Previewing the eight local by-elections of 22nd February 2024
“All the right votes, but not necessarily in the right order”
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a Previewer in possession of a by-election column to write must be in want of some interesting historical facts. Well, clearly my research was not up to scratch last week in one respect, and I have been deluged by a letter from Mrs Trellis of North Wales pointing out something which I had overlooked. I omitted to mention that Chawton, a Hampshire village within the Four Marks and Medstead ward, was for many years the home of Jane Austen; her house there still exists and is now a museum dedicated to her memory. I assure readers that this omission owes more to neglect and distraction than pride or prejudice, but perhaps I have now seen sense. If not sensibility.
Hopefully you won’t need any persuasion to get stuck into this week’s column. In one of those weeks where there’s something for everyone to enjoy, there are eight by-elections on 22nd February 2024:
Romney Marsh
Folkestone and Hythe council, Kent; caused by the resignation of Conservative councillor Liz Grant.
It’s wet. It’s been raining for a very long time here in the Great British Winter. So let’s travel to a place which is in a constant battle with the water, Romney Marsh. Here we have a landscape of flat wetlands next to the smooth English Channel coast, much of which has been reclaimed from the sea over the centuries.
The inland part of the Marsh is almost entirely agricultural, and humans here are far outnumbered by Romney Marsh sheep. These were specifically bred over the years to cope with the wet conditions on the marsh, and they have high resistance to foot rot (a condition which can affect other breeds grazing on wet ground) and liver parasites. Romney Marsh sheep have been exported from here all over the world, and the breed forms the majority of New Zealand’s lamb stock.
On the coast we have the main population centres for this ward, the villages of St Mary’s Bay and Dymchurch, which are linked together by the narrow-gauge Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway. These villages have long been on the frontline against the threat of invasion from France: Dymchurch has a number of surviving Martello towers from the Napoleonic wars, and the never-executed Operation Sealion envisaged an Axis force landing here during the Second World War. Even in peacetime, invading boats are a major part of Dymchurch’s history: its isolation, proximity to France and wide beach made it a hotbed for smuggling.
Which perhaps explains why local politics here in the 2010s were dominated by the UK Independence Party. UKIP won the larger Romney Marsh county division at the 2013 Kent county council elections, although their county councillor served for less than two years before resigning. The Conservatives recovered their seat in the resulting county by-election in May 2015; but in the simultaneous election to what was then Shepway council UKIP won one of the two available seats in this ward, the other going to the Conservatives. In 2019 UKIP gained the Conservative seat, and Ian Meyers and Terry Mullard became the councillors for Romney Marsh.
This area is part of the Folkestone and Hythe parliamentary seat, which for many years returned the former Conservative leader Michael Howard to the Commons. Howard passed his seat on in 2010 to fellow Conservative Damian Collins, who has spent most of his Commons career on the Conservative backbenches; from 2016 to 2019 he was chairman of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport select committee. Before entering politics Collins had captained the St Benet’s Hall, Oxford team which made the last 16 in the 1994–95 series of University Challenge.
Collins’ seat has very similar boundaries to Folkestone and Hythe council, where the Conservatives lost their overall majority in 2019. That year’s local elections returned an overall right-wing majority on the council, but only just. The administration was formed by 13 Conservatives, the two UKIP councillors for Romney Marsh and an independent councillor for New Romney; in opposition were six Greens, six Labour councillors and two Lib Dems. Most of the Green vote came out of Hythe, and the Green Party had won the Kent county council seat for Hythe in 2013. The Green county councillor was re-elected for the redrawn Hythe West division — which includes Dymchurch — in 2017, before losing it to the Conservatives’ Andy Weatherhead in 2021.
The selection of Andy Weatherhead as the winning Conservative candidate for Hythe West proved to be an expensive mistake for the party. In November 2022 the anti-fascist group Hope Not Hate revealed that Weatherhead had previously been a member of a far-right group called New British Union, providing photographs of him attending their conference and a rally outside the Greek Embassy in 2013; on both occasions he was wearing a black shirt with fascist insignia. The Conservatives immediately suspended Weatherhead from the party, and he resigned from Kent county council and from Dymchurch parish council a week later.
