Previewing the three parliamentary and three local by-elections of 20th July 2023
“All the right votes, but not necessarily in the right order”
Six by-elections on 20th July 2023, including three Parliamentary Specials. This is a long one, so grab a brew and let’s dive straight in:
Uxbridge and South Ruislip
House of Commons; caused by the resignation of Conservative MP Boris Johnson.
Belshazzar the king made a great feast to a thousand of his lords, and drank wine before the thousand. Belshazzar, whiles he tasted the wine, commanded to bring the gold and silver vessels which his father Nebuchadnezzar had taken out of the temple which was in Jerusalem; that the king, and his princes, his wives, and his concubines, might drink therein. Then they brought the golden vessels that were taken out of the temple of the house of God which was at Jerusalem; and the king, and his princes, his wives, and his concubines, drank in them. They drank wine, and praised the gods of gold, and of silver, of brass, of iron, of wood, and of stone.
— Daniel 5:1–4
The Colne is one of the more obscure rivers of southern England, but in administrative terms it’s rather important. It rises in central Hertfordshire, just to the south of Hatfield, and flows west through Watford towards Rickmansworth. At that point the river turns south and starts to form a county boundary: initially between Hertfordshire and Greater London, then between Buckinghamshire and Greater London. From here until the Colne reaches the Thames at Staines, it’s roughly followed by the M25 motorway and, for a time, closely followed by the Grand Union Canal at the point where the canal turns north. Here can be found a settlement which has been swallowed up by the urban growth of London but can still be recognised as a town.
Welcome to Uxbridge, a crossing-point of the River Colne whose name commemorates a 7th-century Saxon tribe, the Wixan. The bridge here was an important one: it carried the main stagecoach route from London to Oxford, and as such Uxbridge became a large market town on the Middlesex-Buckinghamshire border. The town was the scene of peace negotiations in 1645 between King Charles I and Parliament, which failed to end the English Civil War; the pub where the talks were held, now called the Crown and Treaty, still stands today. The opening of the canal in 1794 added north-south boat traffic to the east-west road traffic, and brought some new industries to Uxbridge: notably a number of large flour mills next to the canal. One of these, which was owned in the 19th century by one William King, stands derelict now but you can probably find a memorial to it in your local supermarket: this was the Kingsmill which gave its name to a well-known brand of sliced bread.
The coming of the railways marked a bit of a downturn in Uxbridge’s fortunes. The West Coast main line, which superseded the Grand Union Canal, takes a far more direct route from London to Watford; the stagecoach traffic was replaced by Brunel’s Great Western Railway, which runs a few miles to the south of Uxbridge town centre. Uxbridge’s original railway station, one of the relatively few lines in the London area which fell victim to the Beeching Axe, was a branch line terminus off the Great Western route.
The major link to the outside world now is the London Underground. Uxbridge underground station, opened in 1904 and relocated to its current town-centre site on the High Street in 1938, is a branch-line terminus for the Metropolitan and Piccadilly Lines. Before the pandemic struck, it handled over 7 million passengers each year. It’s a striking example of 1930s architecture, and is Grade II listed. Not far away on Vine Street is another 1930s listed building: the former Randalls department store, which closed in 2015. We’ll come back to that later.
To the south of the town centre once lay the extensive grounds of the one of the UK’s largest producers of cut flowers, Lowe and Shawyer’s nursery. This company went bust in 1958, and the site was fairly quickly developed: not for housing this time, but for educational use. Brunel University was opened in 1966 as one of the UK’s so-called “plate-glass” campus-style universities, and its engineering focus is reflected in its being named after the Victorian civil engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel. A number of Brunel graduates currently grace the Commons benches, including the former shadow chancellor John McDonnell, the former Northern Ireland secretary (for about ten minutes at the end of the Johnson premiership) Shailesh Vara and the current shadow cabinet member Rosena Allin-Khan.
Further south from here we come to Yiewsley at the southern end of this constituency, where the Grand Union Canal turns east to approach London. Brunel’s Great Western railway can be found here, and the station of West Drayton lies on the southern boundary of the constituency. Since last year this is an Elizabeth Line station, with trains from here to central London actually reaching central London rather than terminating at Paddington.
The Underground line to Uxbridge approaches the town centre from the north-east, with trains stopping at Hillingdon, Ickenham, Ruislip, Ruislip Manor and Eastcote. With the exception of Ickenham, all of these stations are part of this constituency or on the boundary of it. It was this railway that led to much of this area being covered in urban sprawl, for here we are in Metroland: the quadrant of outer London which filled with houses in the inter-war years thanks to its links to central London via the Metropolitan Railway. Ruislip-Northwood became an urban district in 1904, and saw its population increase from 6,000 to 73,000 in the fifty years from 1911 to 1961.
South Ruislip itself lies on a different Underground route, the Central Line. Central Line trains from South Ruislip and Ruislip Gardens stations handle most of the suburban traffic, while Chiltern Railways expresses to Marylebone mostly pass through without stopping. Below the ground, two tunnel boring machines — Caroline and Sushila — are busy constructing the Northolt Tunnel to carry the High Speed 2 railway line underneath this corner of London.
South Ruislip station used to be called Northolt Junction, and this name is preserved in a nearby airfield. RAF Northolt is the oldest RAF base in the country, opening in 1915 for what was then the Royal Flying Corps. In 1940 it became the home of 303 Squadron, a unit of Polish fighter pilots who claimed the most “kills” of enemy aircraft of any Allied squadron in the Battle of Britain; the nearby Polish War Memorial remains a major landmark on the A40 Western Avenue, one of London’s main arterial roads, which runs along the southern edge of the airfield. That isn’t the only connection between this constituency and the Battle of Britain; the underground Battle of Britain Bunker, an operations room from which decisions were made as to which aircraft to scramble, can be found in Uxbridge to the south of the town centre. It’s now run by Hillingdon council as a museum.
Today Northolt is a major centre for military, government, corporate and private aircraft in London, and it has a few other roles which might be more surprising. Here can be found the overnight base of the London Air Ambulance, the archivists of the Air Historical Branch, the sorting office of the British Forces Post Office, and the musicians of the Central Band of the Royal Air Force and the Band of the RAF Regiment. We’ll come to the latter band in due course; but here is the Central Band of the RAF under the baton of the contemporary composer Nigel Hess, who is conducting the final movement of his New London Pictures suite, “Congestion Charge”.
Which brings us to politics, for one of the political hot potatoes in this corner of London is the ULEZ. The Ultra Low Emission Zone is intended to tackle the problem of London’s poor air quality by effectively pricing the most polluting petrol and diesel vehicles off the road. Under the scheme, any car or van which does not meet the ULEZ emissions standards (nearly all petrol cars produced since 2006 and diesel cars made since 2016 do) and which enters or moves within the zone is charged £12.50 per day by Transport for London. The zone currently applies to the area within the North Circular and South Circular Roads, an area which does not cover Uxbridge; but as of the end of next month, it will be extended to cover the whole of Greater London. It’s pretty controversial in Outer London, and it should be noted that the Uxbridge area has one of London’s highest rates of car ownership.
I noted above the explosive population growth of Ruislip-Northwood urban district in the twentieth century. Back when Uxbridge was first named in a parliamentary constituency, in the redistribution of 1885 which made single-member parliamentary seats the norm, the county of Middlesex — excluding the bits which had become part of the County of London — had just seven parliamentary seats. They were called Brentford, Ealing, Enfield, Harrow, Hornsey, Tottenham and Uxbridge. The Uxbridge constituency covered a large area of western Middlesex, including the whole of what is now the Hillingdon and Spelthorne boroughs and large parts of modern Hounslow and Richmond upon Thames. At its first election in 1885, just under 10,000 men had the vote here.
On these boundaries Uxbridge proved to be a safe Conservative seat. Its first MP was Sir Frederick Dixon-Hartland, a banker and antiquary who had started his parliamentary career in 1881 by being elected as MP for Evesham in Worcestershire; this seat disappeared in the 1885 redistribution, and Dixon-Hartland transferred here. He won six general elections in Uxbridge, including unopposed re-elections in 1886, 1895 and 1900. At his last re-election in 1906 he withstood the Liberal landslide by just 145 votes over the Liberal candidate, Sidney Pocock; that’s the closest the Liberals and their successors have ever got to winning Uxbridge.
Sir Frederick Dixon-Hartland died in November 1909, aged 77. No by-election was held to replace him. This was a time of constitutional crisis: later that month the House of Lords rejected Lloyd George’s “People’s Budget”, prompting the Liberal prime minister Herbert Asquith to ask for a dissolution of parliament and go to the country. The resulting January 1910 general election easily returned the new Conservative candidate Charles Mills as MP for Uxbridge, which reverted to its safe Conservative status with a Tory majority of 4,708 over the Liberals.
Charles Thomas Mills was elected to Parliament at the age of just 22, and he was the Baby of the House between the two 1910 general elections. He was the son and heir of Charles William Mills, the second Lord Hillingdon, who was a banker; this was the Mills family in the name of the bank Glyn, Mills and Co, which was a very large and wealthy private bank in the late Victorian area. (They were taken over by the Royal Bank of Scotland in 1939.) Charles junior joined the board of the bank in 1910, after his election to Parliament. He and his father had tickets for the maiden voyage of the RMS Titanic in 1912, but in the event Lord Hillingdon was not well enough to travel and they both stayed at home. A lucky escape.
