Previewing the Stretford and Urmston by-election and the six local by-elections of 15th December 2022
“All the right votes, but not necessarily in the right order”
Seven by-elections on 15th December 2022, starting with the Parliamentary Special:
Stretford and Urmston
Another day in the canteen of dinnerladies, the sitcom from the pen of the much-missed Victoria Wood which was broadcast by the BBC from 1998 to 2000. The series is set in the factory of HWD Components, a fictional factory in Manchester. Or perhaps not, given that a lot of Manchester factories aren’t actually in Manchester at all. Confused? Let me explain.
It all started with the Traffords. In the late 19th century, Trafford Park was a “beautifully timbered deer park” owned and controlled by the de Trafford family. The Traffords go back to the invasion of Cnut in 1016, at which one of the Vikings — a warrior called Rafe or Ranulph — distinguished himself in fighting on the banks of the Irwell and was subsequently granted the land in that area by Cnut. The Traffords emerged intact from the subsequent Saxon restoration and the Norman Conquest and were still owning land in the area well into the nineteenth century. The present head of the family, Sir John de Trafford, 7th Baronet, is a businessman and banker and former chairman of National Savings and Investments.
What changed Trafford Park from this rural idyll just outside Manchester was the Manchester Ship Canal, which made the River Irwell — the northern boundary of Trafford Park — navigable. Sir Humphrey de Trafford, 2nd Baronet, was an implacable opponent of the canal. Even though the Ship Canal company constructed a nine-foot high wall to block the view of the canal from the Trafford Park estate, and built two wharves for the exclusive use of the de Trafford family, it wasn’t enough. The canal opened for business in 1894; two years later Sir Humphrey de Trafford, 3rd Baronet, put the park up for sale.
After Trafford Park failed to reach its reserve price at auction, Sir Humphrey negotiated a sale to Ernest Hooley for £360,000. Hooley is best remembered these days as a fraudster, but this was his most profitable deal. He quickly got the Ship Canal directors on board as a major investor, and the result was the rapid development of Trafford Park. It didn’t become just another suburb: instead it became the UK’s largest industrial estate.
Just seven years after Trafford Park was sold, around 12,000 people were working there. Half of them were employed at the British Westinghouse factory which made turbines and electric generators. There was also food manufacturing: the Cooperative Wholesale Society quickly erected a flour mill next to the Ship Canal, and the Kellogg’s cornflake factory was opened in 1938 by Florence Millward, winner of a competition to find Britain’s typical housewife. In 1909 some land on the eastern edge of Trafford Park was developed for a new football stadium for Manchester United football club, who played their first match at Old Trafford in February 1910: a 4–3 loss to Liverpool. All of this industry was serviced by a large private railway network, and abandoned railway tracks still litter Trafford Park today.
The original Trafford Park railway lines are disconnected from the national network now, but new tracks have been laid in the roads here over the last few years. This is the Trafford Park Line, the newest addition to Manchester’s sprawling and wildly-successful Metrolink tram network. The Trafford Park line was not intended to connect to housing; it was built solely to serve the football stadium, the industrial estate, and the enormous Trafford Centre shopping mall. It was fast-tracked to open in March 2020, a date which unfortunately coincided with national lockdown.
Readers might remember that national lockdown led to a complete stop for this column. In order to keep my hand in with nothing going on, I started a project to write full-length Parliamentary Special pieces for every constituency in Greater Manchester. The resulting files are still on my computer. I have no intention of publishing them, given that the whole thing is only about 60% finished; however, Stretford and Urmston was one of the bits I did complete. What you’re reading here is an expanded and updated version of the Stretford and Urmston piece which I wrote in 2020.
The Trafford Park branch joins the Metrolink main line at Cornbrook station, which lies on the boundary of this constituency. Cornbrook tram stop is located high up on an exposed viaduct, overlooking a scrapyard and some of the brand-new flats going up on the Salford side of the Ship Canal. It opened in 1999 and was originally for transfer between the Altrincham and Eccles lines only, with no access to the station from the surrounding area. Since 1999 branches to MediaCity UK, East Didsbury, Wythenshawe and the Airport, and now Trafford Park have been added to the Metrolink network; and all of these branches feed into the junction at Cornbrook. The result is that for most of the day Cornbrook’s two platforms (one inbound, one outbound) handle 40 trams per hour each. On a services per platform per hour basis, Cornbrook is the busiest station in the UK and one of the busiest in the world.
Travellers on the Trafford Park tram line will pass between the Rank Hovis flour mill and the Imperial War Museum North, a Daniel Liebeskind building which opened in 2002. The IWMN is directly across the Ship Canal from the Lowry centre and the MediaCityUK complex in Salford, and the latter has spilled over the river in recent years with the development of a new studio building for ITV. Located next to the IWMN, the new ITV studios in Trafford Park have been home to the Coronation Street set since 2013.
There used to be other Coronation Streets in Trafford Park. The modern tram line also goes past the site of the Park’s model village, built by the Westinghouse company for the benefit of its workers. Trafford Park Village was laid out on a grid pattern, complete with numbered street names like “Third Avenue”. Its back-to-back terraces suffered from enormous industrial pollution and turned into slums, and nearly all of them were demolished in the 1970s and 1980s to be replaced by some more industrial units. Some of the buildings on Third Avenue were spared the wrecking ball, including the derelict Trafford Park Hotel; and Trafford Park Village’s Roman Catholic church on Eleventh Street, a temporary structure built out of corrugated iron in 1904 and dedicated to St Antony of Padua, is still open for services.
The business rates generated by Trafford Park didn’t accrue to Manchester Corporation, which represents a missed opportunity for the city. The Corporation had failed to buy Trafford Park when it was put on the market in 1896, and also failed in an attempt to annex the local authority (then Stretford Urban District) in 1902.
Instead it was Stretford, an old market town on the Roman road towards Chester, which benefited from all this industry. Stretford remains independent of Manchester to this day, which means that Old Trafford football and cricket grounds, home respectively to Manchester United FC and Lancashire county cricket club, have never been part of the big city. The business rates paid by them and the big industrial concerns in Trafford Park helped to fund the Stretford Mall, a large shopping centre built in the 1960s in Stretford town centre and now lying half-empty. Its main replacement, the Trafford Centre next to the M60 motorway, is also showing scars from the slow death of Britain’s high street retail sector.