However, by the time the resulting by-election came around in March 2023 Weatherhead had decided that the best course of action was for him to seek re-election from his constituents as an independent candidate, on the grounds that he was never formally a New British Union member and his political views had moved on from fascism since then. It didn’t work. The Hythe West by-election was gained by the Green Party rather easily, with Weatherhead finishing in fifth and last place with 6.6%. Just above him on 8.6% was UKIP district councillor Ian Meyers, who stood as an independent candidate although he was still officially a UKIP member of the council.
Two months later, the 2023 Folkestone and Hythe council elections clearly defeated the Conservative-UKIP-Independent coalition running the council. The Green Party finished as the largest group on the council with 11 seats, Labour won 10, the Conservatives just five (with the council leader losing his seat), and independents and the Lib Dems two each. A Green-Lib Dem minority coalition has been formed, meaning that Folkestone and Hythe is one of eight English local councils with a Green Party leader.
In Romney Marsh ward, UKIP councillor Terry Mullard retired and Ian Meyers, standing as an independent candidate, was defeated. Conservative candidate Liz Grant finished top of the poll with 647 votes, with the ward’s second seat going to Labour’s Tony Cooper on 534 votes — just two votes ahead of the second Conservative candidate Tony Hills. It was a rather fragmented result, with shares of the vote working out as 30% for the Conservatives, 24% for Labour, 22% for independents (most of which went to Andy Weatherhead and Ian Meyers) and 16% for the Green Party. Weatherhead did get his seat on Dymchurch parish council back.
There aren’t all that many Conservative seats that come up in local by-elections these days, which says a bit about how far the party’s local government base has sunk. By coincidence most of the Tory local by-election defences in the first quarter of 2024 have been scheduled for this week, giving a rather unusual menu of six Conservative defences in eight polls.
One of those Conservative defences is the closely-fought ward of Romney Marsh, after Liz Grant handed in her notice in January. The party’s defending candidate is Tony Hills, who lost out here by just two votes last year: he is the county councillor for Romney Marsh division, which covers St Mary’s Bay and the inland villages of this ward, and in the 2019–23 term he was a Folkestone and Hythe councillor for the neighbouring ward of Walland and Denge Marsh. The Labour candidate is Dymchurch parish councillor Chrissie Cooper, who is married to the ward’s current Labour councillor Tony Cooper. No fewer than four independent candidates have been nominated: former UKIP councillor Ian Meyers is standing again after losing his seat here in 2023, Dymchurch parish councillor Dougie Young also contested this ward in 2023 (finishing ninth and last with just 60 votes), Dave Evans is a member of St Mary in the Marsh parish council which covers St Mary’s Bay, and Paul Peacock is a former Conservative district councillor and former Mayor of Hythe. Standing for the Greens is Malcolm Watkinson, a businessman whose firm makes equipment for the water and renewable energy industries. The Lib Dems’ Matt Horrox and Reform UK’s Kim Rye complete a very long ballot paper of nine candidates.
Parliamentary constituency: Folkestone and Hythe
Parliamentary constituency (from next general election): Folkestone and Hythe
Kent county council division: Hythe West (Dymchurch parish), Romney Marsh (Burmarsh, Newchurch and St Mary in the Marsh parishes)
ONS Travel to Work Area: Folkestone and Dover
Postcode districts: CT21, TN25, TN26, TN28, TN29
Chrissie Cooper (Lab)
Dave Evans (Ind)
Matt Horrox (LD)
Tony Hills (C)
Ian Meyers (Ind)
Paul Peacock (Ind)
Kim Rye (Reform UK)
Malcolm Watkinson (Grn)
Dougie Young (Ind)
May 2023 result C 647/532 Lab 534/481 Ind 491/451/60 Grn 357 LD 161
May 2019 result UKIP 851/810 C 630/553 Grn 552 Lab 309/285 LD 272
May 2015 result UKIP 1375/1261 C 1343/1234 Lab 516/420 Ind 287/231 LD 216
Previous results in detail
Calne Chilvester and Abberd
Wiltshire council; caused by the death of Conservative councillor Tony Trotman.
We now cross over into Wessex to reach a small Wiltshire town with a long history. In 978 St Dunstan, who was then archbishop of Canterbury and had performed the first modern coronation (of Edgar) five years earlier, was trying to reorganise the English church to increase the influence of monks. This trampled on the rights of landowners, and matters came to a head with a series of meetings of the Witangemot, the council which advised King Edward the Martyr. The second of these meetings was held on the upper floor of a two-storey building in Calne; during the meeting the floor gave way, and everybody in the room except Dunstan (who clung to a beam) plunged to the ground floor below. Several attendees were killed; legend has it that they were all opponents of Dunstan’s plan.