Like many young men of his time and class, Charles Mills became a Territorial Army officer. He served in the West Kent (Queen’s Own) Yeomanry, reaching the rank of Lieutenant. When the First World War broke out, Mills transferred to the Scots Guards. On 6th October 1915, he was killed in action in France, fighting on the Western Front in the Battle of Loos. Lieutenant Charles Mills MP was 28 years old. He has no known grave, and his name is listed on the Loos Memorial.
The resulting first Uxbridge by-election, held on 10th November 1915, was won by Charles Mills’ younger brother Arthur. The wartime political truce was in effect, and Arthur Mills was elected unopposed.
Arthur Mills retired from the Commons at the 1918 general election, although he wasn’t out of Parliament for long; he succeeded to his father’s titles and entered the Lords the following year as the third Lord Hillingdon. His successor as MP for Uxbridge represented a much smaller area. Middlesex had been increased from seven MPs to seventeen by the redistribution, and the effect of this was to split the Uxbridge seat into two. The southern half of the seat became a new Spelthorne constituency; the revised Uxbridge seat consisted of the whole of the modern London Borough of Hillingdon together with Southall, which is now part of Ealing borough. At its first election in 1918 Uxbridge had 29,442 electors.
Colonel Sidney Peel became the new Conservative MP for Uxbridge. He had a famous surname from a famous family: Sidney was a grandson of the prime minister Sir Robert Peel and a son of Arthur Peel, who was Speaker of the Commons from 1884 to 1895. Sidney Peel was a barrister and financier by trade, but he also had a career as a Territorial Army officer: he served in both the Boer War and the First World War, and was mentioned in despatches and received a DSO while commanding a squadron of the Bedfordshire Yeomanry in France in 1915. In 1917 Peel had been recruited as a financial adviser to the Foreign Office, which led to him being part of the British delegation at the Paris peace conference; he was then appointed chairman of the Export Credits Guarantee Department Advisory Committee, a role he held until his death in 1938. Peel was elected as MP for Uxbridge in 1918 with a comfortable majority of 3,563 votes over Labour, who contested the seat for the first time.
Sidney Peel served just one term as MP for Uxbridge before handing the seat over in 1922 to Dennistoun “Dennis” Burney. Burney was from a noted naval family: his father Cecil Burney was an Admiral of the Fleet who commanded the 1st Battle Squadron at Jutland. He clearly seems to have had a talent for invention. During the First World War, while serving in the naval research establishment at HMS Vernon in Portsmouth, Burney developed an anti-mine device which earned him a fortune in patent royalties and a CMG. In 1922, the year he entered Parliament, Burney was the prime mover behind the Imperial Airship Scheme to transport passengers and mail to the Empire; he then attempted to put this into action by managing the team at Vickers which successfully designed and built the R100 airship. In the 1930s, after retiring from Parliament, Burney designed an aerodymanically streamlined car; he was still inventing in the 1940s, coming up with a new type of high-explosive shell and a recoilless rifle for the British Second World War effort.
In 1923 Dennis Burney was re-elected in Uxbridge thanks to a split opposition vote. Second place that year went to Graham Seton Hutchison, a prominent former Army officer who was one of the early leading lights in the British Legion. In later years Seton Hutchison became a writer of military history and espionage novels as well as becoming involved in a number of obscure fascist movements; which makes it all the more bizarre that his 1923 Parliamentary campaign was as a Liberal candidate, in the last hurrah of Uxbridge Liberalism. Perhaps the British march composer Kenneth Alford was on to something in 1921, when he wrote a march dedicated to Seton Hutchison and called it The Mad Major. Here is that march, played by the Band of the RAF Regiment.
Dennistoun Burney retired from the Commons in 1929, the year he succeeded to his father’s baronetcy. That left a tricky seat for the Conservatives to defend in a poor general election for them. They selected Army officer John Llewellin to hold the seat; the Labour candidate was Reginald Bridgeman, a grandson of the 3rd Earl of Bradford who had spent his career in the Diplomatic Service. When the votes came out of the boxes, Llewllin had successfully held Uxbridge for the Conservatives with 17,770 votes to Bridgeman’s 16,422, with 8.847 voters choosing the Liberal candidate. Bridgeman was expelled from Labour shortly afterwards for membership of the League Against Imperialism. He tried again in Uxbridge at the 1931 election as an independent candidate, but came nowhere near holding his deposit; Llewellin rode the Conservative landslide to win a second term with almost 72% of the vote.
John Llewellin’s parliamentary career peaked during the Second World War. He was appointed to the Cabinet in February 1942 as President of the Board of Trade, but lasted less than three weeks in that position before being reshuffled to become Minister of Aircraft Production. From 1943 he was Minister of Food, a position which he held going into the 1945 general election.
The development of Metroland meant that by now the Uxbridge seat was seriously oversized. In the 1939 electoral register it had an electorate of 140,299, an increase of 377% in 21 years; some of this will have been due to women over 21 gaining the vote in 1929, but the trend is clear. There were constituencies in Middlesex which were even more oversized (Hendon had over 208,000 electors, Harrow over 168,000), but this level of under-representation really could not be ignored. So Uxbridge was one of the seats affected by the emergency redistribution in 1945. Effectively it was split into two: Southall became a constituency of its own, and the Uxbridge seat was cut back to just Uxbridge and Ruislip-Northwood. Yiewsley was transferred into the Spelthorne seat, a short-lived move which was reversed in 1950.
The new Uxbridge included the best Conservative-voting parts of the old seat, but it still fell to Labour in the Attlee landslide of 1945. Minister of Food John Llewellin lost his seat (although he was translated to the Lords soon afterwards), and Frank Beswick became the first Labour MP, and the first non-Conservative MP, for Uxbridge by 25,190 votes to 24,106, a Labour majority of 1,084.
It was the start of a long parliamentary career for Beswick, who was a journalist from a Nottinghamshire coal-mining family. Beswick had been a qualified pilot before the war, and he spent the Second World War in the RAF’s Transport Command, rising to the rank of Flight Lieutenant. However, his constituency was too marginal to allow a ministerial career from the Commons: when he eventually made it to Cabinet in 1967, it was by being appointed as the Lords chief whip. In 1985 Lord Beswick had the distinction of opening a House of Lords debate on social and economic policies which was the first-ever Parliamentary debate to be televised; that debate is remembered for a speech from Harold Macmillan, who by then was the Earl of Stockton, critiquing the Thatcher government’s economic policies.
Ironically, it was Macmillan’s government which had ended Frank Beswick’s Commons career. Beswick had been re-elected three times as MP for Uxbridge on increasingly narrow majorities — he led by 2,398 votes in 1950, by 1,548 in 1951 and by just 876 votes in 1955 in a straight fight with the Conservative candidate Charles Curran. Round three of Beswick v Curran took place in 1959, and this time Charles Curran was the winner by 1,390 votes.
Conservative MP Charles Curran was a barrister by trade. He never got off the backbenches, which may have had something to do with his seat being so marginal; but then, there is this story from his first parliamentary term to consider. The old tale that a judge once had the concept of the Beatles explained to him in court as “a popular beat combo” may well be apocryphal, but something fairly similar happened to Curran in June 1964 when he opened a Commons debate on automation. His speech included the following memorable passage on the subject of literacy:
Let me try to convey to the House one of the consequences of not providing this kind of education for the kind of children about whom we are talking. I want to quote an expert whose name is famous not only here, but throughout the world. He is perhaps almost the most celebrated living Englishman. His name is John Lennon and he is one of the Beatles. I have never seen or heard the Beatles, but I have been very interested indeed to read a book by John Lennon, published in America and, I believe, in this country. It is called “In His Own Write”.
The book contains a number of poems and fairy stories written by Lennon. These tell a great deal about the education he received in Liverpool. He explains that he was born there in 1940 and attended various schools, where he could not pass examinations. I would like to quote one of the poems. It is one that the Ministry of Education and Science might well distribute to every member of its staff concerned with the kind of children we are discussing. It is called “Deaf Ted, Danoota and Me”.
I will quote three verses from it:
“Never shall we partly stray,
Fast stirrup all we three
Fight the battle mighty sword
Deaf Ted, Danoota, and me.Thorg Billy grows and Burnley ten,
And Aston Villa three
We clobber ever gallup
Deaf Ted, Danoota, and me.So if you hear a wondrous sight,
Am blutter or at sea,
Remember whom the mighty say
Deaf Ted, Danoota, and me.”I quote that poem not because of its literary merit, but because one can see from it, as from other poems and stories in the book, two things about John Lennon: he has a feeling for words and story telling and he is in a state of pathetic near-literacy. He seems to have picked up bits of Tennyson, Browning and Robert Louis Stevenson while listening with one ear to the football results on the wireless.
The book suggests to me a boy who, on the evidence of these writings, should have been given an education which would have enabled him to develop the literary talent that he appears to have. I do not know whether my hon. Friend the Joint Under-Secretary of State can tell us anything about what kind of school this Beatle went to. The volume from which I have quoted strikes me as singularly pathetic and touching.