The M60 motorway here is one of the oldest motorways in the country, originally being opened as the Stretford-Eccles Bypass in 1960. The Barton High Level Bridge, which takes the motorway over the Ship Canal, is one of the oldest motorway structures in the country; it was originally two lanes in each direction, and was widened to three lanes in the 1980s in what a well-known online encyclopedia describes as “a major engineering feat”. A civil engineer of my acquaintance once described the way Barton Bridge was widened to me as “interesting” with a slightly unnerving smile. Particularly so given that your columnist works in Trafford Park: I commute to work by driving over that bridge, unless the M60 is having one of its frequent moments.
The Barton High Level Bridge relieved the swing bridges at Barton upon Irwell, which until 1960 were the only road crossing of the Ship Canal between Old Trafford and the Warburton toll bridge. There are two bridges here, one carrying road traffic and the other carrying the Bridgewater Canal; the Barton Swing Aqueduct, with opened with the Ship Canal in 1894, was and remains the only swinging aqueduct in the world. Recent years have seen the opening of the Centenary Bridge linking Trafford Park with Eccles, two footbridges at Salford Quays, and recently a new crossing next to the motorway bridge which links the Trafford Centre complex to the Sale Sharks/Salford rugby stadium in Barton; all of these bridges have decks which lift to allow canal traffic to pass underneath.
Other transport oddities in this constituency include the Carrington Spur, which was opened in 1987 with the number A6144(M) and was the UK’s only motorway to be entirely a single-carriageway road. Trafford council downgraded it to an ordinary A-road in 2006, cutting the speed limit from 70 to 50 mph at the same time.
The motorway marks the transition between Stretford and Urmston, which has a rather different history. Urmston is a late-Victorian middle-class railway suburb along the line from Manchester towards Warrington and Liverpool. It runs seamlessly into the suburbs of Flixton and Davyhulme, which have similar histories. Davyhulme is home to the main sewage works for Manchester, so if the wind is blowing in the wrong direction on your visit you’ll know about it.
Further out again, on the far side of the River Mersey, is the chemicals town of Partington which was created from almost nothing in 1894 as a port on the Ship Canal for Lancashire coal exports, and was greatly expanded after the Second World War by Manchester overspill. With Partington’s rail link having closed long ago, this is an isolated and deprived town.
Partington is part of the Bucklow-St Martins ward of Trafford, which also takes in a small corner of the town of Sale and the parish of Carrington. This is another large industrial area. Carrington is home to a gas-fired power station which opened for business in its current form in 2016, and much of the parish is occupied by an enormous gas and chemical works. Also here are the training grounds for Manchester United FC and Sale Sharks rugby club; Manchester City and Bury FC (RIP) also used to train here. Partington and Carrington are on the south side of the River Bollin, which meant that they were part of Cheshire until the creation of Greater Manchester in 1974; Stretford and Urmston themselves are historically Lancastrian.
Stretford was given a constituency of its own in 1885, but the Stretford constituency of those days had very different boundaries to the current seat. It wrapped around the south of Manchester as Manchester existed in 1885, and as such took in areas of the modern-day city such as Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Levenshulme, Rusholme, Withington and Reddish. By 1918 everything in the seat except Stretford itself had been annexed by Manchester or (in the case of Reddish and Heaton Norris) by Stockport. As such this was a suburban constituency whose electorate saw huge growth during this period: from 11,140 at the 1885 election to 27,629 in December 1910. These were the days when no women and not all men had the vote, so the true population was a lot higher than that.
The first MP for Stretford was the Liberal William Agnew, who had previously represented the South-East Lancashire constituency since 1880. Agnew was one of the Sons in Thomas Agnew and Sons, a London fine art dealership which during this period became the go-to firm for sales of Old Masters. He defeated John Maclure of the Conservatives by 4,866 votes to 4,676, a majority of 190.
Maclure got his revenge the following year, defeating Agnew by 739 votes. One of the prime movers of Conservatism in the Manchester area at the time, Maclure was a businessman in the insurance industry and he had also been involved in the relief efforts during the 1860s Lancashire cotton famine. In 1892 he increased his majority over Agnew to 1,345, and nobody bothered to oppose his re-election in 1895. He was made a baronet in 1898.
Sir John Maclure died in 1901, aged 65, and is commemorated by a stained-glass window in Manchester Cathedral; helpfully in this regard, his brother was the Dean of Manchester. The resulting Stretford by-election of 26th February 1901 was held for the Conservatives by another prominent Anglican, Charles Cripps. The father of the Labour politician Sir Stafford Cripps, Charles was a barrister who had previously served in the 1895 parliament as Conservative MP for Stroud; he had lost his seat in 1900, so this was a quick return to the green benches for him.
During his tenure as MP for Stretford, Cripps was appointed as attorney-general to the Prince of Wales, the future George V (he had served the future Edward VII in the same capacity); he also became Vicar-General of Canterbury, concentrating on church affairs. He later served as MP for Wycombe from 1910 and was promoted to the House of Lords in 1914 as Lord Parmoor, serving on the Lords’ judicial committee despite having never been a judge. Parmoor ended up in the Labour Party, and he was Leader of the Lords in both Macdonald governments.
All this lay in the future in 1906, when the Liberal landslide swept Charles Cripps away as MP for Stretford. The new Liberal MP for the seat was Harry Nuttall, an import and export merchant who was president of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce in 1905, and who had strong support from the 5,000 Manchester freeholders who were eligible to vote in the Stretford county constituency. Nuttall had got nowhere against Sir John Maclure in 1900, but he pulled off a swing of nearly 18% to unseat Cripps with a majority of 2,824. He was re-elected in both 1910 elections, although his majority fell to 876 in December 1910. Arthur Samuel, the defeated Conservative candidate here in both 1910 polls who later had a prominent government career between the wars, polled 10,467 votes in the December election; that score would have won nearly any other constituency.
During this period Flixton and Urmston formed part of the Eccles parliamentary constituency. This looks like a bizarre choice now, but in 1885 the Ship Canal lay in the future and the River Irwell which preceded it was rather easier to cross. Eccles was a knife-edge marginal seat at every election during this period; its most decisive election was in December 1910, when the Liberals enjoyed a majority of 791 votes.
The Eccles constituency was Conservative at its inception, with Alfred Egerton — the youngest son of the 2nd Earl of Ellesmere and from a well-known aristocratic family in the area — winning the 1885 and 1886 elections by majorities of less than 300 votes over the Liberals. Alfred Egerton died from TB in 1890, aged just 38; the resulting Eccles by-election on 22nd October 1890 was gained for the Liberals by Henry Roby, a classical scholar who wrote a two-volume Latin grammar but also helpfully co-owned a cotton mill in Patricroft. Roby defeated Algernon Egerton, Alfred’s uncle, by 205 votes in the closest Eccles result of this period.