Calne itself can be found about fifteen miles south-west of Swindon, on lower ground to the west of the Wessex downs. It’s on the A4, the old road between London and Bristol, and as such benefited a lot from passing trade. For many years this was a major centre of the Wiltshire pork and ham industry, with the town’s pork processing factory originally taking Irish pigs which were too weak to complete the journey to London.
This was one of the ancient boroughs which, until the First Reform Act, were entitled to send two members to Parliament. In practice Calne was a pocket borough controlled by the Marquess of Lansdowne, whose country seat was and still is the nearby stately home of Bowood. This led to controversy over Calne’s representation at the passing of the 1832 reform, which happened while the 3rd Marquess was a member of the Cabinet as Lord President of the Council; a misinterpretation of the 1821 census had led to Calne being originally proposed to keep two MPs when other boroughs of a similar size were scheduled to lose a seat. In its final form the 1832 Act did indeed knock Calne from two MPs down to one, and the town was eventually disenfranchised altogether in 1885.
In more recent years Calne has been a favourite target for Boundary Commission tinkering. In 2010 the town was transferred from the Devizes constituency into North Wiltshire, which has been represented since 1997 by Conservative backbencher James Gray. Gray’s seat will be broken up at the next general election, when Calne will be transferred into the Chippenham constituency: this is currently the seat of cabinet minister Michelle Donelan, who is the Secretary of State for science, information and technology, but Donelan will seek re-election for her next term of office in Melksham and Devizes. So Calne looks likely to get a new MP fairly soon.
The town is represented by four Wiltshire councillors, with Chilvester and Abberd division covering the area immediately to the north of the town centre. It had been represented since the creation of the modern Wiltshire council in 2009 by Tony Trotman, who also served on Calne town council for twenty years including four terms as mayor of the town. Before entering politics Trotman had run an ironmongers shop in Calne for 46 years. He passed away at the end of the November at the age of 76. Trotman was run fairly close by the Lib Dems at his first election here in 2009 but then turned Chilvester and Abberd into a safe Conservative ward; his last re-election in 2021 was by a 47–27 margin.
Big shoes to fill for the defending Conservative candidate Taylor Clarke, a young man whose favourite biscuit (according to whocanivotefor.co.uk) is chocolate hobnobs. The Liberal Democrat candidate is the current mayor of Calne, Robert Macnaughton. Also standing are Nick Maslen for Labour and Hugh Pilcher-Clayton for the Green Party. Calne and the two vacancies in the next section are the only results this week which are expected to come through overnight, so don’t wait up for the other five counts.
Parliamentary constituency: North Wiltshire
Parliamentary constituency (from next general election): Chippenham
ONS Travel to Work Area: Swindon
Postcode district: SN11
Taylor Clarke (C)
Robert Macnaughton (LD)
Nick Maslen (Lab)
Hugh Pilcher-Clayton (Grn)
May 2021 result C 574 LD 332 Lab 179 Grn 136
Previous results in detail
Farnham Common and Burnham Beeches; and
Hazlemere
Buckinghamshire council; caused respectively by the resignation of David Anthony and the death of Ron Gaffney, both of whom were Conservative councillors.
Three of this week’s local by-elections take place in the county of Buckinghamshire. Of these, the two Conservative defences are in the area of Buckinghamshire council, which assumed sole responsibility for local government in most of the county in 2020. Effectively it was a takeover by the county council.
This has meant more remote local government for the two Buckinghamshire council areas polling today. Particularly so in the case of Farnham Common and Burnham Beeches, which lies immediately to the north of Slough. This is centred on the woodland of Burnham Beeches, which is owned by the Corporation of London and maintained by them as public land. It’s a popular filming location, thanks to its proximity to a number of major London film studios. The main population centres here are Farnham Common, which lies on the main road from Slough to Beaconsfield, and the northern half of Burnham which is effectively a suburb of Slough — but if the locals ever hear you say that it’ll be pitchforks at dawn.