The boy appears to be a sort of throwback to H. G. Wells’s “Mr. Polly”, who was brought up in much the same fashion and who was also a boy with a love for and ability with words which he was unable to get developed in school so that, when he was grown up, he talked about “Sesquipedarian verbijooce.” “Mr. Polly” went to school nearly 100 years ago, but it seems that the kind of education that made him talk like that was still being supplied in Liverpool when John Lennon was at school in the 1950s. I would like my hon. Friend to tell us what the secondary modern schools of Liverpool are like now. What sort of education is being provided for that sort of boy at present?
Fellow Conservative MP Norman Miscampbell had to jump to the defence of his fellow Liverpudlians:
It is unfair to say that Lennon of the Beatles was not well educated. I cannot say which, but three of the four went to grammar school and as a group are highly intelligent, highly articulate and highly engaging.
I think that we would draw the wrong conclusions if we thought that the success which they are having came from anything other than great skill.
Charles Curran could not make the Uxbridge seat safe for the Conservatives again. He was re-elected in 1964 by just 653 votes, and lost his seat to Labour in 1966 by 890 votes. The new Labour MP John Ryan was just 26 when he was elected to Parliament in 1966, and he was the second MP for Uxbridge to become Baby of the House — a role which Ryan held until Les Huckfield won the Nuneaton by-election the following year. Ryan was too young and his seat too marginal to make much of an impact in Parliament, and a rematch with Curran in 1970 saw the former Conservative MP get his seat back by a margin of 3,646.
In September 1972 Charles Curran died, while on a visit to Cyprus, at the age of 69. The resulting second Uxbridge by-election, held on 7th December 1972, settled down into another close fight between the Conservatives and Labour. Labour had selected Manuela Sykes, a lecturer and writer who had contested a number of parliamentary elections on the Liberal ticket before she joined Labour; the Conservative candidate Michael Shersby was a Westminster city councillor who ran the British Sugar Bureau. Shersby eventually won the by-election by 14,178 votes to 13,000, a reduced Conservative majority of 1,178; a rematch between Shersby and Sykes in February 1974 resulted in a swing to the Conservatives. However, the result was noted at the time for a strong fourth-place finish by the National Front, whose candidate John Clifton polled 8.7%. Under today’s election rules, that would have saved him his deposit.
It was Michael Shersby who ended the trend in the post-war decades of Uxbridge being a closely fought marginal. He turned it into a safe Conservative seat, winning eight terms of office in total. That included the Labour landslide of 1997, in which Uxbridge turned in one of the closest results of the election: Sir Michael Shersby, as he now was, was re-elected with 18,095 votes against the Labour candidate David Williams’ 17,371, a majority of 724. His 25 years on the Commons were entirely spent on the backbenches, from where he was unusually effective: eight of his private members’ bills made it to the statute book, which is thought to be a record for any MP in the last century.
Sir Michael Shersby suddenly died on 8th May 1997, just a week after being re-elected so narrowly for his eighth term of office. The resulting third Uxbridge by-election took place on 31st July 1997 and was the first parliamentary by-election of the Blair administration. Labour may well have had hopes of winning, but they botched their selection process by excluding David Williams from the shortlist — an action which annoyed the local Labour party branch. The Labour selection eventually went to Andy Slaughter, the leader of Hammersmith and Fulham council; Slaughter now sits in the Shadow Cabinet as shadow solicitor-general, but his parliamentary career had to wait until 2005 to get going after he lost this by-election. The Conservatives selected John Randall, the managing director of Randall’s department store in Uxbridge; in the by-election he increased the Conservative majority in Uxbridge to 3,766 and ended an eight-year losing streak for the Conservatives in parliamentary by-elections. John Randall went on to make the Uxbridge seat safe for the Conservatives again, and he was re-elected three times before standing down in 2015.
We can see from this potted history of the 1950–2010 Uxbridge constituency that it was often a marginal seat with low swings. It certainly wasn’t as strong for the Conservatives as the Uxbridge and South Ruislip seat which exists today, and that’s because the 1950 redistribution transferred some of the best Conservative areas of the old Uxbridge into a new constituency of Ruislip-Northwood. This was one of the safest Conservative seats in what became Greater London, and in the period 1950–2010 it had just three MPs: Petre Crowder (a barrister) from 1950 to 1979, John Wilkinson (previously MP for Bradford West and a Maastricht rebel) from 1979 to 2005, and Nick Hurd (son of Douglas Hurd, and a junior minister for most of the period 2010–19) from 2005 to 2010.
The 2010 redistribution transferred South Ruislip, a strongly-Conservative area, into the Uxbridge constituency to create a new seat with the name of Uxbridge and South Ruislip. John Randall won its inaugural election with a majority of 11,216, which is the strongest Conservative performance in the constituency to date.
Sir John Randall retired from the Commons in 2015, the same year his department store closed down. The Uxbridge and South Ruislip Conservatives then broke the habit of a lifetime and selected a Conservative candidate who would not prove to be a quiet backbencher. At the time of the 2015 general election Boris Johnson was coming to the end of his second term as the only Conservative Mayor of London to date; after retiring from that role in 2016 he became foreign secretary from 2016 to 2018, then leader of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister from 2019.
This column would prefer not to dwell on what happened in 10 Downing Street during the Johnson premiership, on the basis that if you can’t say anything nice it’s better to say nothing at all. However, it’s not possible to talk about this by-election without explaining his downfall. What ultimately did for the Johnson premiership was this:
In this column’s edition of 12th December 2019, covering the undercard to his general election win, I concluded with the words:
In the Christian calendar, this general election falls smack in the middle of Advent, a time of waiting for the coming of the Messiah: both at Bethlehem two thousand years ago, and the future Second Coming. We wait to see whether our new Prime Minister is a new Messiah or a Very Naughty Boy, but one thing is certain: this will not be the Last Judgment of the electorate. Before too long the cycle will turn and there will be another election. That’s democracy. (Andrew’s Previews 2019, page 412.)
Four years on, this column would suggest another Biblical character to compare Boris Johnson to. Let’s go back to the quotation from the Book of Daniel which I started this piece with, here set to music by William Walton in an extract from his choral piece Belshazzar’s Feast:
The reason that the story of Belshazzar’s feast has been remembered through the millennia is not hard to seek. The feast itself was an offensive and provocative act in the eyes of the people, who were appalled at the behaviour of the ruler, his princes, his wives and his concubines. In the Biblical context, listen again to the disgust of the choir as they spit out the words “drank from the sacred vessels”, and imagine just how more provocative things got when Belshazzar used those sacred vessels to propose toasts to false gods.
The Great British public have long ago made their collective mind up that (a) hosting parties in 10 Downing Street when the rest of the country had been banned from doing so and you had personally told people not to do so, and (b) lying about it when the evidence of what you had done came out, is just as offensive, provocative, and disgusting. Johnson was eventually fined by the Metropolitan Police for attending some of those parties, and the opinion poll ratings for the Conservative party and for him personally took a nosedive from which they are yet to recover. He had repeatedly stated on the floor of the Commons that there had been no breaches of COVID-19 regulations in 10 Downing Street, and the Commons Privileges Committee launched an investigation into whether he had misled the House over the lockdown parties.
Belshazzar got his comeuppance: he saw the writing on the wall, and he had to have it explained to him that he had been weighed in the balance and found wanting. On the very night of the feast, Belshazzar’s reign was dramatically ended, presumably by the feast’s attendees — his supporters.
The Privileges Committee, which had a Conservative majority, weighed Boris Johnson’s conduct over “partygate” in the balance, found him wanting, and explained to him what the writing on the wall meant in a damning report which was sent to Johnson in June 2023. In that night his political career was over and he resigned from the House of Commons in disgrace; but not without one last broadside against the members of the Committee, who were not impressed. The published report shortly afterwards recommended that Johnson should have been suspended from the House for ninety days; since there was no point disciplining someone who had already left, Parliament instead voted to do pretty much the only sanction left available to them and stripped Boris Johnson of his former members’ Parliamentary pass.
So, the Uxbridge and South Ruislip Conservatives have a by-election to defend. At the last general election in December 2019 Boris Johnson, who was then prime minister, had been elected for a third term as the seat’s MP with 53% of the vote against 38% for Labour, a numerical majority of 7,210 votes. As often happens in Uxbridge, the two-party swing was low: 2% from Labour to Conservative, which underperformed the rest of the country. That’s pretty unusual in seats held by major party leaders, who tend to get a boost in their constituency as a result of their national profile.
This is a seat with a long Conservative pedigree not just in parliamentary elections but at regional and local level too. In 2021 the ward-level breakdown in the London Mayor and Assembly elections showed a big Conservative lead: the Conservatives’ mayoral candidate Shaun Bailey beat Sadiq Khan 53–25, while the party list-based London Members ballot gave 48% to the Conservatives, 26% to Labour and 10% to the Green Party. It should be noted that these figures are for on-the-day votes only, because postal votes were tallied at borough level.