In 1895 Henry Roby lost his seat to the Conservatives’ Octavius Leigh-Clare, a barrister who was the principal lawyer for the recently-completed Manchester Ship Canal. Leigh-Clare retired in 1906 and the seat went back to the Liberals with George Pollard, a physician who had previously served as mayor of Southport. Pollard successfully beat off a strong performance from future Salford MP Ben Tillett of the Labour Representation Committee, who finished in third place with over a quarter of the vote. Sir George represented the Eccles seat until 1918.
Boundary changes for the 1918 election cut back the Eccles seat to cover just Eccles, Swinton and Pendlebury, but before leaving Eccles I should mention that in the general election of that year it was gained by the Conservatives’ Marshall Stevens. A memorial to Stevens stands in Trafford Park Village, with the inscription “to whose foresight, energy and ability the successful development of Trafford Park as an industrial area is due”. There’s also a road in Trafford Park named after him.
The 1918 redistribution needed to make major changes to the Stretford seat, because most of its voters had ended up in areas which were now part of Manchester or Stockport constituencies. The solution was to marry Stretford town together with the unwanted areas from the Eccles seat into a new Stretford constituency which straddled the Ship Canal. On the south side were Stretford, Urmston, Davyhulme and Flixton, on the north side were Barton Moss, Irlam and Astley. Irlam was another inland port and industrial centre created by the Ship Canal, located opposite Partington and in a similar vein; Astley was a pit village on the far side of Chat Moss, while Barton Moss had a small population. It’s fair to say that the internal communications of this seat were appalling.
The outgoing Stretford Liberal MP Henry Nuttall elected to retire in 1918, and the new Stretford constituency was a very different political fight from what had gone before. In the left corner was the Labour candidate Joseph Hallsworth, who at the time was secretary of the Amalgamated Union of Co-operative Employees and who would later become the first secretary-general of its successor USDAW. In the right corner was the overwhelming winner Thomas Robinson, a businessman in the dyeing trade who had served on Stretford urban district council since its formation in 1894.
Thomas Robinson’s party affiliation is complicated. Officially he was a right-wing independent candidate, but he had the Coalition coupon in 1918 and in practice he was often endorsed by the Liberals and took their whip in Parliament. In 1924 he successfully sought re-election as a Constitutionalist candidate; this was a label normally used by Unionists, including Winston Churchill at one point, but the relevant Times Guide described Robinson’s re-election as “no change” from 1923, when the Liberals had endorsed him. His last re-election in 1929 was as a bona fide independent candidate, with a comfortable majority over Labour.
Robinson retired from the Commons in 1931, although he kept going in local politics and went on to serve twice as Mayor of Stretford. The 1931 election in Stretford was a straight fight between the Conservatives and Labour, with the Tories’ Gustav Renwick winning very easily. Renwick was an industrialist with a number of business interests and a sideline in hare-coursing and greyhound breeding. Many years later, he was the winning owner at the 1953 Waterloo Cup.
Gustav Renwick served one term in the Commons before handing the Stretford seat on in 1935 to the Tories’ Anthony Crossley. He was a grandson of Sir William Crossley, who had served as a Liberal MP for Altrincham and was a founder of the engineering firm Crossley Brothers. Anthony was in his early 30s and had made his mark as a writer and publisher. He had also competed at the Wimbledon tennis championships in 1931 and 1932, on the latter occasion after being elected as one of the two MPs for Oldham. Stretford was a much safer Conservative seat than Oldham, and Crossley could have expected a long Parliamentary career.
It wasn’t to be. On 15th August 1939 Anthony Crossley was one of four passengers on a British Airways flight from Hendon Aerodrome to Copenhagen which caught fire in mid-air and ditched into the water off the coast of Denmark. The co-pilot was the only survivor; the pilot and all four passengers died.
By the time the resulting Stretford by-election was held on 8th December 1939, the Second World War had broken out and the wartime political truce was in effect. However, the Conservatives were challenged in the by-election by a Communist candidate and an Independent Labour Party candidate (Bob Edwards, who later had a long parliamentary career as a Labour MP in the West Midlands). Neither of them got anywhere near the winning Conservative candidate Ralph Etherton, who had had two previous failed election campaigns in the previous four years: he stood for the Conservatives in Liverpool Everton in 1935 and was a Municipal Reform candidate in the 1937 London County Council election. Etherton promptly joined the RAF and worked his way up to the rank of Flight Lieutenant. The war brought him love, because he married Charles de Gaulle’s driver Johanne Cloherty in 1944.
The 1945 general election broke the mould in Stretford with the first Labour victory in the seat. Herschel Austin, who pulled off a 19-point swing to ride the Attlee landslide to a 6,294-vote majority, was a furniture-maker by trade who had been headhunted into politics as a result of the war; he ended the Second World War as a staff officer in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, with the rank of Sub-Lieutenant. In parliament he proved to be a strong left-winger, regularly clashing with Ernest Bevin over the matter of Israel. Austin was from a Jewish immigrant family, and his opinion was that Bevin was an anti-Semite.
In 1950 the intervention of the Liberals led to Herschel Austin losing his seat back to the Conservatives. The new Tory MP for Stretford was Samuel Storey, who resumed a long parliamentary career interrupted by the Attlee landslide: Storey had been an MP for Sunderland from 1931 to 1945, and went on to serve as MP for Stretford from 1950 to 1966. He saw off two future MPs during this time: Labour’s Charles Mapp (Oldham West, 1959–70) lost here in 1951, while local doctor Michael Winstanley (Cheadle 1966–70, Hazel Grove Feb-Oct 1974) stood here for the Liberals in 1964 and polled 23% of the vote. It’s fair to say that that was the last hurrah for Liberalism in Stretford.
Sir Samuel Storey lost his seat for the final time in 1966 to Labour’s Ernest Davies. Aged 39 at the time, Davies had made his career in physics: he lectured in the subject at Manchester and had done research in superconductivity for much of the previous decade. In 1961 he had been elected as a Stretford borough councillor.
Ernest Davies quickly became a Parliamentary Private Secretary, but his seat was too marginal for a long government career to be feasible, and he lost his seat back to the Conservatives in 1970. He later served on Southwark council in London from 1974 to 1982.
