% for the Liberal Democrats. The council seats within that area split 12 to Labour and 7 to the Conservatives.
At this point an interest has to be declared, because also elected here in 2019 was this column’s genial host and Britain Elects’ founder Ben Walker. He is not a Cheshire West and Chester councillor, instead sitting on Upton-by-Chester parish council. Walker has however been selected as a Labour candidate for the next Cheshire West and Chester elections in May 2023, when he is due to contest the city-centre Chester City and the Garden Quarter ward.
Looking beyond that, this constituency is under threat from the current boundary review. This is because the rules the Boundary Commission for England are working to force all constituencies to be within 5% of the average, while the population of the Wirral is no longer large enough to sustain four parliamentary seats. (It wasn’t really large enough to sustain four parliamentary seats when the current boundaries were drawn up, but the Commission’s initial proposal for a seat crossing the Mersey estuary between Wallasey and Liverpool went down so badly that keeping four undersized seats for the Wirral borough was seen as a preferable alternative.) Cutting the Wirral down to three-and-a-bit seats has knock-on effects in western Cheshire, and the position of the city of Chester creates a conundrum for the Commission which basically only has two solutions. One is to have the city surrounded by a very unwieldy rural constituency stretching from Neston to the Shropshire border. The other, which the Commission have chosen in their revised draft map, is to split Chester between two seats for the first time. They have chosen the obvious dividing line of the River Dee. Most of the current City of Chester seat will be included within a revised seat of Chester North and Neston, which would probably have a very similar political profile, while the parts of the seat south of the Dee are to be transferred into the safe-Conservative Eddisbury constituency which would be renamed as Chester South and Eddisbury. Final consultation on these proposals closes on 5th December, so there is still time to register your support/outrage (delete as applicable) for this and other parts of the proposed new constituency map.
Readers who have got this far will have noted that the City of Chester has elected a number of previous MPs who have been the subject of scandal, either during or after their terms of office. Financial misconduct, alleged paedophilia, even murder, we’ve had it all. Well, we can now add to that list the Labour MP Christian Matheson, who has recently been investigated by Parliament’s Independent Expert Panel over allegations of sexual misconduct towards a junior staff member. On 21st October that panel recommended that Matheson be suspended from the Commons for four weeks. Under recent changes to parliamentary rules prompted by the similar case of the Conservative MP for Delyn Rob Roberts (who remains in post), this would have resulted in Matheson facing a recall petition from his electors. Although he continued to deny the allegations, once the Panel’s recommendations were published Matheson decided to jump before he was pushed: he promptly applied for the Chiltern Hundreds.
So we have a parliamentary by-election which will be the first of a series of Labour defences in north-west England. We have a further by-election to come in Stretford and Urmston in two weeks’ time, before travelling to West Lancashire in the new year.
Defending this by-election, the first of the Sunak premiership, is Labour candidate Samantha Dixon. She is a former leader of Cheshire West and Chester council, and currently represents Chester City and the Garden Quarter ward on that council.
The Conservatives have also gone for a Cheshire-based candidate, although not a local one. Liz Wardlaw is based on the far side of the county in Congleton, where she represents Odd Rode ward on Cheshire East council. She is a registered nurse.
The only other party to save their deposit here in December 2019 were the Liberal Democrats, who start from 6.8%. Their candidate is Rob Herd, who is one of two candidates (the other being Dixon) to live in the constituency; Herd is a modern languages teacher and also a parish councillor.
Two other parties stood here last time. The Greens have selected Paul Bowers, who is currently the only Green member of Cheshire West and Chester council; he represents Helsby ward, which is part of the Weaver Vale constituency. The Brexit Party are now Reform UK; their candidate is Jeanie Barton, who lives over the Welsh border in the Clwyd South constituency. Barton was a UKIP candidate in last year’s Senedd election, and in the 2022 Welsh local elections she was an independent candidate for the Minera ward of Wrexham council.
Four other candidates stand. Cain Griffiths, a student who works part-time in the hospitality industry, is standing for the UK Independence Party. There is one London-based candidate on the ballot, Richard Hewison of Rejoin EU whose policy platform is left as an exercise for the reader. Howling Laud Hope is back for his latest by-election as leader of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party. Completing the ballot paper is Chris Quartermaine of the Freedom Alliance.
There has been no specific polling for this by-election, but given the recent upturn for Labour and collapse for the government in the national polls this should be a far easier Labour defence than Hartlepool, which was also triggered by MP misconduct. That was only 19 months ago (Andrew’s Previews 2021, page 193), but it feels like a different era.