The latest elections here were in May 2022 for Hillingdon council. This has been under Conservative leadership continuously since 1998 and has had a Conservative majority since 2006. The 2022 local elections, held under new boundaries with a cut in the number of councillors from 65 to 53, returned 30 Conservative councillors against 23 for Labour; most of the Labour councillors represent wards in the Hayes and Harlington constituency to the south, which is represented in Parliament by the former Shadow Chancellor and Brunel graduate John McDonnell. The ward and constituency boundaries no longer match up; if we take as a best fit the Hillingdon wards of Colham/Cowley, Eastcote, Hillingdon East, Hillingdon West, Ruislip Manor, South Ruislip, Uxbridge and Yiewsley, then last year the Conservatives polled 52% of the vote and won 18 seats while Labour polled 33% and won 3 seats. It’s fair to say that Hillingdon council’s Conservative administration is seen locally as relatively popular and generally competent.
So, that’s the scene for a by-election which has attracted a very large field of 17 candidates. Right at the bottom of this long ballot paper, thanks to his surname being at the wrong end of the alphabet, is the defending Conservative candidate Steve Tuckwell. He is a Hillingdon councillor who has represented South Ruislip ward since 2018; away from the council he works as a business performance consultant.
The Labour candidate is Danny Beales, who gives an address in the constituency but has cut his teeth in politics on Camden council in central London. He has been a Camden councillor since 2014; until being selected for this by-election he was that council’s cabinet member for new homes, jobs and community investment.
The only other party to save their deposit here in December 2019 was the Liberal Democrats, whose candidate is Blaise Baquiche. He describes himself as a committed environmentalist, and until recently he worked as a policy adviser at DEFRA.
The fact that this was the Prime Minister’s constituency in December 2019 meant that there were quite a lot of minor party and fringe candidates last time too. The Green Party, who placed fourth in 2019 with 2.2%, have indulged in some nominative determinism by selecting Sarah Green. UKIP were fifth last time with 283 votes, and their candidate Rebecca Jane will be hoping to improve on that despite the fact that she has a long way to come for the campaign — she gives an address in Lancashire. The Official Monster Raving Loony Party are defending sixth place with their party leader Howling Laud Hope, one of whose many, many previous election campaigns came in this constituency back in 2015. And the seventh-placed candidate from 2019 is back for another go: he, she or it is Count Binface, standing for the eponymous Count Binface Party. Binface also placed seventh here in the 2021 London mayoral election.
A number of other candidates from that London mayoral contest two years ago have also turned up on this ballot paper. In this category we have Lawrence Fox of Reclaim (5th), Richard Hewison of Rejoin EU (9th) and Piers Corbyn of Let London Live (10th). Other candidates here with party labels are Steve Gardner for the continuing SDP; Buckinghamshire councillor Ed Gemmell for the Climate Party, which he leads; and Enomfon Ntefon for the Christian Peoples Alliance. To complete the picture there are four independent candidates: “Kingsley Hamilton Anti Ulez” and “No Ulez Leo Phaure” have changed their names to indicate their opposition to the Ultra Low Emission Zone expansion, Cameron Bell has previously been a Conservative candidate in Hillingdon council elections, and Thomas Darwood appears on the ballot under his nom-de-plume “77 Joseph”. This piece has made allusions to the Book of Daniel; “77 Joseph” is an allusion to the Book of Exodus, and refers to the seven years of plenty and the seven years of famine under Joseph’s viziership of Egypt.
At the time of writing two published opinion polls of the seat have been attempted, with contrasting results. Lord Ashcroft Polls were in the field from 18 May to 2 June, before Boris Johnson’s resignation; they found a Conservative lead over Labour of 50–33. Somewhat later we have a constituency poll done over the period 26 June to 4 July by JL Partners for the website 38 Degrees, which had Labour in first place with 41% to the Conservatives’ 33%. Regular readers will be aware that the record of constituency polling in the UK is distinctly patchy, and there has been plenty of time for the result to change from that in any direction.
The future boundary changes leave this constituency relatively little changed, partly thanks to its position on the edge of Greater London. Some swaps will be made on the seat’s northern boundary with the Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner constituency, with Uxbridge and South Ruislip gaining the Ickenham area in exchange for Eastcote. This probably increases the notional Conservative majority over Labour, with estimates from Electoral Calculus giving a notional lead of 8,758 based on the December 2019 votes.
Boris Johnson’s career in elected office may be over, but we’ll be talking about the consequences of it for some time yet. As we shall see in the other parliamentary by-elections taking place today…
London Assembly constituency: Ealing and Hillingdon
Hillingdon wards: Colham and Cowley, Eastcote (part), Hillingdon East, Hillingdon West, Ickenham and South Harefield (small part), Ruislip (small part), Ruislip Manor (most), South Ruislip, Uxbridge, Yiewsley
ONS Travel to Work Area: Slough and Heathrow
Postcode districts: HA4, HA5, UB4, UB5, UB7, UB8, UB9, UB10
Kingsley Hamilton Anti Ulez (Ind)
Blaise Baquiche (LD)
Danny Beales (Lab)
Cameron Bell (Ind)
Count Binface (Count Binface Party)
Piers Corbyn (Let London Live)
Lawrence Fox (Reclaim)
Steve Gardner (SDP)
Ed Gemmell (Climate Party)
Sarah Green (Grn)
Richard Hewison (Rejoin EU)
Howling Laud Hope (Loony)
Rebecca Jane (UKIP)
77 Joseph (Ind)
Enomfon Ntefon (CPA)
No Ulez Leo Phaure (Ind)
Steve Tuckwell (C)
December 2019 result C 25351 Lab 18141 LD 3026 Grn 1090 UKIP 283 Loony 125 Binface 69 Utting 44 Yogenstein 23 Burke 22 Smith 8 Tobin 5
June 2017 result C 23716 Lab 18682 LD 1835 UKIP 1577 Grn 884
May 2015 result C 22511 Lab 11816 UKIP 6346 LD 2215 Grn 1414 TUSC 180 Thompson 84 Loony 72 Communities United 52 Eccentric Party 50 Doherty 39 Realists’ Party 18 Jackson 14
May 2010 result C 21758 Lab 10542 LD 8995 BNP 1396 UKIP 1234 Grn 477 EDP 403 NF 271
May 2021 GLA results (excludes postal voters)
Mayor: C 11493 Lab 5477 Grn 1389 LD 558 Reclaim 506 Omilana 482 Count Binface 273 London Real 244 Rejoin EU 174 Let London Live 155 UKIP 153 Animal Welfare 110 Heritage 110 Women’s Equality 106 Obunge 78 SDP 65 Farah London 59 Fosh 54 Renew 45 Burning Pink 40
London Member: C 10635 Lab 5748 Grn 2098 LD 859 Animal Welfare 422 UKIP 351 Rejoin EU 334 Women’s Equality 302 Reform UK 294 CPA 255 London Real 159 Heritage 131 Let London Live 117 TUSC 80 Comm 70 SDP 53 Londonpendence 46 National Liberal 25
Somerton and Frome
House of Commons; caused by the resignation of Conservative MP David Warburton.
After all that’s been going on in the previous piece, maybe it’s time to get out of London and escape to a small town in the country? Well, Frome comes recommended: according to the Sunday Times a couple of years back, this is the best place to live in the South West.
Perhaps it helps that this is one of those places which the Industrial Revolution rather passed by. In mediaeval times Frome was one of the most important towns in Somerset, as a centre for wool and textiles. Daniel Defoe, writing three centuries ago, described it as reckoned “to have more people in it, than the city of Bath, and some say, than even Salisbury itself”, and as “likely to be one of the greatest and wealthiest inland towns in England”. That might no longer be the case, but with nearly 29,000 residents Frome is a pretty important place which has cultivated a slightly “alternative” scene in recent years. It has a railway station, on a loop off the Westbury-Taunton line with regular trains to Bath and Bristol to the north and occasional services to London Paddington.
The railway line passes through the other town which gives its name to this constituency, although there is no longer a station there. With a population of under 5,000, Somerton is one of the smallest places currently namechecked in a constituency name: it’s never been a large town, but it was once the county town of Somerset and actually gave its name to the county.
In fact, Somerton isn’t even the second-largest town in the seat. That title instead goes to Wincanton, on the A303 road from London to Exeter. This name will be known to fans of horseracing, to fans of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld (Wincanton is twinned with Ankh-Morpork; yes, really; no, I am not making this up), and to stockbrokers. Wincanton plc is one of the UK’s largest logistics firms: it originated as the logistics arm of Cow and Gate Dairies, which had a major creamery in Wincanton. (Following a number of mergers, Cow and Gate Dairies itself is now part of the Irish food company Greencore; Cow and Gate baby food, however, is a Danone brand.)
This is a deeply-rural part of Somerset which is rather short on towns. The only other settlements in the Somerton and Frome constituency with over 2,000 souls are Langport, Castle Cary and Bruton. Langport can be found on the edge of the Somerset Levels at the western end of the seat; it was the site of an English Civil War battle in 1645 which saw the New Model Army essentially wipe out the last Cavalier field army. Castle Cary and Bruton are market towns roughly in the centre of the constituency. Castle Cary, which this column will be returning to next month, is also a railway junction and the main railhead for the Glastonbury Festival site (which is just outside the boundary of this seat). Bruton was the birthplace of the former Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, and his marriage to Thea here a couple of weeks ago was the society wedding of the year.