The new Conservative MP for Stretford from 1970 was Winston Churchill. The grandson of the former prime minister of that name, Churchill had very much followed in his grandfather’s early footsteps by becoming a war correspondent. His coverage of the Six-Day War was particularly memorable, but Churchill also reported on conflict in Yemen, Borneo, Vietnam, the Prague Spring, the 1968 Democratic Convention, Biafra, China and the fall of Salazar in Portugal. He had had a near-miss at getting elected to Parliament in the 1967 Manchester Gorton by-election, but Stretford was an easier proposition. Helped by the withdrawal of the Liberals, Churchill put together a 7% swing to win with a majority of 4,015.
Churchill was re-elected three more times as MP for Stretford, but his seat was never particularly safe: his majority fell to 1,237 in October 1974. His career in government was undistinguished, although he did serve as a frontbench defence spokesman for a time opposing the Wilson and Callaghan administrations.
The 1983 redistribution broke up the Stretford constituency. The Stretford name was retained by a new seat consisting of Stretford itself and two wards from inner-city Manchester, namely Whalley Range and Moss Side; Moss Side had previously been the centre of its own parliamentary seat. The Urmston half of the seat crossed into what had been Cheshire to join with the northern half of Sale (from the Altrincham and Sale constituency) and with Partington (which, hilariously for such an industrial and deprived town, had previously been in the true-blue Knutsford seat) to form another new constituency called Davyhulme. Projections were that the new Stretford seat would be notionally Labour whereas Davyhulme would be safe Conservative, and Winston Churchill successfully sought re-election in Davyhulme. Churchill was the only MP to represent that seat.
The new Stretford seat was won by Labour’s Tony Lloyd, who was Stretford born and bred and had started his political career on Trafford council in 1979. By 1983 he was deputy leader of the Labour group on that council, and Stretford proved to be a safe Parliamentary seat for him. During his time as MP for Stretford Lloyd became a Labour whip in 1986, and he was an opposition spokesman on a number of topics from 1987 to 1997.
The redistribution of 1997 reversed the change made in 1983 and recreated the Stretford seat of 1950–83, although with the new name “Stretford and Urmston” and with boundaries which now included Partington. The new seat was projected to be notionally Labour, and Winston Churchill — with his Davyhulme seat having been abolished — elected to retire after 27 years in the Commons. The outgoing Stretford MP Tony Lloyd sought and won the selection for Manchester Central, where the Moss Side and Whalley Range wards had been transferred to, leaving the new Stretford and Urmston seat open.
The Labour nomination for the new seat was won by Beverley Hughes, a former probation officer who had made her career in social science: at the time of her election she was a lecturer in social policy at Manchester University as well as being leader of Trafford council. She had no problem being elected into what has proved to be a safe Labour seat, and ended up winning three terms as MP for Stretford and Urmston. Notable candidates Hughes defeated include the future Education secretary Damian Hinds, who was the Conservative candidate here in 2005; and the model Katie “Jordan” Price who failed to save her deposit as an independent candidate in 2001.
In the Commons Hughes worked her way up the greasy pole to junior ministerial level, serving in the Home Office from 2002 to 2004 when she was forced to resign over a scandal involving visas for Eastern European workers, and then in the Department for Education and Skills from 2005 to 2009. Hughes retired to the Lords in 2010, and since 2017 she has been a deputy mayor of Greater Manchester with responsibility for policing and crime.
Hughes was replaced as Labour MP for Stretford and Urmston by Kate Green. Green had left a banking career to go into politics, serving from 2004 to 2009 as chief executive of the Child Poverty Action Group; she was appointed OBE in 2005 for services to welfare work. In ten years in Parliament Green has been on the Labour frontbenches more often than not, serving under Starmer as shadow education secretary from June 2020 (as replacement for Rebecca Long-Bailey) to November 2021.
Green, who is now 62, is leaving Westminster politics to concentrate on local affairs. She is off to work for the Mayor of Greater Manchester Andy Burnham, who has appointed her in succession to Baroness Hughes of Stretford as deputy mayor of Greater Manchester for policing and crime. That means that all of the last three Stretford MPs have held that or the equivalent job at some point: Tony Lloyd was elected as the only Greater Manchester Police and Crime Commissioner in 2012, and he also served as interim mayor of Greater Manchester until Burnham’s election in 2017.
Kate Green will take up her new job in the new year. She leaves behind a safe seat for Labour to defend in the resulting Stretford and Urmston by-election: in December 2019 Green beat the Conservative candidate Mussadak Mirza by 60% to 28%, a majority of 16,417 votes.
Recent local elections in the constituency indicate that this Labour hegemony is likely to continue. They tell a story. From 2004 until 2018 Trafford council was the only Conservative-controlled metropolitan borough in the north of England, and this was helped by the Conservative party performing well in the four wards covering the Urmston area. This had a skilled working-class/lower middle-class/petit bourgeois demographic, which was attracted to the area by the jobs available in Trafford Park and attracted to the Conservative council administration by Trafford’s selective grammar school system. If for example we look at the local elections in 2012 — which nationally was probably the best Labour year of the 2010s — we find the Conservatives narrowly holding Davyhulme East, Davyhulme West and Flixton wards and narrowly losing Urmston ward to Labour.
The Stretford half of the seat increasingly becomes an inner-city area the closer you get to Moss Side, which is just over the boundary. At the time of the 2011 census Clifford ward (between Old Trafford and Manchester city centre) was 65% non-white, with 36% of the population having Asian and 19% black ethnicity; that black figure was the second-highest for any ward in north-west England. Longford ward (covering the cricket ground and the eastern part of Old Trafford and Stretford) and Stretford ward are both in the top 50 wards in England and Wales for population born in the Republic of Ireland. The four wards covering the Stretford half of the seat — Clifford, Longford, Gorse Hill and Stretford itself — are the top four wards in north-west England for Sikhism. These four wards plus the deprived town of Partington provide a solid bedrock Labour vote.
So in order to keep hold of the council, the Trafford Conservatives had to keep Urmston happy. Which the Urmston Conservatives successfully did for many years with the help of a fearsome political machine which was continually at war with the Altrincham Conservatives. This internecine conflict delivered a huge amount for the residents of Urmston, which has not one but two council-run leisure centres.
Unfortunately for Trafford Conservatism, Urmston has undergone quite a lot of demographic change in the last decade. It’s still a middle-class area, but the petit-bourgeois demographic has been displaced by urban professionals who have moved here in their droves. These are the sort of people who voted to remain in the EU (as Trafford did as a whole) and who are repelled by what modern Conservatism has become, and the result is that the Conservative vote in Trafford has gone into freefall. The Tories lost control of the council in 2018, and a minority Labour administration took over which won a majority the following year.