Of course, only one of the candidates can win. The eight losers might well find themselves on Friday morning in the shrine at the amphitheatre of Deva Victrix, ruefully looking at this:
All photographs in this section were taken by the author on Saturday.
Cheshire West and Chester wards: Blacon, Chester City and the Garden Quarter, Christleton and Huntington (part: Christleton, Dodleston, Eaton and Eccleston, Huntington, Littleton, and Poulton and Pulford parishes), Farndon (part: the Aldford part of Aldford and Saughton parish), Great Boughton, Gowy Rural (part: Guilden Sutton parish), Handbridge Park, Lache, Newton and Hoole, Saughall and Mollington, Upton
ONS Travel to Work Area: Chester
Postcode districts: CH1, CH2, CH3, CH4, CH64, CH66, CH70
Jeanie Barton (Reform UK)
Paul Bowers (Grn)
Samantha Dixon (Lab)
Cain Griffiths (UKIP)
Rob Herd (LD)
Richard Hewison (Rejoin EU)
Howling Laud Hope (Loony)
Chris Quartermaine (Freedom Alliance)
Liz Wardlaw (C)
December 2019 result Lab 27082 C 20918 LD 3734 Grn 1438 Brexit Party 1388
June 2017 result Lab 32023 C 22847 LD 1551
May 2015 result Lab 22118 C 22025 UKIP 4148 LD 2870
May 2010 result C 18995 Lab 16412 LD 8930 UKIP 1225 EDP 594 Grn 535 Ind 99
Broxburn, Uphall and Winchburgh
West Lothian council, Scotland; caused by the death of Labour councillor Ann Davidson.
The result for the City of Chester by-election won’t come in until very late into the night, so while you’re waiting let me now bring you the undercard to today’s title fight, as we consider five local by-elections. The Conservatives are defending three of them, with the other two being to replace Labour and Green councillors. I’ll start with the Labour defence, which is in Scotland.
Our first local by-election of the week takes place to the west of Edinburgh and to the north of Linlithgow. Broxburn and Uphall are two halves of a single conurbation to the north of the M8 motorway, while Winchburgh is a separate settlement a few miles to the north of Broxburn. All of these grew into towns in the nineteenth century thanks to the discovery of oil shale in the rocks of West Lothian. For a while this was a boom area, as shale oil was extracted and refined, until the industry died in the mid-twentieth century. Today the main reminder of the past industry is the extensive “bings”, or spoil heaps, which dominate the landscape. All three towns are linked together by the Union Canal, while the main railway line from Edinburgh to Glasgow passes under Winchburgh in a tunnel.
West Lothian’s ward boundaries haven’t changed since Scottish councils went over to PR in 2007, so we can compare results here over a long period of time. The inaugural election here in 2007 returned two Labour councillors, one from the SNP and one from a local pressure group, Action to Save St John’s Hospital (the main general hospital in Livingston). The SNP gained the hospital group’s seat in 2012, then Labour lost their second seat to the Conservatives in 2017. In the May 2022 local elections the first preferences split 42% to the SNP, 30% to Labour and 18% to the Conservatives, with the seat count remaining at 2–1–1. The Scottish National Party also represent the area at Westminster (the ward is mostly within the Livingston constituency) and at Holyrood (as part of the Linlithgow constituency).
West Lothian council is finely balanced. The SNP are the largest party, but with 15 out of 33 seats they are short of a majority and have no allies. Instead Labour are running the council as a minority with 11 seats plus this vacancy, relying on the votes of four Conservatives, a Lib Dem and an independent councillor.
This by-election is being defended by Labour following the passing of their councillor Ann Davidson in September 2022, just four months after her election. Her late husband, Alex, had previously been a Labour councillor for the same ward. With Labour starting 12 points behind in this by-election they have a lot of ground to make up in vote growth and/or transfers to hold their seat, and the SNP should probably be counted as favourites.