George Osborne may be Somerset-born, but his parliamentary career took place as MP for the Cheshire constituency of Tatton. That seat has a smaller Conservative majority than Somerton and Frome now, but that wasn’t the case in 2001 — as we shall see when we get to that point in the political history of this area.
Frome was one of the towns enfranchised by the First Reform Act of 1832. The 1831 census had found a population here of over 11,000, which was (wrongly) expected to increase. However, only 322 people here actually had the right to vote, and the first parliamentary election in Frome was not a good example for the future. It didn’t help that there was a lot of bad blood between the two candidates, Sir Thomas Champneys (later Mostyn-Champneys) and Thomas Sheppard. Champneys was the squire of nearby Orchardleigh, but he was in debt and neglected his estate; he was also unmarried, and his reputation was such that in 1820 he stood trial for sodomy, ultimately being found not guilty. He also owned slaves, which in 1832 was still legal but seriously controversial. Sheppard was firmly on the anti-slavery side, and he had been a key prosecution witness in Champneys’ 1820 sodomy trial. The two days of voting in Frome were marred by serious violence, most of which came from Champneys’ supporters: a Sheppard supporter died, a house was destroyed, the Riot Act was read out, and the Army had to be called in to restore order. Sheppard won the election by 163 votes to 100, and went on to serve for four terms as MP for Frome.
Sheppard’s successor, Robert Boyle, was unseated in 1852 by an election petition. The Commons committee which ruled on election petitions in those days decided that he was disqualified by virtue of being secretary of the Most Illustrious Order of St Patrick, the Irish equivalent of the Order of the Garter. (The last Knight of St Patrick died in 1974, but the Order has never been formally abolished and Charles III remains its Sovereign.) Boyle resigned his secretaryship and won the resulting Frome by-election unopposed. He died the following year from disease while serving in the Crimean War, and the resulting by-election returned his older brother Richard Boyle, Viscount Dungarvan. Richard succeeded to his father’s titles in 1856 and entered the Lords as the 9th Earl of Cork and Orrery; the resulting second Frome by-election returned yet another brother, William Boyle, who defeated the Radical candidate Donald Nicoll by one vote, 158 to 157. Nicoll got his revenge in the general election the following year.
The borough’s electorate was small enough that pressure could be brought to bear on the voters by the local aristocrats. In Frome’s case that meant the Marquess of Bath, whose seat at Longleat is nearby (although Longleat is over the county boundary in Wiltshire). As we shall see, a number of members of the Bath family have served as MP for Frome, starting with Lord Edward Thynne who defeated Donald Nicoll to serve as a Conservative MP here from 1859 to 1865. In 1868 Frome had a celebrity MP: the Liberals’ Thomas Hughes was a barrister who was prominent in the co-operative movement, but he is remembered today primarily for turning his education at Rugby School into the bestselling novel Tom Brown’s School Days.
Frome’s failure to become a great industrial town meant that it was disenfranchised by the Third Reform Act in 1885, which reduced Somerset’s representation from eleven MPs to ten. The Frome constituency instead became of Somerset’s seven county divisions: this was Somerset’s north-eastern constituency, stretching north from Frome to entirely surround the city of Bath. The outgoing Liberal MP for Frome Henry Samuelson was a late retirement from the Commons on health grounds: a rushed Liberal selection to replace him produced Lawrence Baker, a stockbroker who specialised in foreign bond dealings. On the new lines, Baker defeated the Conservative candidate Thomas Thynne in the 1885 general election by the rather narrow margin of 763 votes (4,735 to 3,972). The Liberal split shortly afterwards led to Baker being deselected as Liberal candidate in favour of Godfrey Samuelson, who was defeated by Thynne at the 1886 general election by 703 votes.
Known as this time as Viscount Weymouth, Thomas Thynne was the son and heir of the 4th Marquess of Bath. He had a minor ministerial career in the India Office under Balfour, and as Master of the Horse in the Bonar Law government during the days when that was a government rather than a ceremonial position; he also served for forty unbroken years as Lord-Lieutenant of Somerset and as chairman of Wiltshire county council.
However, this lay in the future when Weymouth lost his seat in 1892 to the Liberals’ John Barlow by 487 votes. Barlow’s business was trade with the Far East in tea, coffee, rubber and other commodities: he was the senior partner in the Manchester and London firm of Thomas Barlow and Brother, and also the senior partner in Barlow and Company which had offices in Calcutta, Shanghai and Singapore.
Viscount Weymouth defeated Barlow in the general election of 1895 — a good Conservative year — by 383 votes. The following year he succeeded to his father’s titles and entered the Lords as the 5th Marquess of Bath. The resulting third Frome by-election of 2nd June 1896 was Thynne v Barlow again, because the defending Conservative candidate was Bath’s younger brother Lord Alexander Thynne; however, John Barlow recovered his seat by 5,062 votes to 4,763. This is the point at which the Frome constituency’s merry-go-round stopped: although the seat remained marginal, Barlow went on to serve as as the MP here for 22 more years and was re-elected for four more terms of office.
That was the Frome constituency. However, in the 1885–1918 period most of the acreage and around half of the population of what’s now Somerton and Frome were in the East Somerset constituency, which took in all the other towns in the seat plus Shepton Mallet and Glastonbury. This was a much more right-wing seat than Frome, although it still returned a Liberal MP in 1885: that was Henry Hobhouse, who came from a local and rather radical family based in Castle Cary. Emily Hobhouse, the anti-war activist who drew attention to conditions in British concentration camps in the Boer War, was his sister; his sons included the pacifist and prison reformer Stephen Hobhouse and a Somerset MP we shall come to later, Arthur Hobhouse; and the socialist Beatrice Webb was Henry Hobhouse’s sister-in-law. (The current Somerset Lib Dem MP Wera Hobhouse is no relation: she is German, and Hobhouse is her married name.)
Henry Hobhouse’s passion was education. He drafted the controversial Education Act 1902, and he founded boarding schools for boys and girls in Bruton. The girls’ school closed down last year; but the bizarrely-named Sexey’s School in Bruton is still going: it’s now co-educational, and is very unusual in being a boarding school within the state sector. In 1902 Hobhouse also became the founding chairman of the Cider Institute.
Hobhouse was on the Liberal Unionist side of the 1886 split in the party, and went on to win East Somerset four times under his new political colours (without opposition in 1886 and 1900). He retired in 1906, the year of the Liberal landslide which swept away the Liberal Unionists in East Somerset. John Thompson, a solicitor, became the last Liberal MP for the seat; he stood for Parliament six times, but this was his only win.
The Liberal Unionists comfortably defeated Thompson to take the East Somerset seat back in January 1910. Their new MP was Ernest Jardine, a businessman from Nottingham who had taken over the family’s lace manufacturing firm. Jardine’s had a factory in Shepton Mallet, and Ernest had got into the locals’ good books in 1907 by buying Glastonbury Abbey at auction for £30,000. He immediately sold the Abbey on to the Church of England, effectively saving its ruins for the nation.
The retirement of Ernest Jardine and John Barlow in 1918 coincided with a major redrawing of Somerset’s constituency boundaries. The county was cut from ten MPs to seven, the East Somerset constituency disappeared, and during the period 1918–50 what’s now the Somerton and Frome seat was split roughly evenly between three constituencies. The western end, including Somerton and Langport, was transferred to the Yeovil constituency which was the only seat in Somerset to return Conservative MPs throughout this period.
Yeovil’s first MP was Aubrey Herbert, who had won the predecessor seat of South Somerset at a by-election in 1911. Herbert was from an aristocratic family: he was born at Highclere Castle, or Downton Abbey as TV viewers know it today. Despite his extremely poor eyesight he travelled extensively in the Orient, and was reportedly offered the throne of Albania. Twice. Herbert’s knowledge of the Turkish language proved useful in the 1915 Gallipoli campaign, when as an ANZAC liaison officer he negotiated an eight-hour ceasefire with the Turkish commander Mustafa Kemal (yes, that Kemal), to allow both sides to bury their dead. He received the Coalition coupon for Yeovil in the 1918 general election and won easily, being re-elected for a third term in 1922.
Unfortunately, by this point Aubrey Herbert had gone totally blind. It’s fair to say that the medical advice he received about this was not good: the doctors recommended restoring his sight by having all his teeth extracted. Talk about giving your eye teeth. But far from restoring Herbert’s sight, the dental operation instead gave him blood poisoning, and he died in September 1923 at the age of just 43.
For the resulting Yeovil by-election, held on 30th October 1923, Labour reselected William Kelly (a trade union officer and engineer), while the Liberals intervened with a strong showing from their candidate, barrister Charles Waley Cohen. The resulting split in the opposition vote ensured a large majority for the defending Conservative candidate Major George Davies, who had been born in Hawaii and was briefly British vice-consul in his native Honolulu. All three candidates returned five weeks later for the 1923 general election, in which Davies was re-elected and Waley Cohen took second place.