Farnham Common is a rather exclusive area associated with a whole load of celebrities. A little more down the social scale is Hazlemere, a large village in the Chiltern hills which has effectively become a north-eastern suburb of High Wycombe. Hazlemere has only been a parish of its own since 1987, reflecting major population growth towards the end of the last century. Its secondary school is named after Sir William Ramsay, who won the 1904 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his discovery of the noble gases; Ramsay lived in Hazlemere for many years until his death in 1916, commuting from here to his laboratory at UCL.
The Farnham Common and Burnham Beeches ward is part of the Beaconsfield parliamentary seat, which has voted Conservative at every election since its formation in 1974. From 1997 its MP was Dominic Grieve, whose 2010 vote share of 61% was the second-highest Conservative vote in the country at that election; only William Hague performed better. Grieve became Attorney General in the coalition government, before serving as chair of the Commons Intelligence and Security Committee from 2015 to 2019. He was kicked out of the Conservative Party in 2019 for his opposition to Brexit and sought re-election in Beaconsfield that year as an independent candidate, polling 29% and finishing in second place.
Hazlemere is currently included with the Wycombe parliamentary seat, which voted Labour in 1945 and 1950 but never since. Wycombe will be on the Labour target list for the next general election, but the Labour canvassers are likely to leave Hazlemere alone: the forthcoming boundary changes transfer Hazlemere into the Chesham and Amersham parliamentary seat, which was gained by the Liberal Democrats in a 2021 by-election. The notional results from 2019 here show Chesham and Amersham to be a very long way down the Lib Dem target list, partly because they can’t take account of the by-election result and partly because the Chesham and Amersham seat also gains the town of Gerrards Cross from the Beaconsfield seat: the Lib Dems didn’t contest Beaconsfield in 2019, instead endorsing Dominic Grieve’s independent candidacy.
The two Buckinghamshire wards up for election today were originally drawn up for the 2013 Buckinghamshire county council elections, and then reused in the 2021 election with an increase from one to three county councillors each. Farnham Common and Burnham Beeches is safely Conservative, with a 51–32 lead over the Lib Dems in 2021. This also reflects previous results for the now-abolished South Bucks district, in which Burnham Beeches ward was normally left uncontested.
Hazlemere ward turned in a split result in 2021, with two seats going to the Conservatives and one to independent candidate Ed Gemmell; shares of the vote were 42% for the Conservatives, 36% for Gemmell and 10% for the Liberal Democrats. Gemmell subsequently founded the Climate Party and he stood on that ticket in the Uxbridge and South Ruislip parliamentary by-election last year, polling just 49 votes (0.2%) and finishing 15th out of 17 candidates. The two Hazlemere wards on the former Wycombe council were normally Conservative in recent years, although the Lib Dems did win a by-election in Hazlemere South in November 2011.
The Hazlemere by-election follows the death in November of Ron Gaffney, who was with Wycombe council for almost its entire existence: he worked on Wycombe’s finance and accounting team from 1973 until his retirement in 2006, then sat on that council for Hazlemere North ward from 2007 until abolition in 2020. The Farnham Common and Burnham Beeches poll is to replace David Anthony, who had represented wards containing Farnham Common on South Bucks council since 2011 and had served on that council’s cabinet.
Defending the Farnham Common and Burnham Beeches by-election for the Conservatives is David Moore, who sits on Farnham Royal parish council which covers Farnham Common. The Lib Dem candidate Carol Linton is the vice-chair of Burnham parish council. Also standing here is Alexa Collins for Labour.
In Hazlemere the defending Conservative candidate is local resident Steven Roy. Leigh Casey is standing as an independent candidate on a Gemmellite ticket; he is a firefighter and Hazlemere parish councillor. The Lib Dem candidate is Mark Titterington, who from 2015 to 2020 was a Conservative member of Chiltern district council for the neighbouring Holmer Green ward; he contested Chesham as a Lib Dem in the 2021 Buckinghamshire elections. Labour’s Adam Dale completes the Hazlemere ballot paper.