The Labour majority on Trafford council has continued to grow since 2019 and currently stands at 40 Labour councillors against just 13 Conservatives, 5 Lib Dems, 4 Greens and an ex-Labour independent. The Stretford and Urmston constituency now has a full slate of 27 Labour councillors, and in May 2022 the constituency’s nine wards voted 64% for Labour and 22% for the Conservatives, a clear swing to Labour since December 2019. All four Urmston wards had Labour majorities of 15 points or more. The Labour hold on the Stretford and Urmston constituency is not under any threat from the Boundary Commission either: the draft maps in the boundary review currently ongoing leave this seat unchanged going forwards.
Defending this by-election for Labour is one of the architects of Trafford’s swing to Labour. Andrew Western has been the Labour leader of Trafford council since 2018; he represents Priory ward in Sale but lives in this constituency, in Flixton. Western was the Labour candidate for Altrincham and Sale West in the 2017 and 2019 general elections, getting a swing to Labour from the 1922 Committee chairman Sir Graham Brady on both occasions.
The Conservative candidate is Emily Carter-Kandola, who gives an address in Manchester city centre. She is a communications professional.
The only other party to save their deposit here in December 2019 was the Liberal Democrats, who polled 5.9%. They have reselected Anna Fryer, who stood here at the last two general elections; Dr Fryer lives and works in the constituency as a senior mental health doctor at Trafford General Hospital in Urmston. Fourth here in 2019 were the Brexit Party on 3.5%; they are now Reform UK and they have selected Paul Swansborough, who was a UKIP councillor in Redditch from 2014 to 2018 but now lives in Urmston. The Greens start from 2.7% and fifth place; their candidate is Trafford councillor Dan Jerrome, who was re-elected in May for a second term as councillor for Altrincham ward.
Four other candidates have been nominated for this by-election. Independent candidate Hazel Gibb is the editor of the local magazine Trafford Community News; in May’s local elections she polled 6.4% in Gorse Hill ward, and in those polls she was the only council candidate in this constituency who was not from Labour, the Conservatives, the Lib Dems or the Greens. Christina Glancy stands for the anti-lockdown Freedom Alliance, Jim Newell for the self-explanatory Rejoin EU and Julien Yvon for the eighties throwback Social Democratic Party.
The result from Stretford and Urmston will take a few hours of counting to come through, so while that’s going on let me bring you the undercard: the six local by-elections taking place today. These consist of three Conservative defences, two Labour and a free-for-all; and one of these is another Greater Manchester poll. Let’s go there…
Trafford council wards: Bucklow-St Martins, Clifford, Davyhulme East, Davyhulme West, Flixton, Gorse Hill, Longford, Stretford, Urmston
ONS Travel to Work Area: Manchester
Postcode districts: M15, M16, M17, M21, M31, M32, M33, M41, WA13
Emily Carter-Kandola (C)
Anna Fryer (LD)
Hazel Gibb (Ind)
Christina Glancy (Freedom Alliance)
Dan Jerrome (Grn)
Jim Newell (Rejoin EU)
Paul Swansborough (Reform UK)
Andrew Western (Lab)
Julien Yvon (SDP)
December 2019 result Lab 30195 C 13778 LD 2969 Brexit Party 1768 Grn 1357
June 2017 result Lab 33519 C 13814 UKIP 1094 LD 1001 Grn 641 Christian Peoples Alliance 122
May 2015 result Lab 24801 C 12916 UKIP 5068 Grn 2187 LD 1362 Whig Party 169 Population Party UK 83
May 2010 result Lab 21821 C 12886 LD 7601 UKIP 1508 Grn 916 Christian Party 178
Ashton
Wigan council, Greater Manchester; caused by the death of Labour councillor Anthony Sykes.
Our other Greater Manchester poll today is at the western end of the county. Indeed, not all of Ashton-in-Makerfield made it into Greater Manchester; the urban district here used to include the village of Garswood, which ended up in Merseyside at the 1974 reorganisation.
The town of Ashton, however, ended up in the metropolitan borough of Wigan. It was traditionally a Lancashire coalfield town around five miles south of Wigan, although the pits are now long gone. One locally famous person who worked down the pits here was William Kenealy, an Irishman who was one of the six VCs “before breakfast” won by the Lancashire Fusiliers at the Gallipoli landings. Kenealy is still at Gallipoli today, having died of wounds sustained in further fighting two months after the landings. The NUM president Joe Gormley was from Ashton, and the local parliamentary seat of Makerfield and its predcessors have returned Labour MPs continuously for over a century; for 80 years the MP for Ince or Makerfield was always sponsored by the NUM or its predecessors.
Ashton-in-Makerfield isn’t that well-linked to Manchester, with its main link to the outside world being the M6 motorway which runs north-south past the town. This is the nearest town to Haydock Park racecourse, which lies just outside the ward boundary to the south and brings punters to the area all year round.
Ashton ward covers the town centre and the Town Green area along the A58 towards Bolton; the northern half of the town is outside this area and instead covered by Bryn ward, which has appeared in this column on a number of previous occasions. In the 2011 census Ashton made the top 60 wards in England and Wales for Christianity (81.0%); historic Lancashire is an area where lapsed Christians are much more likely than average to tick the “Christian” box on the census form.
Wigan council has an impregnable Labour majority, and Ashton ward has had a full slate of Labour councillors since 2012. Previously this had been one of the stronger areas for Community Action, a now-defunct anti-Wigan Labour slate. One former Community Action figure came close to winning here as an independent in 2019, but there has been no major challenge to Labour in Ashton ward since. Much of the former independent vote now seems to have coalesced around the Conservatives, who moved into second place here in 2021 for the first time this century; shares of the vote here in May were 53% for Labour, 23% for the Conservatives and 20% for an independent candidate.
That result re-elected the Labour councillor Anthony Sykes for a second term after he joined the council in 2018. By day Sykes was a science teacher and president of the St Helens branch of the National Education Union; off-duty he played guitars to destructionin a band, and he had delivered supplies to vulnerable constituents during lockdown on his Harley-Davidson motorbike. Unfortunately, by May 2022 Sykes’ health was failing; he died at the end of September at the appallingly early age of 51.
Although Sykes won a four-year term in May, his successor will need to seek re-election in 2023 when Wigan council is due to get new ward boundaries. The new map, which is currently before Parliament, retains this ward basically unchanged but expands its name to “Ashton-in-Makerfield South”.