Sir George Davies went on to serve as MP for Yeovil for 22 years, only being seriously threatened in 1929 when he had a majority of 847 votes over the Liberals. He retired in 1945, when the Tories held Yeovil very narrowly: the new MP Lt-Col William Kingsmill, a soldier and businessman, defeated the Labour candidate Malcolm MacPherson by just 174 votes. (MacPherson later had a long Parliamentary career as Labour MP for Stirling and Falkirk.)
The Frome constituency of 1918–50 was a lot more left-wing, partly because Frome wasn’t typical of it. The seat surrounded the city of Bath as before, but was expanded to take on the Somerset coalfield around Midsomer Norton and to run up to the edge of Bristol: that’s the edge of Bristol as it was in 1918, and by 1950 Bristol city council had annexed a corner of the Frome constituency and filled that corner with a large number of council houses.
This made the Frome constituency a Conservative-Labour marginal throughout the inter-war period. The 1918 election result set the scene for what was to come. Sir John Barlow, the outgoing Liberal MP for Frome, finished in third place and lost his deposit; and Labour’s Edward Gill, a coalminer from south Wales who had been seriously wounded at Mametz Wood in the First World War, finished just 664 votes behind the Conservative candidate Parcy Hurd. A rematch between Hurd and Gill in 1922 saw Hurd win by 706 votes, which was actually closer in percentage terms.
Percy Hurd was a journalist who started a political dynasty: his son Anthony Hurd, his grandson Douglas Hurd and his great-grandson Nick Hurd (who we saw earlier in Ruislip-Northwood) have all served on the green benches. Douglas Hurd recalled his grandfather as not being very political, with the remark “he used to go round villages in Wiltshire telling funny stories”. That was after he was MP for Frome: Hurd was elected as MP for the safer Conservative territory of Devizes after he lost his seat in Frome in 1923.
Frederick Gould was elected in 1923 as the first Labour MP for Frome, lost his seat in 1924, got it back in 1929 and lost it again in 1931. He was a local man who worked in a boot factory in Midsomer Norton, was elected to Radstock urban district council, and rose within the National Union of Boot and Shoe Operatives. In between Gould’s two terms, Frome was represented from 1924 to 1929 by the businessman and Conservative MP Geoffrey Peto.
In 1931 Gould lost his seat for the second time, to the Conservatives’ Henry Thynne. Yes, it’s that surname again: Henry was the son and heir of the former Frome Conservative MP Thomas Thynne, the fifth Marquess of Bath, and at this point he had the title of Viscount Weymouth. As the sixth Marquess of Bath, Henry opened Longleat to the public (mainly in order to raise the money to pay death duties after his father died), developed the safari park, and amassed a large collection of paintings by Adolf Hitler (now there was a painter! he could paint a whole apartment in one afternoon! two coats!) together with a copy of Van Klomp’s Fallen Madonna with the Big Boobies. But all this lay in the future: in 1931 Viscount Weymouth was a 26-year-old Bright Young Thing, and he would not inherit the marquessate until 1946. He served one term before standing down from the Commons in 1935.
This column has written quite a few of these deep dives into MPs of the past, and one theme which comes up over and over again is that it’s a very, very male list. So it comes as a refreshing change to talk about a female pre-war MP for once. Mavis Tate had been elected in the 1931 Conservative landslide as MP for Willesden West in Middlesex; that was normally a safe-Labour seat, so in 1935 she sought the Conservative selection for safer territory in Frome. Well, not that much safer: her majority was just 994 votes over Labour. In Parliament Tate campaigned for women’s rights, particularly for equal pay with men.
Mavis Tate lost her seat in the 1945 Attlee landslide to Walter Farthing. He was a long-serving Bridgwater councillor, and an officer of the Transport and General Workers’ Union. Farthing only served one term, as the Frome constituency disappeared in the 1950 redistribution.
In the period 1918–50 the other third of what became Somerton and Frome — Wincanton, Bruton and Castle Cary — was part of the Wells parliamentary seat, which took on a lot of the abolished East Somerset in the 1918 redistribution. That created a constituency which started off as a close Conservative versus Liberal contest, although the Tories normally had the upper hand. The first MP during this period was the Conservatives’ Harry Greer, who had won a by-election in the London constituency of Clapham earlier in the year before being displaced by boundary changes. Greer was a businessman focused on trade with the Far East, and he had travelled around the world several times on business. He was knighted during his term of office in Wells for his role as chairman of the Lord Roberts Memorial Workshops, which provided employment for wounded ex-servicemen — of whom there were a lot in the early 1920s.
Sir Harry Greer passed the Wells seat on in the 1922 election to Robert Bruford, a Somerset county councillor who had served for fifteen years as chairman of Taunton rural district council. He was a farmer who also ran a brewery on the side, and his election campaign was sponsored by the National Farmers Union. The NFU might not have been too pleased that Bruford’s maiden speech in Parliament was in support of a Bill to permit imports of livestock from Canada.
Bruford lost his seat in Wells after just a year, when the 1923 general election here was won by the Liberal candidate with a majority of 909 votes. At this point we bring back onto the stage Arthur Hobhouse, whose father Henry had previously been a Liberal MP for East Somerset. Arthur Hobhouse is remembered today as the founder of England and Wales’ National Parks, because many years later he chaired the National Parks committee which proposed to the Attlee government that twelve areas of England and Wales be designated as such. With the designation of the South Downs in 2010, Hobhouse’s proposals have now been implemented in full. At this point in time Arthur Hobhouse was a solicitor who had served in the British Expeditionary Force during the war.
It took a high-profile candidate for the Cosnervatives to dislodge Hobhouse at the 1924 general election. Sir Robert Sanders had entered Parliament in January 1910 as the Conservative MP for Bridgwater, served with distinction in the war as a lieutenant-colonel with the North Devon Yeomanry, and then quickly climbed the greasy pole of government. He had joined the Cabinet in 1922 as minister of agriculture and fisheries, but his ministerial career was terminated when he lost his seat in Bridgwater in 1923. Sanders returned to the Commons by comfortably defeating Hobhouse the following year, but never held high office again.
In 1929 Sir Robert Sanders was translated to the House of Lords (as the first Lord Bayford), and the Conservatives’ Anthony Muirhead defeated Arthur Hobhouse by 644 votes to become the fifth MP for Wells in as many elections. Muirhead was a soldier with a stellar war record, who had won an MC in 1917 and a bar to his MC at Armentières the following year. He was re-elected in 1931 and 1935, and started to climb the greasy pole of government under Neville Chamberlain. When the Second World War broke out, he was a junior minister in the India Office.
Muirhead had never fully left the forces, and by September 1939 he was a lieutenant-colonel in the Territorial Army commanding the 63rd (Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars) Anti-Tank Regiment of the Royal Artillery. He was also 48 years old and had an injured leg. On 29th October 1939 he committed suicide, apparently fearful that his injury would prevent him taking an active part in the war.
The resulting Wells by-election of 13th December 1939 fell under the wartime political truce, and the Conservative candidate Dennis Boles was elected unopposed. Boles was an Army officer, who had won the Sword of Honour as the best of his intake at Sandhurst, and ended up as lieutenant-colonel of the Royal Horse Guards. His innings of 183 for Eton in the 1904 Eton v Harrow match is still a record for that fixture, and he was also a skilled polo player. Once the war was over Boles was re-elected as MP for Wells with a majority of 2,465 over Labour, who pushed the Liberals into third place here for the first time. (The unlucky Liberal candidate who achieved this was Lady Violet Bonham Carter, daughter of the former prime minister Herbert Asquith and grandmother of the actress Helena Bonham Carter.)
The 1950 redistribution maintained seven constituencies for Somerset, but major changes had to be made in the north of the county to accommodate the growth of the city of Bristol. The Frome constituency was radically redrawn with the name North Somerset, and it no longer included Frome which was transferred into the Wells constituency. That makes Wells the main predecessor seat for Somerton and Frome, although Somerton itself was still in the Yeovil seat until 1983.
During the period 1950–83 Wells was consistently a Conservative-held seat but was rarely safe, with Labour finishing a strong second until 1970 and the Liberals in a strong second place thereafter. Dennis Boles was re-elected for a third and final term in 1950 by 2,626 votes, before standing down in 1951.
His replacement also had a noted military career. Lieutenant-Commander Lynch Maydon had commanded Royal Navy submarines during the Second World War, and he was responsible for one of the biggest single losses of life in that war when his submarine HMS Tradewind torpedoed the dangerously-overloaded Japanese prison ship Jun’yō Maru off Sumatra in September 1944. More than 5,000 of those on board, most of whom were Javanese slave labourers or Dutch prisoners of war, drowned. Lynch Maydon was South African by birth — his father had served on the legislative assembly for Natal — and he proved his right-wing credentials in the Commons in 1968 by claiming to be the only member of the House who supported apartheid.
Lynch Maydon retired from the Commons in 1970 — he died shortly afterwards — and passed the Wells seat on to another Tory MP in the same military/right-wing vein. Robert Boscawen had won an MC in the Second World War, doing so in October 1944 as a 21-year-old tank commander during the defence of the Nijmegen bridgehead. He was seriously burned in the last month of the war when a shell hit his tank, and spent three years in hospital as a member of the “Guinea Pig Club” before joining his family’s Cornish china-clay business. Boscawen had actually sought election in his native Cornwall before ending up here, but after two failed tilts at Falmouth and Camborne in the 1960s the local party decided that his Monday Club membership was sending out the wrong signal to the radical voters they needed to win over, and they ditched him.