Farnham Common and Burnham Beeches
Parliamentary constituency: Beaconsfield
Parliamentary constituency (from next general election): Beaconsfield
ONS Travel to Work Area: Slough and Heathrow
Postcode districts: SL1, SL2
Alexa Collins (Lab)
Carol Linton (LD)
David Moore (C)
May 2021 result C 1421/1384/1372 LD 885/819/554 Lab 386/292 Reform UK 99
May 2017 county council result C 1476 LD 463 Lab 149 UKIP 140
May 2013 county council result C 1114 UKIP 541 LD 228
Previous results in detail
Hazlemere
Parliamentary constituency: Wycombe
Parliamentary constituency (from next general election): Chesham and Amersham
ONS Travel to Work Area: High Wycombe and Aylesbury
Postcode districts: HP10, HP15
Leigh Casey (Ind)
Adam Dale (Lab)
Steven Roy (C)
Mark Titterington (LD)
May 2021 result C 1624/1373/1156 Ind 1380 LD 371/256 Lab 354/314/298 Freedom Alliance 124
May 2017 county council result C 1632 LD 324 Lab 254 UKIP 190
May 2013 county council result C 976 UKIP 784 Lab 191 LD 173
Previous results in detail
Loughton and Shenley
Milton Keynes council, Buckinghamshire; caused by the resignation of Labour councillor Brigid McBride.
This week’s only Labour defence comes in the New City of Milton Keynes, where the Loughton and Shenley ward runs south-west from Milton Keynes Central railway station. Loughton is an old village which has been swallowed up by the growth of Milton Keynes, Great Holm is a typical MK residential area in the ward’s northern corner, while Shenley Church End lies on Watling Street (or, as locals call it, the V4) and includes the site of a mediaeval fort, the “Toot”. Other residential areas within the Grid include Grange Farm, Medbourne and Oakhill.
Features of this ward include the large Woodhill prison and the associated Oakhill Secure Training Centre for child prisoners, the National Badminton Centre where the GB and England badminton squads are trained, and the National Bowl, an open-air amphitheatre which opened in 1979 with a capacity of up to 65,000. The National Bowl is a favourite venue for rock band tours in the summer months, and a number of its performances have been recorded for posterity: groups from Queen and Status Quo to the Prodigy and Linkin Park have had gigs at the National Bowl released on home media.
The Parliamentary Boundary Commission have often struggled to keep pace with the explosive growth of Milton Keynes, which at the next general election will expand from its current two parliamentary seats to two-and-a-bit. This will mean that the current Milton Keynes South seat, which includes Loughton and Shenley, will be divided into two new seats. The current Conservative MP Iain Stewart, who has represented Milton Keynes South since 2010 and is the chair of the Commons transport committee, will contest the new seat of Buckingham and Bletchley which is projected to be much stronger for the Conservatives than Milton Keynes Central. So there will soon be a new MP for Loughton and Shenley ward: it’s going into Milton Keynes Central, which is definitely on the Labour target list for the next general election.
Recent election results in Milton Keynes have been encouraging for Labour, who currently run the New City in coalition with the Lib Dems but have a good chance of taking overall control of the council in May. Loughton and Shenley has generally been a tight marginal ward since its 2014 creation, with Labour’s gain of the ward in 2023 marking the first time either the Conservatives or Labour had won a full slate of councillors here. Shares of the vote last year were 48% for Labour and 39% for the Conservatives.
This by-election follows the resignation of the 2023 winner Brigid McBride, who was appointed OBE in 2015 for services to UK digital transformation: at the time she was digital director (London) of HMRC. She stood down from Milton Keynes council last month on health grounds, eight months into her term of office.
Defending this close by-election for Labour is Leo Montague, a senior manager at Marks and Spencer who has previously been a Milton Keynes councillor — for the Liberal Democrats, in whose interest he represented Monkston ward from 2019 to 2023. The Conservatives have reselected Rajeev Sharma who was their losing candidate in the ward last year; arachnophobes may wish to be aware that he is listed by Companies House as a director of a company called Hundred Spiders Ltd. Also standing are Garrath Green for the Liberal Democrats; Timothy Lee for the Green Party; and independent candidate and West Bletchley parish councillor Ray Brady, who was the prospective Reform UK parliamentary candidate for Milton Keynes Central until he got into the local press last month for Definitely Not Racist social media posts.