Defending for Labour is Andrew Bullen, who is hoping to join his wife Jenny as a councillor for this ward; Andrew is a community activist who is involved with a number of local charities. The Conservatives have reselected Paul Martin who was runner-up here in May. The independent from last time has not returned, so the Lib Dems’ Geoffrey Matthews — another returning candidate from May — completes the ballot paper.
Parliamentary constituency: Makerfield
ONS Travel to Work Area: Warrington and Wigan
Postcode district: WN4
Andrew Bullen (Lab)
Paul Martin (C)
Geoffrey Matthews (LD)
May 2022 result Lab 1281 C 557 Ind 470 LD 92
May 2021 result Lab 1572 C 860 LD 125
May 2019 result Lab 1038 Ind Network 1003 UKIP 306 C 212 LD 101
May 2018 result Lab 1112 Ind 793 UKIP 109 LD 41 C 36
May 2016 result Lab 1204 Ind 616 UKIP 426 C 253 LD 89
May 2015 result Lab 2738 UKIP 950 C 833 Community Action 749 Ind 318
May 2014 result Lab 1144 UKIP 591 Ind 403 Community Action 395 C 170
May 2012 result Lab 1400 Ind 585 Ind 402 C 189 BNP 118
May 2011 result Lab 1595 Ind 710 Community Action 626 C 344
May 2010 result Lab 2208 Community Action 1980 Ind 574 C 571 BNP 352
May 2008 result Community Action 1766 Lab 1111 C 248 BNP 178
May 2007 result Community Action 1423 Lab 1258 C 256 BNP 195
May 2006 result Lab 1261 Community Action 1200 C 320
June 2004 result Community Action 2366/2302/2229 Lab 1302/1029/1012 C 402
Previous results in detail
Barrowford and Pendleside
Pendle council, Lancashire; caused by the death of Conservative councillor Carlo Lionti.
As we travelled, we came near a very great hill, called Pendle Hill, and I was moved of the Lord to go up to the top of it; which I did with difficulty, it was so very steep and high. When I was come to the top, I saw the sea bordering upon Lancashire. From the top of this hill the Lord let me see in what places he had a great people to be gathered.
As the witching hour of close of polls approaches, we now travel north-east within Lancashire to the 557-metre summit of Pendle Hill. A landmark for much of eastern Lancashire, Pendle Hill was the scene of the above vision in 1652 described in the autobiography of George Fox, one of the founders of the Quakers. Nine years later, the local scientist Richard Towneley (of the Towneleys of Towneley Hall in Burrnley) took barometric readings at various altitudes on Pendle Hill, from which he concluded that there was a relationship between air density and air pressure; this was one of the pieces of evidence used by Robert Boyle in the publication of Boyle’s Law in 1662. Boyle himself didn’t use that name: he referred to his namesake law as “Mr Towneley’s hypothesis”.
But it’s other seventeenth-century events which have placed Pendle Hill into the national consciousness. This is the series of Pendle Witch Trials in 1612, which led to ten locals going to the gallows for witchcraft. One of those, Alice Nutter, was commemorated in 2012 by a statue in her home village of Roughlee; other events that year to mark the 400th anniversary of the trials included a world record being set by 482 people walking up Pendle Hill while dressed as witches.
Pendle Hill itself lies on the boundary of the ward, district and parliamentary seat named after it, with the summit being midway between Clitheroe to the west and Barrowford to the east. Barrowford is a large village on the edge of Pendle’s built-up area, on the main road towards Gisburn and Settle. This road climbs up onto the moors through the villages of Higherford and Blacko, before rounding Blacko Tower which has overlooked the valley since 1890. Despite its location on the right side of the Pennines the moorland beyond Blacko Tower used to be part of Yorkshire, before being transferred to Lancashire in the 1974 reorganisation.
That reorganisation created Pendle council, which is based on the towns of Nelson and Colne in the Calder valley. This is a closely politically-fought area which has had council majorities for all three main parties at some point in the last 30 years. The Conservatives won a majority on the council in 2021 and defended it in May this year, but they have recently fallen into a minority after Carlo Lionti died and another of their councillors quit the party and wemt independent. The current composition of the council is 15 Conservatives plus this vacancy, 10 Labour, 5 Lib Dems and 2 independents. The Pendle parliamentary seat, which has the same boundaries as the district, has voted for the government at every election since October 1974 with the exception of 1992.
Barrowford and Pendleside ward was created in 2021, merging the previous wards of Barrowford, and Blacko and Higherford with the Pendleside part of the former Higham and Pendleside ward. These were all Conservative units, with Blacko and Higherford in particular having a strongly middle-class demographic profile.
Despite this Barrowford does seem to have a high councillor attrition rate, which we can illustrate by looking in detail at the bizarre electoral career of one Christian Wakeford. He was first elected to Pendle council as a Conservative councillor for Barrowford ward in 2015, when there were two seats up here following the resignation of Conservative councillor Anthony Beckett. Wakeford won the by-election seat and so had to seek re-election in 2016, when there were two seats up here again following the resignation of Conservative councillor Christopher Jowett. Again Wakeford won the by-election seat (being at the wrong end of the alphabet probably didn’t help his cause) and so he had to seek re-election yet again in 2018, which he did successfully. However, this still didn’t entitle Wakeford to a full four-year term: he was due back before the voters in 2020 when new boundaries were to be introduced for Pendle council.
Then events intervened. In December 2019 Christian Wakeford, who by now had become leader of the opposition Conservative group on Pendle council. was elected as the Conservative MP for Bury South. One wonders whether this new role caused Wakeford to lose focus on his existing democratic duties, because in April 2020 he was disqualified from Pendle council under the six-month non-attendance rule. By this point the pandemic had hit, and his Pendle council seat remained vacant for more than a year before new boundaries could be finally introduced in 2021, one year later than anticipated. Wakeford has a highly marginal parliamentary seat, but he would appear to have lengthened his political career in Bury South by the unusual method of crossing the floor and defecting to Labour in January 2022; he has been selected by Bury South Labour as their parliamentary candidate for the next general election.
Wakeford was also the Lancashire county councillor for the Pendle Hill division until his retirement from the county council in May 2021. Like Barrowford, it’s a safe Conservative division. Pendle Hill covers most of this ward with the exception of Blacko, which is part of the large Pendle Rural division along with Trawden, Foulridge, Earby and Barnoldswick. Pendle Rural was close between the Conservatives and Lib Dems in 2021, but most of the Lib Dem vote will have come out of Barlick.