At Boscawen’s final re-election as MP for Wells in 1979, he defeated two future parliamentarians. In third place was Paul Murphy, a future Labour cabinet member who served as MP for Torfaen from 1987 to 2015. Finishing last was Alexander Thynn (yes, that name again), then known as Viscount Weymouth and the future 7th Marquess of Bath (you might remember him as the crazy one with loads of women), who polled just 155 votes as a Wessex Regionalist candidate.
During the period 1950–83 Somerton and Langport were still part of the Yeovil parliamentary seat, which was represented for all but one year of this period by the Conservative MP John Peyton. He had spent most of the Second World War as a prisoner after being captured in Belgium in 1940 while serving with the British Expeditionary Force; he used the time to study law, and was called to the Bar when he got back to Britain in 1945. Peyton was yet another Monday Club rightwinger, but unlike his Somerset colleagues Lynch Mayton and Robert Boscawen he achieved high political office: he served as transport minister throughout the Heath administration, in which he role he made helmets compulsory for motorcyclists and privatised Thomas Cook.
John Peyton then went on to serve in the Shadow Cabinet throughout the Labour government of 1974–79, as shadow leader of the Commons and then shadow agriculture minister. He was a candidate in the 1975 Conservative leadership election, joining the action in the second ballot where he finished fifth and last with eleven votes, a long way behind Margaret Thatcher’s winning score of 146. When the Conservatives came to power in 1979, Thatcher offered Peyton his old job at transport: he turned it down, and he was the only member of Thatcher’s shadow cabinet to go to the backbenches.
Peyton’s final re-election as MP for Yeovil in 1979 came with a large majority over the Liberal candidate Paddy Ashdown, a former Royal Marine and intelligence officer. Ashdown failed to squeeze the vote for the Labour candidate Ian Luder, whom we met last week on his retirement as an Alderman of the City of London.
The boundary changes of 1983 had to contend with the creation of the short and unloved county of Avon, which took the northern edge off Somerset (including the city of Bath) and a large number of its voters. The rump Somerset county council area was divided into five constituencies, one of which was a brand-new seat called Somerton and Frome. With some minor changes around the edges, this is the seat we have today. Robert Boscawen’s old Wells constituency was effectively split in half, and he chose to contest the new seat of Somerton and Frome rather than the seat which kept the name Wells. He became the first MP for Somerton and Frome in 1983, defeating the SDP candidate by 9,227 votes, and was re-elected in 1987 by a similar margin. At this point he was in the Whips office, before returning to the backbenches in 1988. Robert Boscawen retired from the Commons in 1992, as the last serving MP to have won a Military Cross in the Second World War.
In 1992 Boscawen passed the Somerton and Frome constituency on to Mark Robinson, who appeared in one of this column’s by-election deep dives five years ago: he was the Conservative MP for Newport West in the 1983–87 Parliament. Robinson was from a Bristol family prominent in business and sport: his father John Robinson ran a paper and packaging company, while his grandfather Sir Foster Robinson had been captain of the Gloucestershire cricket team. Before entering the Commons the first time Mark Robinson had worked for six years for the UN and for a further six years for the Commonwealth; after losing his seat the first time he joined the board of the Commonwealth Development Corporation. He returned to the Commons in 1992 with a majority of 4,341 over the Liberal candidate, David Heath.
The 1997 landslide against the Conservatives saw them hold only one of Somerset’s five constituencies, Bridgwater. The other four seats all went to the Liberal Democrats, including Somerton and Frome which was gained by David Heath. It was a very close result: Heath polled 22,684 votes against Robinson’s 22,554, giving a Lib Dem majority of 130.
This was the first of four knife-edge wins for David Heath, who won four terms as (to date) the only Liberal Democrat MP for Somerton and Frome with majorities of 130, 668, 812, and finally 1,817 votes. That final result came in the 2010 general election, the first on the current boundaries, against Conservative candidate Annunziata Rees-Mogg (Sir Jacob’s sister) who later briefly became a Brexit Party MEP. Outside politics Heath was an optometrist: before seeking election to Parliament he was the leader of Somerset county council from 1985 to 1989, taking on the position at the age of just 31. In his final parliamentary term he served as a junior minister in the Coalition government, with responsibility for agriculture and food.
Upon David Heath’s retirement in 2015 Somerton and Frome suddenly snapped back to being a safe Conservative seat. The replacement Lib Dem candidate David Rendel (who had been MP for Newbury from 1993 to 2005) was trounced in the election, losing by over 20,000 votes to the new Conservative candidate David Warburton. The Conservatives increased their share of the vote by 8.5 percentage points, making Somerton and Frome one of their best results of the 2015 general election.
David Warburton got his career big break through music, playing in a number of rock bands before studying composition at the Royal College of Music and at King’s College London, where Sir Harrison Birtwistle was his supervisor. After spending five years as a music teacher Warburton moved into the technology side of music, focusing on the growing market of mobile phones: in 2007 the Sunday Times listed his company Pitch Entertainment as the UK’s sixth-fastest-growing technology company. The following year Warburton sold Pitch Entertainment to an American firm for an undisclosed sum.
In 2019 Warburton won his third term of office in Somerton and Frome, defeating the Lib Dem candidate Adam Boyden by 56% to 26% with a reduced numerical majority of 19,213. Then, in 2022, this photograph was published by the Sunday Times:
There are two lessons here which you need to learn, kids. First, don’t do drugs; second, if you do something which might be construed as illegal or borderline illegal, maybe having somebody photograph you in the act is not a good idea. But in these days where everybody has a camera, that’s becoming more and more difficult to avoid. Just ask Boris Johnson.
This photograph of David Warburton with cocaine was taken in February 2022 and came to light two months later alongside allegations of sexual harassment by him. Warburton was referred to Parliament’s Independent Complaints and Grievance Scheme, had the Conservative whip suspended, and suffered a breakdown severe enough that he was admitted to a psychiatric hospital.
The investigation into David Warburton does appear to have been a bit of a mess which has satisfied nobody. The initial report from the ICGS upheld two allegations of sexual misconduct, to which the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards added a third count after reviewing the evidence. Warburton appealed against those decisions, and in July 2023 Parliament’s Independent Expert Panel sent the whole thing back to the ICGS and asked them to start again. In the meantime, David Warburton announced his resignation from the Commons in June 2023, apologising for the cocaine use but continuing to deny the harassment allegations. With the ball back in the IGCS’ court, they decided to drop the investigation earlier this week; no reason was given for this on grounds of confidentiality, but there doesn’t seem to be much point in disciplining someone who has already left.
Until this year, Somerton and Frome took in parts of two local government districts, Mendip (which included Frome) and South Somerset (which took on the seat’s other main towns). Both of these districts were swept away in April in an effective takeover of Somerset’s local government by the county council. If this was intended as a Conservative takeover, it didn’t work out that way: the Somerset county council election in 2022 resulted in the Liberal Democrats gaining control.
The division and constituency boundaries don’t match up. If we take as a best fit for the constituency the county divisions wholly in the seat plus Castle Cary, Martock and Mendip South, then the 2022 local elections here gave 39% of the vote to the Liberal Democrats, 32% to the Conservatives and 16% to the Green Party, who are particularly strong in Frome. In councillor terms that was 12 seats for the Lib Dems, 6 Conservatives and 4 Greens. For those who remember back to the near the start of this Preview, I can report that the Hobhouse family of Castle Cary are still going and still involved in local politics: Henry Hobhouse, a descendant of the 19th-century Liberal MP for East Somerset of the same name, is the Liberal Democrat councillor for Castle Cary. That division’s Conservative councillor has recently died, so the voters of Castle Cary will be called out for a further by-election in three weeks’ time.
Before then we have a parliamentary seat to fill. Defending for the Conservatives is Faye Purbrick, who is a Somerset councillor for Yeovil South division (which is not part of this constituency) and sat on the Somerset county council cabinet until the Conservatives lost control last year. Away from politics she runs a consulting business.
Another Somerset councillor on the ballot is the Lib Dems’ Sarah Dyke, who represents the Blackmoor Vale ward in this constituency: this is a deeply rural area south of Wincanton, centred on the village of Templecombe on the Salisbury-Yeovil railway line. Dyke sits on the Somerset council cabinet, holding the environment and climate change portfolio. At the time of writing, she is the bookies’ favourite.
Third here in December 2019 were Labour, who start on 12.9% of the vote. They have changed candidate to Neil Guild, a civil engineer and Iraq veteran who is based in Taunton. He wasn’t a Somerset council candidate last year — his LinkedIn profile suggests he works for the council, which would explain that — but he has previously stood for Parliament, contesting the Taunton Deane constituency in 2015. This selection hasn’t gone down well with Labour’s 2019 candidate here Sean Dromgoole, who has left the party in a huff.
All four candidates for Somerton and Frome last time saved their deposit, although only just in the case of the Green Party who polled 5.1%. They have a high-profile local candidate in Martin Dimery, a retired drama teacher who has been creative director of the Frome Festival for 15 years. He was re-elected last year as a county councillor for Frome West, and he leads the Green group on Somerset council.