Parliamentary constituency: Milton Keynes South
Parliamentary constituency (from next general election): Milton Keynes Central
ONS Travel to Work Area: Milton Keynes
Postcode districts: MK4, MK5, MK8, MK13
Ray Brady (Ind)
Garrath Green (LD)
Timothy Lee (Grn)
Leo Montague (Lab)
Rajeev Sharma (C)
May 2023 result Lab 1652 C 1315 LD 264 Grn 178
May 2022 result Lab 2145 C 1564 LD 232 Grn 194
May 2021 result Lab 2106 C 1836 LD 198 Grn 195
May 2019 result C 1609 Lab 1573 Grn 320 LD 302
May 2018 result C 1887 Lab 1683 LD 240 Grn 179
May 2016 result Lab 1997 C 1618 LD 240
May 2015 result C 3283 Lab 2026 UKIP 721 LD 448 Grn 392
May 2014 result Lab 1353/1338/1126 C 1321/1283/1282 UKIP 716/607/598 Grn 405 LD 233/228/180
Previous results in detail
Bakewell; and
Norbury
Derbyshire Dales council; caused respectively by the resignation of Mark Wakeman and the death of Tony Morley, both of whom were Conservative councillors.
We now travel north for two by-elections in some gorgeous Derbyshire countryside. Let’s leave the best till last and start with Norbury ward, which covers eleven parishes in the countryside between Ashbourne and Uttoxeter. These are tiny villages: the ward’s largest population centre is Marston Montgomery, with 383 voters on the roll. Norbury itself lies close to the River Dove, which here is the border with Staffordshire.
If Norbury ward is obscure, Bakewell is definitely not. This is the largest town within the Peak District National Park, located on the Derbyshire Wye downstream from Buxton. It has a culinary claim to fame as the home of the Bakewell pudding, a form of jam pastry dessert which is slightly different from the better-known Bakewell tart. There are three shops in Bakewell which will all sell you what they claim to be the original pudding; which, if any, of those claims is true is essentially unprovable. The Bakewell ward isn’t just the town itself; it also takes in the nearby villages of Ashford in the Water and Over Haddon.
Both of these wards are within the Derbyshire Dales local government district, which is based in Matlock, and the Derbyshire Dales parliamentary seat. This is Derbyshire’s safest Conservative seat; Derbyshire Dales and its predecessor seat of West Derbyshire have been represented by Tory MPs continuously since 1950. Previous representatives here include a number of generations and relatives of the Dukes of Devonshire, the political commentator Matthew Parris and the former coalminer and Conservative cabinet member Patrick McLoughlin. The current MP Sarah Dines, who took her seat over from McLoughlin in 2019, enjoys a majority of over 17,000 votes; the Boundary Commission have essentially left Derbyshire alone in their recent review and her seat sees only minor changes for the next general election.
Derbyshire county council is under Conservative control following the 2021 elections. Norbury ward contributes to a large Conservative lead in the Ashbourne county division. The Bakewell county division was close between the Conservatives and Labour in 2021; this division is much larger than Bakewell ward and stretches north from the town to take in Sheffield commuter territory in the Hope Valley, which has swung quite strongly towards Labour in recent local elections.
The Derbyshire Dales district, which is based in Matlock like the county council, is quite another matter. This went into no overall control in 2023 after 24 years of Conservative majority; the Lib Dems are now the largest party on the council, and they have formed a traffic-light coalition with Labour and the Greens.
Bakewell and Norbury wards both remained in the Tory column last year. In Bakewell the vote shares were 46% for the Conservatives, 24% for Labour and 14% for the Green Party; however, a lot of the Conservative share was a massive personal vote for Mark Wakeman who polled almost twice as many votes as his running-mate. With this by-election being prompted by Wakeman’s resignation after five years in office, this might not be quite as safe a Conservative ward as it looks on paper.
Norbury ward contains some of the most Tory countryside around, and Tony Morley’s 2023 lead of 67–17 over Labour was an unusually low score for the party. Morley had served on the council since 2015 and was the council chairman in 2019–20. He passed away in September, so this by-election has taken quite a long time to be called.
The Norbury by-election has a ballot paper of four candidates — not a bad effort in a ward which often used to be left to the Conservatives without a contest. The Tories’ defending candidate is Sue Bull, a former district councillor for Ashbourne North ward who lost her seat last year. The Labour candidate is Bob Allen, who gives an address within the ward in the village of Yeaveley. Also standing are John Hill for the Green Party and Robin Shirtcliffe for the Liberal Democrats.
