Previewing the Keppel ward, Rotherham by-election of 26th January 2023
“All the right votes, but not necessarily in the right order”
Just one by-election on 26th January 2023:
Keppel
Rotherham council, South Yorkshire; caused by the resignation of Rotherham Democratic Party councillor Paul Hague.
Q15. Which king was married to Eleanor of Aquitaine?
A: Henry I
B: Henry II
C: Richard I
D: Henry V
That question was asked on 20th November 2000 to Judith Keppel, a garden designer from Fulham who was reportedly struggling for money. At the time, ITV were running a get-rich-quick scheme called Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, which promised a top prize of One Million Pounds, Cheque, for correctly answering fifteen multiple-choice general knowledge questions. Sounds easy, doesn’t it?
Well, not so. It turns out that correctly answering fifteen multiple-choice general knowledge questions isn’t as easy at it sounds. In the UK, the top prize has only been paid out six times: to Judith Keppel, David Edwards, Robert Brydges, Pat Gibson, Ingram Wilcox and Donald Fear. Between them, their winnings are just enough to cover Nadhim Zahawi’s tax bill.
Judith Keppel, as stated, went on to answer the above question correctly and become the first winner of the show’s top prize. Following this, she had a stint of 19 years as one of the original professional quizzers on the game show Eggheads, which started in 2003 on BBC2 and transferred to Channel 5 a few years ago. Keppel is now in her 80s, and she retired from the show last year.
Jackpot questions on Millionaire are rarely short of controversy (cough), and Keppel’s win was no exception. Eyebrows were raised at the fact that her million-pound win was scheduled by ITV in direct competition with the series finale of the BBC sitcom One Foot in the Grave, and also at the fact that Judith is a descendant of the people in her final question, Eleanor of Aquitaine and her second husband. (Eleanor had previously married King Louis VII of France, but that didn’t make it to the list of possible answers on the screen.)
In truth, the second criticism doesn’t have much force. If you’re living in the UK and you’re of European descent, then there’s a good chance you’re descended from Eleanor of Aquitaine (and her second husband) too. Let’s do the maths. You have two parents, who have two parents each, and so on; so, if there are no relationships between cousins in your family tree, then your number of ancestors at each generation back will be 2 raised to the power of the generation number.
One person whom we know for sure is descended from Eleanor of Aquitaine (and her second husband) is King Charles III, who is 27 generations down the line from Eleanor. This implies that Eleanor is one of 134,217,728 27th-generation ancestors of Charles III, which is clearly an implausible number: it’s twice the current UK population, which is an order of magnitude higher than the number of people who were living in England then. Clearly there must be a lot of cousin relationships in Charles’ and your family tree; and in the case of King Charles, you don’t need to go far back to find one. Charles III’s mother and father were both descended from Queen Victoria.
Indeed, you only need to go 37 generations back before the number of possible ancestors for you exceeds the number of humans who have ever lived (a figure estimated at around 117,000 million). Counting 37 generations back from Charles III brings you to Alfred the Great. The sheer number of paths mean that there’s likely to be a line of descent between pretty much any living Briton of European stock and pretty much any European historical figure who had surviving children, as long as you go far back enough. The difficulty is finding that line of descent.
In the case of Judith Keppel, we can prove her descent from Eleanor (and her second husband) without much difficulty, because the wider Keppel family have been in the public eye for centuries. In England the line goes back to Arnold Joost van Keppel, who came from a prominent Dutch family and was a favourite of William III. When the Prince of Orange came to England in the Glorious Revolution, van Keppel went with him and became a major figure at the king’s court. In 1697 William III awarded him the hereditary title of 1st Earl of Albermarle. Arnold’s son Willem van Keppel, the 2nd Earl, married Lady Anne Lennox who was a granddaughter of Charles II via his illegitimate son Charles Lennox, duke of Richmond; as such all of the 2nd Earl’s descendants are also descendants of Eleanor of Aquitaine (and her second husband).
Judith is a granddaughter of Walter Keppel, the 9th Earl of Albermarle, who did his bit for local politics. In 1919 Viscount Bury, as he was then known, was elected to the London County Council as a Municipal Reform councillor for Wandsworth Central. He had previously been the losing Conservative candidate for Altrincham in the January 1910 general election.
One thing the Keppel family have been known for through the ages is mistresses to the Royal Family. Alice Keppel, a long-time mistress of King Edward VII, was a daughter-in-law of the 7th Earl of Albermarle. Alice’s great-granddaughter has continued the tradition of being a royal mistress into the present day, as she is now Queen Camilla.