Defending for Labour and top of the ballot paper is Tony Boyle, who was previously a councillor for this ward from 2012 to 2017. The SNP candidate is Thomas Ullathorne, who won the last by-election to West Lothian council in East Livingston and East Calder ward last year (Andrew’s Previews 2021, page 311); he lost re-election in that ward in May. Another returning candidate from a previous by-election is Douglas Smith of the Conservatives, who last appeared in this column in March 2021 in Livingston South ward (Andrew’s Previews 2021, page 21). Also standing on a long ballot paper are Chris Cotter for the Greens, Peter Clarke for the Lib Dems, Debbie Ewen for Alba, independent candidate Chris Horne (who was the Conservative councillor for this ward from 2017 to 2022, and unsuccessfully sought re-election in Linlithgow ward in May), and independent candidate Steven Laidlaw (a retired social worker from Broxburn). This is a Scottish local by-election, so Votes at 16 and the Alternative Vote are in operation.
Westminster constituency: Livingston (most), Linlithgow and East Falkirk (small parts)
Holyrood constituency: Linlithgow
ONS Travel to Work Area: Livingston
Postcode districts: EH29, EH52
Tony Boyle (Lab)
Peter Clarke (LD)
Chris Cotter (Grn)
Debbie Ewen (Alba)
Chris Horne (Ind)
Steven Laidlaw (Ind)
Douglas Smith (C)
Thomas Ullathorne (SNP)
May 2022 first preferences SNP 2870 Lab 2029 C 1215 Grn 298 LD 255 Alba 95 Scottish Family Party 91
May 2017 first preferences SNP 2903 C 1897 Lab 1637 Grn 256 LD 217 TUSC 57
May 2012 first preferences Lab 2349 SNP 2168 Action to Save St John’s Hospital 766 C 316
May 2007 first preferences Lab 2807 SNP 2549 Action to Save St John’s Hospital 1047 C 559 LD 431
Previous results in detail
Gaywood North and Central
Norfolk county council; caused by the resignation of Conservative councillor Graham Middleton.
Returning to England, we find ourselves on the east coast within the town of King’s Lynn. Gaywood North and Central ward is the north-eastern corner of the town, the point just before it runs into the village of South Wootton which is being absorbed into the urban area. This is a strongly working-class area centred on the Reffley Academy primary school. In the 2011 census Gaywood North Bank ward, which covers three-quarters of this division, was in the top 70 wards in England and Wales for part-time working (18.5%).
The other quarter of this county division was covered until 2019 by Old Gaywood ward. Boundary changes for the 2019 election split this area up between three other wards of King’s Lynn and West Norfolk district. Some of it went into Gaywood North Bank, which split its three seats between two Conservative and one Labour councillor. The other two wards involved, Gaywood Clock and Springwood, both voted Labour in 2019 but cover only small corners of this division.
The Gaywood North and Central county division hasn’t had its boundaries changed since 2005; it was supposed to be redrawn for the 2021 Norfolk county councils, but the Local Government Boundary Commission’s new map was blown off course by the pandemic and they ended up missing the deadline. The five elections here to date have returned five different county councillors: three Conservatives, one Labour (in 2005) and one UKIP (in 2013). The 2021 result here was a good result for the Conservatives who increased their majority over Labour to 56–34.
Mind, defending parties should never take local election results for granted. Apart from the fact that Labour are strongly represented on the district council here, the Conservatives should probably draw lessons from the by-election last year in the neighbouring Gaywood South division. Their newly elected county councillor from May 2021 resigned his seat immediately to take up a new job, and the Conservatives lost the resulting by-election in July 2021 (Andrew’s Previews 2021, page 304) to … the Liberal Democrats, who came from nowhere.
This by-election arises from the resignation of Graham Middleton, who also sets on King’s Lynn and West Norfolk council where he represents The Woottons ward. Middleton is the deputy leader of the district council, and he has resigned from the county council in order to concentrate on his district duties.
Originally this by-election was due to be combined with a by-election to King’s Lynn and West Norfolk council, because the Labour councillor for Gaywood Clock ward, John Collop, had recently died. However, when nominations closed for the two elections only one candidate was standing for Gaywood Clock, so that poll was called off and the candidate — Alex Ware, of Labour — was declared elected straight away. This column sends its congratulations to her. The Conservatives explained their failure to stand as being out of respect to the late councillor Collop, which doesn’t sound like a very good excuse to this column. One wonders if there’s something else going on with the local party’s organisation.
We might be able to pick up more clues to that from the result of this county by-election. Defending for the Conservatives is Sheila Young, who was previously a county councillor for this division from 2017 to 2021. The Labour candidate Richard Johnson is proudly declaring his socialist credentials on the ballot paper by giving an address on Clement Attlee Way (yes, really), which is not part of this division. Also standing are David Sayers for the Lib Dems and Vicky Fairweather for the Greens.