In Bakewell the defending Conservative candidate is Richard Walsh, who has been a losing candidate in the last three Derbyshire Dales elections (most recently in Darley Dale ward) but might finally get his chance to win here. Labour have selected Bob Butcher. The Green candidate is Nicola Peltell, who is an advanced nurse practitioner. Also standing are Claire Cadogan for the Lib Dems, former Dragon’s Den entrepreneur and antivaxxer Rachel Elnaugh-Love as an independent candidate, and Lesley Crosby for Reform UK. Polling day is 22nd February — the date on which Bakewell’s last bank, NatWest, is due to close.
Bakewell
Parliamentary constituency: Derbyshire Dales
Parliamentary constituency (from next general election): Derbyshire Dales
Derbyshire county council division: Bakewell
ONS Travel to Work Area: Chesterfield
Postcode districts: DE4, DE45
Bob Butcher (Lab)
Claire Cadogan (LD)
Lesley Crosby (Reform UK)
Rachel Elnaugh-Love (Ind)
Nicola Peltell (Grn)
Richard Walsh (C)
May 2023 result C 1011/581 Lab 526 Grn 307 LD 178/166 Ind 175
Previous results in detail
Norbury
Parliamentary constituency: Derbyshire Dales
Parliamentary constituency (from next general election): Derbyshire Dales
Derbyshire county council division: Ashbourne
ONS Travel to Work Area: Derby
Postcode districts: DE6, ST14
Bob Allen (Lab)
Sue Bull (C)
John Hill (Grn)
Robin Shirtcliffe (LD)
May 2023 result C 492 Lab 123 Grn 116
Previous results in detail
Jedburgh and District
Scottish Borders council; caused by the resignation of Scottish National Party councillor Pam Brown.
We finish for the week by taking the main road up to the mountain pass at Carter Bar, which marks the border between England and Scotland, and then descending into the valley of the Jed Water. Here we find the town of Jedburgh, whose importance to the Borders’ road network (it’s a primary destination for road signs as far as away as Newcastle and Edinburgh) belies its population of slightly under 4,000.
This is a classic border town, as the lyrics of the local song Jetharts Here make clear. A succession of border raids from the English has left Jedburgh Abbey, an impressive structure which had been patronised by a number of Scottish kings, in ruins. Alexander III married his queen Yolande of Dreux here in 1285, the year before his death plunged Scotland into a succession crisis; Yolande subsequently miscarried Alexander’s posthumous child, and his three-year-old granddaughter Margaret, the Maid of Norway, died before she could be crowned. Jedburgh Abbey itself had been founded by the Bishop of Lindisfarne in the 9th century, before Scotland and England existed as distinct countries; at the time it had the Anglo-Saxon name Jedworth, and the town has had many different spellings of both of its names recorded over the centuries. A list which probably includes
It’s impossible for your columnist to talk about Jedburgh without mentioning Eric Davidson, who was born here in 1937. He was brought to England by National Service in the RAF, made his career in Greater Manchester as a policeman, and was also plugged into a huge number of voluntary networks in his adopted Bury. Davidson was appointed MBE in 2008 for voluntary service to the community in Lancashire, and was a Deputy Lieutenant of Greater Manchester. I knew Colonel Eric as president of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers (Lancashire) Band, in which I am privileged to serve as a musician; he founded the band in 1997 and continued to run it up to his death in 2022. He never forgot or allowed anyone else to forget his roots in the Scottish Borders, and as a result I have played two gigs in Jedburgh with the band: one in the town hall, the other in the Royal British Legion club.
The Jedburgh RBL club hosts a memorial to of one of the most important Second World War heroes you have probably never heard of. Lt Tony Fasson grew up here before making his career in the Royal Navy. In 1941 he was assigned to the destroyer HMS Petard, which engaged a German submarine off Port Said on 30th October 1942. Depth charges forced U-559 to the surface, and its crew abandoned ship with the submarine taking on water. This didn’t deter Fasson and AB Colin Grazier, who boarded the vessel and managed to retrieve its secret codebooks. Fasson and Grazier then went back into the U-boat for more — at which point the submarine sank without warning, taking them with it to the bottom of the Mediterranean. Both of them were posthumously awarded the George Cross “for outstanding bravery and steadfast devotion to duty in the face of danger”, a citation which was about all that could be said given the top-secret significance of what they had done: the codebooks which Tony Fasson and Colin Grazier retrieved from U-559 enabled Bletchley Park to break into German naval radio traffic, and their bravery may well have shortened the Second World War.