Many of the earls of Albermarle down the centuries have made their mark in both politics and the military. For example, let’s consider the career of the third Earl, George Keppel. When your columnist did Mastermind a few years ago taking questions on the subject of the eighteenth-century military commander James Wolfe, George Keppel (then known as Viscount Bury) came up in the research. He was commander of the 20th Foot in the 1740s and 1750s while Wolfe was second-in-command, and frankly didn’t get a very good writeup in Wolfe’s biographies. During this period Bury was also a member of parliament, being returned as MP for Chichester in 1746.
Viscount Bury succeeded to his father’s titles and entered the House of Lords as the 3rd Earl of Albermarle in 1754, and the resulting Chichester by-election returned his younger brother Augustus Keppel. Both Albermarle and Augustus had prominent military careers, and they hit their own jackpot during the Seven Years War with the decisive British victory at the 1762 Siege of Havana. Albermarle was the commander of the British land forces in that action, while Augustus was the naval second-in-command. The prize money they won went a long way towards paying off the debts accrued by their father, the 2nd Earl, who was a notorious spendthrift.
It was around this point that the Rockingham Whigs started to become important in British politics. This was a Whig group hostile to George III, which was centred around two-time Prime Minister Charles Watson-Wentworth, the second Marquess of Rockingham.
(Wine gums, anyone?)
The Keppels were major supporters of Rockingham, so they were out of political favour during the American Revolutionary War while the British government was led by Lord North.
During that time, in January 1778 Augustus Keppel was promoted to admiral and given the task of commanding the Western Squadron, guarding the English Channel and approaches from its base in Plymouth. With the French having by now entered the war on the side of the American revolutionaries, this was likely to be a tough assignment. Admiral Sir Hugh Palliser, with whom Keppel was not on good terms, was one of his subordinate commanders.
In July 1778 the Western Squadron engaged the French at the First Battle of Ushant. It went badly for the British, partly due to Keppel’s tactics and partly due to Palliser failing to obey orders. The battle ended indecisively. No ships were lost on either side, but the British came off worse in terms of damage and casualties.
The battle resulted in a furious row between Keppel and Palliser, which got completely out of hand by spilling over into Parliament: both of them were MPs. Keppel ended up before a court-martial, which acquitted him of the charge of misconduct and neglect of duty. He resigned from the Navy, but got a parting shot in 1782 when Lord Rockingham came to power for his second term as Prime Minister. Rockingham raised Augustus Keppel to the peerage as the first and only Viscount Keppel, and gave him the job of First Lord of the Admiralty.
That wasn’t the only thing that Rockingham did for Augustus Keppel. The Marquess of Rockingham was a very wealthy man with a large estate at Wentworth Woodhouse near Rotherham. The Wentworth park has a number of massive follies scattered around it, depending on the taste and budget of the aristocrat in charge at the time. One of those follies is Keppel’s Column, a 115-foot column erected in 1780 to commemorate the acquittal of Admiral Augustus Keppel. Keppel’s Column still stands today at the southern end of the Wentworth estate, close to the main road between Rotherham and Chapeltown. It’s a landmark of South Yorkshire, and it’s recently been refurbished and reopened to the public following a grant from the Culture Recovery Fund.
Since 2004 Keppel’s Column has given its name to the Keppel electoral ward of Rotherham council. This covers the deprived Kimberworth Park area at the north-western corner of Rotherham’s built-up area, but also extends to the mining village of Thorpe Hesley next to the M1 motorway. With its easy connection to the motorway, Thorpe Hesley is turning into something of a commuter centre.
Keppel ward, and the Thorpe Hesley ward which preceded it, were solidly Labour for the first forty years of the modern Rotherham council’s existence, with the sole exception of a Lib Dem win in Thorpe Hesley ward in 2000. Then the wheels came off the council’s Labour administration in spectacular fashion, mainly due to the uncovering of massive failings by the council in dealing with the Rotherham child exploitation scandal. Following critical reports by Baroness Jay and Dame Louise Casey, central government effectively sacked the Labour council in 2015 by sending the Commissioners in to take over all of Rotherham’s executive functions. A whole-council election was ordered for 2016.
There had already been an effect on the town’s election results. The Labour MP for Rotherham, Denis MacShane, had been forced to resign in 2012 following a scandal over his parliamentary expenses; Labour held the resulting Rotherham by-election against a strong second place for the UK Independence Party who polled 21.7%, at the time their highest ever vote share in a parliamentary election. The British National Party also finished in third place and easily saved their deposit.
At the following Rotherham council elections in 2014, UKIP topped the poll across the borough with 44% of the vote, against 41% for Labour, and they won ten of the 21 seats up for election.