Parliamentary constituency: North West Norfolk
King’s Lynn and West Norfolk wards: Gaywood North Bank (almost all), Gaywood Clock (small part), Springwood (small part)
ONS Travel to Work Area: King’s Lynn
Postcode district: PE30
Vicky Fairweather (Grn)
Richard Johnson (Lab)
David Sayers (LD)
Sheila Young (C)
May 2021 result C 1031 Lab 616 LD 131 UKIP 61
May 2017 result C 871 Lab 621 UKIP 226 LD 120 Ind 71
May 2013 result UKIP 697 Lab 625 C 478 LD 158
June 2009 result C 1090 Lab 445 LD 369 BNP 346 Grn 322
May 2005 result Lab 1906 C 1771 LD 772
Previous results in detail
Chiddingfold and Dunsfold
Waverley council, Surrey; caused by the death of Conservative councillor John Gray.
With the clock now counting down quickly to the May 2023 local elections, we now come to the last by-election of the current term of a recent Conservative disaster area — Surrey.
The Waverley local government district covers a large swathe of rural southern Surrey, with Farnham and Godalming as its largest towns. The 2019 local elections in Waverley saw the Conservatives lose thirty — yes, 30 — of the 53 seats they were defending, and they lost control of the council to a coalition of the Farnham Residents party, the Lib Dems, the Greens and Labour. By-elections since then have not shown much improvement, with the Conservatives having lost two more seats earlier this year.
I mentioned yesterday that I had been hoping to talk about the first by-election in the seat of chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, who represents a constituency at the other end of Surrey. Well, one day later we get to the first by-election in the seat of chancellor Jeremy Hunt, who represents Chiddingfold and Dunsfold as part of his South West Surrey constituency. This is a seat seemingly made for Cabinet ministers: Hunt’s predecessors Virginia Bottomley and Maurice Macmillan were also prominent frontbenchers.
Chiddingfold and Dunsfold are small villages in a rather remote part of Surrey to the east of Haslemere, but that doesn’t mean they’re not frequented by high-profile people. Chiddingfold in particular has a number of associations with well-known musicians. This is the location of The Farm, the main recording studio for Genesis, while scenes from the village provided a backdrop for the video accompanying the Mike and The Mechanics song Over My Shoulder.
Dunsfold, on the other hand, has Dunsfold Aerodrome. This was built by the Canadian air force during the Second World War, but took on a new life after the war in the hands of Hawker Siddeley and their successors British Aerospace, who used the airfield for manufacture and testing of fighter jets. The Hawker Siddeley Harrier, the first vertical takeoff and landing fighter jet, and the later BAe Sea Harrier were developed at Dunsfold.
BAE Systems sold Dunsfold Aerodrome in 2002, after which it became part of the national consciousness. This is the filming location of Top Gear, the BBC’s high-profile motoring programme, and is the site of its test track which has challenged celebrities and racing drivers for two decades now. The Top Gear test track straddles the ward and parish boundary, but most of the outer section is part of this ward. As we can see in this helpful graphic from the tireless contributors to OpenStreetMap.
OpenStreetMap aren’t the only internet people to have had some fun on the Top Gear test track, as we can see from the fact that the Google Street View camera car was apparently escorted around the track by the Stig (link).
Chiddingfold and Dunsfold ward is one of the parts of Waverley district which has remained in Conservative hands even as all around fell apart, but the May 2019 result here still showed a sharp drop in the Conservative majority. The Greens and Lib Dems fielded only one candidate each for the two seats, which may have been an electoral pact (there were some funny things going on with candidate patterns in Waverley three years ago); however, the Local Elections Archive Project credits them separately giving percentages of 41% for the Conservatives, 27% for the Green Party and 23% for the Lib Dems. The local county council division, Waverley Eastern Villages, remains safe for the Conservatives as well.
This by-election follows the death in September of John Gray, who had represented Chiddingfold and Dunsfold ward since 2015. Whoever wins it might have to work hard to secure reselection, because there are only five months left until the next Waverley local elections in May 2023 — at which point this ward will be broken up.
Defending for the Conservatives is Ian Mitchell, a former small business owner whose family have lived in the area for over 200 years. Mitchell previously contested this ward in 2015 as a UKIP candidate. Unfortunately, his campaign has spun off the track at the final corner: on the Tuesday before polling the Conservatives stopped their campaign and suspended Mitchell from the party over a series of dubious posts on his social media. This move came far too late to remove Ian Mitchell’s name from the ballot paper, where he remains listed as an official Conservative candidate.