The border wars between England and Scotland in an earlier era led to the abandonment of the town of Roxburgh, which gave its name to an old Scottish county but of which nothing exists today other than some ruined castle ramparts. Jedburgh took over as the county town of Roxburghshire after the fifteenth century, and the county council met here until 1930 when its offices moved north to Newtown St Boswells.
Newtown St Boswells is now the home of Scottish Borders council, which covers an area that was once four counties: Berwickshire, Roxburgh, Selkirkshire and Peebles-shire. These counties covered some very pretty countryside but had a very low population, and from 1918 Roxburghshire was no longer large enough for an MP of its own. It’s currently part of the Westminster seat of Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk, which has been in Conservative hands since 2017; the local MP, John Lamont, is currently a junior minister at the Scotland Office.
Lamont has sat in Westminster since 2017, but he had previously represented the area in the Scottish Parliament for ten years as MSP for what is now the seat of Ettrick, Roxburgh and Berwickshire. This is now represented by Rachael Hamilton, who is from a Welsh farming family and is the Scottish Conservatives’ shadow cabinet member for rural affairs and islands. In the 2021 Holyrood election Hamilton won over 50% of the vote here against competition from the SNP’s Paul Wheelhouse, who lost his seat as a regional MSP at the election. The Labour candidate, who just about saved his deposit, was Ian Davidson who served for many years as an MP for Glasgow but is originally from Jedburgh. Whether he’s any relation of Eric Davidson I don’t know.
Scottish local elections are run under proportional representation, and none of the 29 councils on the mainland have an overall majority for any party. The Scottish Borders is one of five Scottish councils with a Conservative leader, who presides over a coalition of Conservative and independent councillors; the 2022 local elections returned 14 Conservative councillors, 9 for the Scottish National Party, 7 independents, 3 Lib Dems and a Green councillor.
Jedburgh and District is consistently one of the strongest Conservative wards in Scotland. The Tories have topped the poll in all four local elections since the ward was created in 2007, and polled an absolute majority of the first preferences in both 2017 and 2022. Shares of the vote here in 2022 were 50% for the Conservatives, 23% for the SNP and 15% for an independent candidate, with the three seats splitting two to the Conservatives and one to the SNP.
The Scottish National Party are on a losing streak in Scottish by-elections which has now been going on for over a year, and that losing streak doesn’t look likely to end here. Which is problematic, given that they are the defending party here in a ward where they polled only 23% two years ago. Pam Brown, who took the ward’s SNP seat over in 2022, stepped down in November on health grounds. The dates for Scottish local by-elections are set by the returning officer but have to be held within three months of the vacancy occurring, meaning that today was the last possible date for this poll to be held.
Defending for the SNP is Phil Dixon, who appears to be fighting his first election campaign. The Conservatives have selected John Bathgate, who was the strong independent candidate for this ward in 2022; he polled 15% of the first preferences and finished as runner-up. No new independent has come forward, so the other candidates are Charles Strang for the Greens; James Clarke for an outfit which your columnist hasn’t previously heard of, the Scottish Eco-Federalists; Ray Georgeson for the Lib Dems; and Kaymarie Hughes for Labour.
Coming up next week, we have three Lib Dem defences in five local by-elections — and the Andrew’s Previews take on the Rochdale parliamentary by-election. You will not want to miss that.
Westminster constituency: Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk
Westminster constituency (from next general election): Berwickshire, Roxburgh and Selkirk
Holyrood constituency: Ettrick, Roxburgh and Berwickshire
ONS Travel to Work Area: Hawick and Kelso
Postcode districts: TD5, TD6, TD8, TD9
John Bathgate (C)
James Clarke (Scottish Eco-Federalists)
Phil Dixon (SNP)
Ray Georgeson (LD)
Kaymarie Hughes (Lab)
Charles Strang (Grn)
May 2022 first preferences C 1764 SNP 809 Ind 529 Grn 250 Ind 102 Alba 53
May 2017 first preferences C 2120 SNP 755 Ind 600 Grn 171 Lab 119 Ind 70
May 2012 first preferences C 1115 SNP 759 Ind 549 LD 388 Borders Party 258 Lab 169
May 2007 first preferences C 1889 SNP 877 LD 716 Borders Party 316 Ind 87
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 (link). You can also support future previews by donating to the Local Elections Archive Project (link).
Andrew Teale