This populist wave was nothing new, as we can see from looking at previous election results in Keppel ward which is part of the Rotherham constituency. Although this ward had been consistently Labour from its 2004 creation to 2012, that disguises a number of close results and freak vote splits. In 2004 Labour’s Ian Barron had won the ward’s third and final seat eleven votes ahead of the Lib Dems and sixteen votes ahead of UKIP’s David Cutts. The BNP finished a close second in 2006 and 2007, and UKIP were a close second in 2008 and a more distant second in 2011. In 2014 David Cutts rode the populist wave to finally break through in Keppel ward after many years of trying, defeating Ian Barron by 50–38. UKIP won a second seat here in 2015 with Paul Hague being elected.
The 2016 all-out election didn’t end up changing very much in Rotherham, with Labour winning 48 seats against 14 for UKIP and an independent — almost the same as the outgoing council. All three councillors for Keppel ward were re-elected, Labour’s Margaret Clark and UKIP’s David Cutts and Paul Hague.
By the time the next Rotherham council elections came around in 2021, many things had changed in the borough politically. The council’s UKIP group had rebranded as the Rotherham Democratic Party, and the Conservatives had broken through in the borough by gaining the Rother Valley parliamentary seat at the 2019 general election. This led to major changes in the borough’s political makeup, with the Conservatives coming from nowhere to become the main opposition on the council. Labour held their majority with 32 seats, against 20 Conservatives, 3 Lib Dems, 3 Rotherham Democratic Party councillors and an independent.
Keppel ward, however, was less affected by these changes. Of the three outgoing councillors, David Cutts stood down and the other two were re-elected: Maggi Clark for Labour and Paul Hague for the Rotherham Democratic Party. Labour gained the seat vacated by Cutts, with the shares of the vote being 31% and 2 seats for Labour, 26% and 1 seat for the Rotherham Democratic Party, 24% for the Conservatives and 12% for the regionalist Yorkshire Party. Boundary changes mean that these figures are broadly but not directly comparable with previous years.
This by-election is to replace the Rotherham Democratic Party councillor Paul Hague, who resigned in November following criticism over his attendance. He had only turned up to four meetings of the council since May 2021, and had come close to being disqualified under the six-month non-attendance rule.
There is no defending Rotherham Democratic Party candidate. After holding just three seats at the May 2021 Rotherham elections, the party then performed appallingly at two by-elections to Rotherham council in December 2021, polling just six votes in Anston and Woodsetts ward and not doing much better in Aughton and Swallownest ward ward (Andrew’s Previews 2021, page 557). They have since deregistered with the Electoral Commission, although the two remaining Rotherham Democratic Party councillors still use that name for their Rotherham council group. Incidentally, both of those by-elections were Conservative losses: Labour gained one ward, the Lib Dems the other.
So we have a free-for-all! Labour hold the other two seats in Keppel ward, and they will be hoping for a gain with their candidate Carole Foster; she is a youth worker who contested Rotherham West ward in 2021, finishing as runner-up by just eight votes. Another candidate here who narrowly lost out in 2021 was Mohammed Osman Suleman of the Conservatives, who came within 26 votes of winning in Sitwell ward two years ago; Sitwell is traditionally one of the strongest Conservative areas in Rotherham, and it is noticeable that the two Conservatives who did get elected in that ward in 2021 did not, unlike Suleman, have Muslim names. Peter Key, who stood in Keppel for the Yorkshire Party in 2021, is back for another go in this by-election. Also standing are Khoulod Ghanem for the Lib Dems; independent candidate Sid Currie, who is a former Rotherham Labour councillor and also stood in Rotherham West ward in 2021; and Paul Martin for the Green Party.
The answer to the quiz question — although you probably won’t get a million pounds for knowing this — was of course Henry II. And since we’ve paid tribute to so many historical Keppels this week, it would be remiss of me to leave Rotherham without bringing you this little blast from the past.
Parliamentary constituency: Rotherham
ONS Travel to Work Area: Sheffield
Postcode districts: S35, S61
Sid Currie (Ind)
Carole Foster (Lab)
Khoulod Ghamen (LD)
Peter Key (Yorkshire Party)
Paul Martin (Grn)
Mohammed Suleman (C)
May 2021 result Lab 1204/1117/754 Rotherham Democratic Party 993/681/642 C 917 Yorkshire Party 448 LD 264
Previous results in detail
Voter ID
From May, you will need photo ID to vote in person at a parliamentary election in Great Britain or a local election in England. If you don’t have one of the accepted forms of photo ID, you can apply for a free Voter Authority Certificate or a postal vote from your local council elections office. Do it now and beat the rush.
For more information and to apply for a VAC or postal vote, go to electoralcommission.org.uk/voterid.
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