That unforced error might provide an opportunity for another party to gain the seat. Despite their second-place finish in 2019 there is no Green candidate this time; the local Greens have instead endorsed the Lib Dem candidate Dave Busby, who works in the charity sector and has run several full and half-marathons for charity. Rebecca Aitken completes the ballot paper for Labour.
Unfortunately, there is no place on the candidate list for the Stig. Unless one of them is in fact the Stig, of course.
Parliamentary constituency: South West Surrey
Surrey county council division: Waverley Eastern Villages
ONS Travel to Work Area: Guildford and Aldershot
Postcode districts: GU8, GU27
Rebecca Aitken (Lab)
Dave Busby (LD)
Ian Mitchell (C)
May 2019 result C 617/606 Grn 406 LD 344 Lab 121
May 2015 result C 1445/1306 Lab 460 UKIP 418
May 2011 result C 1244/1040 Lab 411
May 2007 result C 1121/1063 Lab 218
May 2003 result C 739/719 LD 229/190 Lab 129/119
Previous results in detail
Arundel and Walberton
Arun council, West Sussex; caused by the disqualification of Green Party councillor Faye Catterson, who failed to attend any meetings of the council in six months.
Travelling due south from Chiddingfold we come to another large rural ward, this time located mostly within the South Downs National Park, which covers ten whole parishes and parts of two others. The largest of these is the market town of Arundel, located at the point where the River Arun punches through and out of the South Downs on its journey south to the sea.
Arundel is quite a small town, particularly compared to the nearby resorts on the coastal strip, but it gives its name to a parliamentary seat and is home to a Catholic cathedral. The latter is probably down to the influence of one of England’s most prominent Catholic families, the Dukes of Norfolk. This family is still based at Arundel Castle, which was first built in 1067 and where restoration and renovation work is still going on. The 18th and present Duke, as holder of the hereditary position of Earl Marshal, has the responsibility of organising the Coronation of King Charles III and Queen Camilla next year. Arundel is the ward’s railhead, with trains travelling north to Horsham and London and south to Bognor Regis.
Also within the ward is the village of Fontwell, known for its National Hunt racecourse at Fontwell Park. We’ve already had this week the shortest racecourse in England at Chester; Fontwell is the only English course whose track is in a figure-of-eight shape. Walberton, the other village in the ward name, is located roughly halfway between Arundel and Fontwell.
As with Waverley to the north, Arun district (which is named after the river) was a place where the Conservatives lost bucketloads of seats and their council majority in the 2019 local elections. This didn’t even happen in the dark days of the 1990s. Indeed, the Liberal Democrats became the largest party on the council three years ago, although a Lib Dem-led administration subsequently fell apart and the Conservatives are back in minority control.
The Lib Dem surge didn’t extend to Arundel and Walberton, but the Conservative weakness did and it cost them one of the ward’s three seats. The Tory slate did still top the poll, but only with 32%; the beneficiary of this was the Green Party candidate Faye Catterson, who polled 26% and won the ward’s third seat. There were also significant scores for the Lib Dems (19%) and Labour (12%).
This area is still safely Conservative at other levels of government, although the Arundel and South Downs constituency did swing to the Liberal Democrats in December 2019. Most of the ward is within either the Arundel and Courtwick or the Fontwell division of West Sussex county council, both of which are safe for the Conservatives. The Greens ran second in Fontwell last year, and earlier this year they gained an Arun council by-election from the Conservatives in Barnham ward — the ward which covers the rest of that division.
The Green Party are having to defend the Arundel and Walberton by-election after their councillor Faye Catterson was kicked out under the six-month non-attendance rule. I understand she’s not been in the best of health recently; you can get leave of absence for that, but it needs to be granted by the council before the six months runs out.
Defending for the Green Party is Stephen McAuliffe, an environmental scientist from Fontwell who sits on Walberton parish council. (Fontwell has no parish of its own, for some reason.) The Conservative candidate is Mario Trabucco, who is a parish councillor in Aldingbourne just to the west of this ward. The Lib Dems have not returned, so Labour’s Michael Ward completes the ballot paper; he stood here in 2019, was the Labour candidate for Arundel and Courtwick in last year’s West Sussex county elections, and by his own account he has previously been a councillor in London.