The disqualification of Wakeford hasn’t ended the parade of council vacancies in Barrowford and Pendleside. The new ward easily returned the Conservative slate in 2021. Top of the poll was long-serving councillor Linda Crossley, who died in February 2022; as a result the May 2022 election here was for two seats, with the Conservative slate beating Labour 59–41 in a straight fight. Elected in second place, and therefore due for re-election in 2023, was Carlo Lionti who owned a namesake Italian restaurant in Colne. He passed away from prostate cancer at the start of October, aged 75. Lionti had first joined the council in May 2019, representing Higham and Pendleside ward before transferring here in 2021.
Defending this by-election for the Conservatives is David Gallear. Labour have reselected their regular candidate Susan Nike who has been contesting council elections here for years; Nike may share her surname with the Greek goddess of victory but she is yet to live up to that name at the ballot box. Completing the ballot paper for the Lib Dems is the last non-Conservative to be elected as a Barrowford councillor: Allan Vickerman was a Lib Dem councillor for the old Barrowford ward from 2002 to 2006. All three candidates give addresses in the ward.
Parliamentary constituency: Pendle
Lancashire county council division: Pendle Hill (Barley-with-Wheatley Booth, Barrowford, Goldshaw Booth and Roughlee Booth parishes), Pendle Rural (Blacko parish)
ONS Travel to Work Area: Burrnley
Postcode districts: BB8, BB9, BB12
David Gallear (C)
Susan Nike (Lab)
Allan Vickerman (LD)
May 2022 double vacancy C 1366/1290 Lab 958/815
May 2021 result C 1668/1516/1173 Lab 615/462/409 Ind 500 LD 178/130/96
Previous results in detail
Wingfield
Amber Valley council, Derbyshire; caused by the death of Conservative councillor Valerie Thorpe.
We now cross to the East Midlands and to the Amber Valley district and parliamentary seat. This is named after the River Amber, which rises south of Clay Cross and flows south to meet the Derwent at Ambergate. A large part of its course flows through Wingfield ward.
Wingfield ward is named after the village of South Wingfield, to the west of Alfreton. This is notable for Wingfield Manor, a manor house which once housed Mary Queen of Scots during her English imprisonment and is reputed to be the site of England’s first flushing toilet. After being damaged in the Civil War, Wingfield Manor has been deserted since the eighteenth century and now lies in ruins; it’s on the Buildings at Risk register, and is not currently open to the public.
South Wingfield was a mining village once, but there’s no trace of its mining heritage in its election results. Wingfield ward had been represented continuously since 1998 by Conservative councillor Valerie Thorpe, who enjoyed a large personal vote. Thorpe, who died in September at the age of 78, was known for her charity and ward work; she was still making phone calls on behalf of constituents from her hospital bed during her final illness. Her constituents included Nigel Mills, who has been the Conservative MP for Amber Valley since 2010; Mills has signed the nomination papers for the Conservative candidate in this by-election.
Amber Valley council has had some wild swings back and forth between the Conservatives and Labour in recent years, but the Conservatives are currently in the ascendancy; the council composition currently stands at 28 Conservatives plus this vacancy, 11 Labour, 3 Greens, 1 ex-Conservative independent and 1 “Socialist”. Thorpe was last re-elected in May 2019, enjoying a 69–19 lead over Labour. The ward is part of the Ripley West and Heage division of Derbyshire county council, which is Conservative although not quite that strongly so.
Defending for the Conservatives is Dawn Harper, who lives in the ward in the village of Fritchley and runs a catering firm. The Labour candidate is Dean Watson, an electrician who lives and is a parish councillor some distance away in Shipley, on the far side of Ripley and Heanor. Also standing are Sally Lowick for the Greens and Kate Smith for the Lib Dems.
Parliamentary constituency: Amber Valley
Derbyshire county council division: Ripley West and Heage
ONS Travel to Work Area: Derby
Postcode districts: DE5, DE55, DE56
Dawn Harper (C)
Sally Lowick (Grn)
Kate Smith (LD)
Dean Watson (Lab)
May 2019 result C 602 Lab 168 Grn 66 LD 39
May 2015 result C 920 Lab 302 UKIP 109 Grn 49 LD 40
May 2011 result C 761 Lab 261 LD 61
May 2007 result C 728 Lab 120 LD 64
May 2003 result C 635 Lab 187
Previous results in detail
Toller
South Kesteven council, Lincolnshire; caused by the resignation of independent councillor Jan Hansen.
It’s time for the ninth and final by-election to South Kesteven council in the current term. This Lincolnshire district is based on the towns of Grantham and Stamford, but also includes a large rural area and a fair amount of fenland. Which is where we travel to next.
The Toller ward is named after a distinguished Lincolnshire family which had large landholdings in the village of Billingborough. There is still in existence a Toller Educational Foundation, which makes grants to school-leavers from the village. Billingborough is on the edge of the fens roughly halfway between Bourne and Sleaford. It’s off the main road between the two towns, which takes a higher, more westerly route through the village of Folkingham.
After electing Conservative councillors in previous elections this century, Toller took a different turn in 2019. In that year the outgoing Conservative councillor, Mike King, was narrowly defeated by independent candidate Jan “The Chocolate Man” Hansen, who ran a chocolate shop in Folkingham for 36 years. The Chocolate Man polled 388 votes to the Conservatives’ 366. Hansen also contested the Lincolnshire county elections last year in the local division of Folkingham Rural, finishing a rather distant second to the Conservatives on that occasion.
Unfortunately for those readers who might now want to travel to Folkingham as soon as possible, I have to inform all chocoholics that the Chocolate Man retired and wound up his business earlier this year. He has now retired from his democratic duties as well, claiming that there is a “culture of bullying and intimidation” on South Kesteven council.
This gives us a free-for-all between two candidates. One is the Conservatives’ Tony Vaughan, who gives an address in Ropsley some distance to the west. The other is Murray Turner of the Lib Dems, who is a Billingborough parish councillor. Seconds out!
Parliamentary constituency: Grantham and Stamford
Lincolnshire county council division: Folkingham Rural
ONS Travel to Work Area: Peterborough
Postcode district: NG34
Murray Turner (LD)
Tony Vaughan (C)
May 2019 result Ind 388 C 366
May 2015 result C 943 LD 448
May 2011 result C 629 Grn 170 LD 152
May 2007 result C unopposed
May 2003 result C unopposed
Previous results in detail: 2003–11 2015-
Priory Heath
Ipswich council, Suffolk; caused by the resignation of Labour councillor Sarah Barber.