Parliamentary constituency: Arundel and South Downs
West Sussex county council division: Arundel and Courtwick (Arundel, Burpham, Houghton, Lyminster and Crossbush, South Stoke and Warningcamp parishes), Fontwell (Madehurst, Slindona and Walberton parishes, part of Aldingbourne parish, part of Barnham and Eastergate parish), Angmering and Findon (Poling parish)
ONS Travel to Work Area: Chichester and Bognor Regis (most), Worthing (Poling parish)
Postcode districts: BN17, BN18, PO18, PO20, PO22
Stephen McAuliffe (Grn)
Mario Trabucco (C)
Michael Ward (Lab)
May 2019 result C 1088/923/852 Grn 884 LD 642/546 Lab 423 UKIP 388
May 2015 result C 2691/2448/1994 Ind 1166 UKIP 1151 Lab 938
Previous results in detail
Bitterne
Southampton council, Hampshire; caused by the death of Conservative councillor Terry Streets.
We started the week in a city, and let’s finish in one. Bitterne was a village once, but it was swallowed up by the growth of Southampton long ago; the current Bitterne ward consists entirely of suburban housing on the eastern edge of the city. It doesn’t really cover the Bitterne area very well, and new ward boundaries coming in for Southampton next year will acknowledge that by renaming this ward after its largest component, the council estate of Thornhill. The 2011 census here has a very working-class return, and Bitterne is one of the top ten wards in south-east England for social renting (47.1% of households).
Despite this, the ward’s local elections have swung a long way to the right in recent years, something which can’t fully be explained by the fact that the Conservatives have held the local parliamentary seat of Southampton Itchen since 2015. The swings involved are larger than that. Something else might be going on. Itchen is a marginal seat which has often turned in very close results: John Denham, then a Labour Cabinet minister, held it by 192 votes in 2010, while Royston Smith held the seat for the Conservatives in 2017 by just 31 votes.
The council has also been closely fought in recent years, swinging wildly from Labour to Conservative and back. Currently there is a Labour majority with 26 seats against 20 Conservatives (plus this vacancy) and a single Lib Dem.
Bitterne ward took on its current boundaries in 2002. The current score stands at 11 Labour and 5 Conservative wins, the latter coming in 2008, 2018, 2019, 2021 and 2022. The result from May this year shows that this is definitely a marginal ward, with the Conservative councillor Terry Streets being re-elected for a second term of office with a 47–41 margin over Labour.
Streets suddenly passed away in late August, and this by-election is being held to replace him. The Conservative defence in this marginal ward falls to Callum Ford. Labour have selected Yvonne Frampton. Also standing are Ronald Meldrum for the Greens, Nick McGeorge for the Lib Dems and Mabel Wellman for the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition.
Parliamentary constituency: Southampton Itchen
ONS Travel to Work Area: Southampton
Postcode districts: SO18, SO19
May 2022 result C 1248 Lab 1097 Grn 141 LD 117 TUSC 47
May 2021 result C 1642 Lab 999 Grn 182 LD 116
May 2019 result C 1062 Lab 951 UKIP 421 Grn 206 LD 141
May 2018 result C 1528 Lab 1233 LD 118 Grn 114 Ind 96
May 2016 result Lab 1150 C 783 UKIP 541 LD 132 Grn 128 TUSC 42
May 2015 result Lab 2343 C 1935 UKIP 1043 Grn 254 LD 240 TUSC 41
May 2014 result Lab 1153 UKIP 966 C 963 LD 140 TUSC 55
May 2012 result Lab 1416 C 1217 UKIP 210 LD 133 TUSC 77
May 2011 result Lab 1626 C 1277 LD 290 TUSC 163
May 2010 result Lab 2464 C 1922 LD 1171
May 2008 result C 1494 Lab 1034 LD 387
May 2007 result Lab 1373 C 961 LD 510
May 2006 result Lab 1273 C 849 LD 481 BNP 466
June 2004 result Lab 1145 C 888 LD 491 BNP 317
May 2003 result Lab 1268 C 740 LD 487 BNP 288 UKIP 84
May 2002 result Lab 1432/1420/1366 C 709/616/563 LD 349/347/341
Previous results in detail
If you enjoyed these previews, there are many more like them — going back to 2016 — in the Andrew’s Previews books, which are available to buy now and will make an excellent Christmas present for the discerning psephologist (link). You can also support future previews by donating to the Local Elections Archive Project (link).
Andrew Teale