Back to the towns now as we travel into East Anglia. Priory Heath ward is the south-east corner of Ipswich, a ward of council housing on the road towards Felixstowe. Much of this housing is on the former site of Ipswich racecourse, which closed in 1911 and was redeveloped for housing in the 1930s. Also here is a new and fast-growing estate built on the site of the former Ipswich airport, which was been rechristened as Ravenswood.
All the main communication links to the container port of Felixstowe pass through this ward, including the railway line and the A14 dual carriageway, so it’s appropriate that wa can find in Priory Heath ward the main UK offices of MSC. That’s the Mediterranean Shipping Company, a Swiss firm which overtook Maersk Line this year to become the largest container shipping line in the world. Their ships are regular visitors to the Felixstowe docks.
In this century Priory Heath has never failed to elect a Labour councillor: the Conservatives have finished a close second on many occasions but have never broken through. The outgoing Labour councillor Sarah Barber was first elected in 2016. She was re-elected in 2021 with a 48–40 lead over the Conservatives; on the same day the Priory Heath division of Suffolk county council, which has the same boundaries, had a smaller Labour lead of 46–40. Compared to that, there was a big swing to the Labour in May’s local elections which had an increased Labour majority of 54–33. The ward is part of the Ipswich constituency, which was a Conservative gain from Labour in 2019.
Sarah Barber, who was mayor of Ipswich in 2017–18, has recently left her job as a nurse at Ipswich Hospital because she could no longer make ends meet on an NHS salary. She is still working in nursing but now works privately for better pay. With this better pay came a change of job location, and Ms Barber also found she needed time to support her mother. She stepped down from the council in November.
Defending for Labour is Roxanne Downes, who according to her Twitter profile dislikes “any politician putting themselves before public”. And there was me thinking that was what an election was all about. The Conservative candidate is Gregor McNie, who has worked for 35 years in financial services and is also a former naval reservist. Completing the ballot is Trevor Powell for the Lib Dems.
Parliamentary constituency: Ipswich
Suffolk county council division: Priory Heath (same boundaries)
ONS Travel to Work Area: Ipswich
Postcode districts: IP3, IP5, IP10
Roxanne Downes (Lab)
Gregor McNie (C)
Trevor Powell (LD)
May 2022 result Lab 1033 C 635 Grn 155 LD 105
May 2021 result Lab 1062 C 891 Grn 187 LD 86
May 2019 result Lab 925 C 538 Ind 252 Grn 153 LD 108
May 2018 result Lab 1013 C 661 Grn 99 LD 96
May 2016 result Lab 1026 C 558 LD 148
May 2015 result Lab 1627 C 1329 UKIP 569 Grn 172 LD 160
May 2014 result Lab 908 UKIP 546 C 490 LD 121
May 2012 result Lab 1047 C 375 Grn 119 LD 107
May 2011 result Lab 1290 C 605 LD 244
May 2010 result Lab 1525 C 1211 LD 823
May 2008 result Lab 881 C 692 LD 169 Ind 137
May 2007 result Lab 852 C 789 LD 234
May 2006 result Lab 704 C 626 LD 308 Ind 125
May 2004 result Lab 731 C 644 LD 359
May 2003 result Lab 509 C 446 LD 286 Ind 88
May 2002 result Lab 603/601/588 C 412/369/359 LD 231/220/194
Previous results in detail
Andover Romans
Test Valley council, Hampshire; caused by the resignation of Conservative councillor Nick Matthews.
We finish up in a town which Andrew’s Previews hasn’t previously given the full treatment to. This is Andover, which lies in the north-west corner of Hampshire on the main road and railway line from London to Salisbury. One firm which makes money by selling marital aids over the internet named Andover last year as the sexiest place on the UK based on sales volumes, so clearly it’s high time we paid a visit.
The name of Andover Romans ward derives from a real Roman fort, Leucomagus, at the junction of two Roman Roads, the Portway and the Icknield Way. The site of Leucomagus is now buried under a London overspill council estate in the north-eastern Andover suburb of East Anton. More housebuilding is going on in this ward at pace, and the boundary changes which created this ward in 2019 reflected that.
Before 2019 this area was covered by Alamein ward, which also took in the parishes of Enham Alamein and Smannell to the north. The Alamein name was added to the village of Enham Alamein in 1945, after the village had become a place for soldiers injured in the Battle of El Alamein to convalesce. Andover continues to have strong military associations, with the British Army HQ being based here since 2010.
The local authority here is Test Valley council, which runs southwards to Romsey and the edge of Southampton. This has a Conservative majority, with the 2019 elections returning 24 Conservative councillors, 12 Lib Dems and 7 councillors from a localist group called the Andover Alliance. The Andover Alliance, who also won a majority on Andover town council, subsequently fell apart in spectacular fashion, and only one of their Test Valley councillors is still in the party. Of the other six, three are now independent councillors, one joined the continuing Liberal Party, and the other two seats were gained by the Conservatives in by-elections last year.
Romans ward hasn’t been affected by these shenanigans and returned a full slate of Conservatives in 2019: shares of the vote were 39% for the Conservatives, 25% for the Lib Dems and 23% for the Andover Alliance. The ward is part of the safely-Conservative Andover North division of Hampshire county council. Andover is part of the safe-Conservative constituency of North West Hampshire, whose MP Kit Malthouse (a former member of the London Assembly) was in the Cabinet as Education Secretary for the five minutes of the Truss premiership.
This by-election is to replace Conservative councillor Nick Matthews, who was first elected in 2019; he has stood down on health grounds. Defending for the Conservatives is Katie Brooks, who is the president of Andover Women in Business and runs a web design firm called Bear Behind. (Remember what I said about Andover being the sexiest town?) Brooks’ opposition will come from Jason Sangster, who was co-opted to Andover town council in 2020 as an independent and is still shown as such on the town council’s website; however, Sangster has recently joined the Lib Dems and he has their nomination for this by-election. With no candidate from the Andover Alliance or anybody else, this is a straight fight.
Parliamentary constituency: North West Hampshire
Hampshire county council: Andover North
ONS Travel to Work Area: Andover
Postcode districts: SP10, SP11
Katie Brooks (C)
Jason Sangster (LD)
May 2019 result C 623/604/575 LD 398/348/316 Andover Alliance 377/374/331 Lab 215
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