There are four other candidates standing in this by-election whom I shall take in alphabetical order. Lorna Corke sat as a UKIP member of Sedgemoor council from 2015 to 2019 representing Highbridge and Burnham Marine ward; she is standing here with the nomination of the Christian Peoples Alliance. Reform UK have selected Bruce Evans, who is a businessman based in Somerton. Rosie Mitchell, a railway conductor and RMT member, is standing as an independent candidate on a left-wing platform. Last on the ballot paper is Peter Richardson, a military veteran and retired pilot who contested Somerton in last year’s county elections: he is the UKIP candidate.
Looking forward, whoever wins this by-election will have a choice to make when the next general comes around because Somerton and Frome is being split up by the forthcoming boundary review. Just over half of the seat — Somerton, Castle Cary, Bruton and Wincanton — will take in Glastonbury from the current Wells constituency to form a new seat of Glastonbury and Somerton. The Frome area will then form the basis for a completely new seat called Frome and East Somerset, which will expand north to take in Midsomer Norton and Radstock from the current North East Somerset constituency. In December 2019 conditions both of these would have been safe Conservative seats — but we’re no longer in December 2019 conditions.
Two down, one to go. Now it’s time to head north for our final parliamentary by-election of the day…
Somerset council divisions: Blackmoor Vale, Castle Cary (part: all except Chilton Cantelo, Mudford, and Yeovilton and District parishes), Curry Rivel and Langport, Frome East, Frome North, Martock (part: Ash, Long Load and Martock parishes), Mendip Central and East, Mendip Hills (part: Holcombe and Kilmersdon parishes), Mendip South (part: all except Pilton parish), Somerton, South Petherton and Islemoor (part: Barrington, Hambridge and Wesport, Ilton, Isle Abbotts, Isle Brewers, Puckington and Stocklinch parishes), Wincanton and Bruton
ONS Travel to Work Area: Yeovil (Somerton, Langport, Castle Cary, Bruton and Wincanton areas), Street and Wells (countryside generally between Frome and Bruton), Trowbridge (Frome area)
Postcode districts: BA2, BA3, BA4, BA6, BA7, BA8, BA9, BA10, BA11, BA13, BA22, DT9, DT10, TA3, TA7, TA10, TA11, TA12, TA13, TA19
December 2019 result C 36230 Lab 17017 Lab 8354 Grn 3295
June 2017 result C 36231 LD 13325 Lab 10998 Grn 2347 Ind 991
May 2015 result C 31960 LD 11692 UKIP 6439 Grn 5434 Lab 4419 Ind 365
May 2010 result LD 28793 C 26976 Lab 2675 UKIP 1932 Ind 236
Selby and Ainsty
House of Commons; caused by the resignation of Conservative MP Nigel Adams.
In a sense, any by-election is a “black swan” event — something which happens unpredictably and whose outcome may well come as a surprise. We have three parliamentary by-elections today, so presumably that’s three swans. Which is appropriate, because legend has it that’s how the town of Selby was founded.
The story as told starts in the early fifth century in France with St Germain, who was bishop of Auxerre. He travelled to Britain in 429, shortly after the Romans had left, to combat a form of peculiarly British heresy known as Pelagianism. St Germain wasn’t forgotten in Auxerre, and an abbey grew up there which was dedicated to him.
In the late 1060s a monk at Auxerre Abbey called Benedict had a dream, in which St Germain commanded him to go to England and build a monastery at a place where he saw three swans swimming. Benedict took with him one of St Germain’s relics, a finger bone. After some time wandering throughout England, he came to a sharp bend on the lower reaches of the Yorkshire Ouse and saw three swans swimming. Under an oak tree nearby, Benedict of Auxerre set up his cross in or around 1069 and founded Selby Abbey.
There was a piece of good timing involved here. This was early in the reign of William the Conqueror, at a time when the new Norman king was nearby running a savage military campaign known as the Harrying of the North. His wife Queen Matilda was pregnant again, and in 1068 or 1069 she gave birth to a son, Henry; this birth is generally claimed to have happened at Selby. Whatever the truth of this is, King William and Queen Matilda immediately became patrons of the new Selby Abbey. In time, through a combination of good luck, military acumen and porphyrogeniture (being “born in the purple”, unlike his older brothers), their baby son would rule England and Normandy as King Henry I.
The nave and chancel of Selby Abbey survived the Dissolution of the Monasteries intact, to become the town’s parish church. It’s one of the finest churches in England, larger than a number of cathedrals and with a history to match. Much of the fixtures and fittings are from the twentieth century, a result of a major fire in 1906; but the stonework is recognisably Norman. The windows of Selby Abbey include the Washington Window, a piece of fifteenth-century stained glass featuring a shield of three red stars above two red stripes: this was the coat of arms of the Washington family, and is now the flag of the District of Columbia over the pond. And the Abbey has a modern-day distinction: in 1969 it became the first parish church to host the Royal Maundy service, which normally takes place in a cathedral or a Royal Peculiar. The only other parish church to do so to date is Tewkesbury Abbey, in 1971.
The Abbey spawned a town around it, which became an important market centre for the local countryside. The River Ouse is navigable south of York, and shipbuilding became an important indsutry in Selby. Perhaps the most famous vessel to be launched from Cochrane’s shipyard here was Greenpeace’s former ship Rainbow Warrior II, which started life in 1957 as a deep-sea trawler called Ross Kashmir.
For centuries the only way over the river was by ferry, but that changed in 1791 with the opening of the Selby Toll Bridge which was the first bridge over the Ouse south of York. This is not a fixed link: in order to allow river traffic to pass, it’s a swing bridge. The toll of 7p per crossing lasted until 1991, when North Yorkshire county council bought out the bridge owners and immediately abolished the toll charges. At a stroke, this eased the town’s chronic traffic problems. A bypass for Selby, which features another swing bridge over the Ouse, took most through traffic out of the town centre a decade or so later.
The railway bridge slightly downstream of the Selby Toll Bridge is also a swing bridge. This is located just to the north of Selby’s railway station which is a stop for a number of intercity trains, mostly those going to or from Hull. Until 1983 the Selby swing bridge also carried the East Coast Main Line between London and York, but no longer. To see the reason for that, we have to look underground.
The Selby coalfield was one of the last UK coalfields to be exploited, with extraction starting in the 1980s and peaking in 1993–94 at 12 million tonnes a year. Kellingley Colliery, which closed in 2015, was the last deep coal mine in the UK. It was originally intended that coalmining would keep Selby’s economy going well into the 22nd century, but geological and political problems put paid to that idea. Nonetheless the National Coal Board did pay for the East Coast Main Line between Doncaster and York to be diverted on a new high-speed route to the west of Selby, well away from areas which could be subject to mining subsidence. Some of the abandoned railway alignment to the east of Selby has been reused for a road bypass of Barlby.
Where did all that coal go? Well, most of it went into three massive power stations in the area: Ferrybridge (just outside the constituency boundary), Eggborough and Drax. The first two of these are gone now, but Drax is still going strong. At full power Drax is capable of providing 6% of Great Britain’s electricity supply, although it doesn’t run at full power these days: coal-burning here has now ceased in favour of generating electricity from biomass, which basically involves burning wood pellets. Eggborough power station may have disappeared, but the adjacent Saint-Gobain glass factory is still going strong and has recently had its float-glass furnace rebuilt and upgraded at a cost of £30 million.
Selby hit the headlines on the early morning of 28th February 2001 because of the UK’s worst railway disaster of this century. This actually happened some miles south of Selby at the village of Great Heck, where the East Coast Main Line crosses underneath the M62 motorway. A car and trailer driven by a sleep-deprived driver left the motorway, slid down the embankment and came to rest on the southbound track of the railway, where it was hit by a Newcastle to London express. The express train partially derailed but stayed upright and kept going down at speed the tracks for nearly half a mile, before colliding with a coal train going the other way. Four traincrew and six passengers were killed. Gary Hart, the driver of the car, was sentenced to five years in prison for causing death by dangerous driving.
The countryside around Selby has often been fought over, most notably in 1461 near the village of Towton. On Palm Sunday, in blizzard conditions, the Wars of the Roses culminated in possibly the bloodiest battle ever fought on English soil: the Yorkist forces under the charismatic Edward, Duke of York routed the Lancastrian army loyal to King Henry VI. Henry fled the country as a result, and Edward assumed the throne as King Edward IV. The battlefield site has changed little over the last 550 years, but one memorial on the site is this fifteenth-century piece of stonework known as Dacre’s Cross.
Towton is not far south of this constituency’s second-largest town. Tadcaster lies on the main road from York to Leeds and was historically the lowest crossing-point of the River Wharfe; today it’s a brewing centre, the home of both John Smith’s (right) and Samuel Smith’s (left) breweries. And not much else, really: on my research visit I had a hard time finding anything open on a Saturday afternoon.
Crossing the bridge over the Wharfe at Tadcaster brings us into the former wapentake of Ainsty, a rural area to the west of York. This had some rather unusual administrative arrangements in mediaeval times, being controlled by the city of York and thus outside the Yorkshire riding sytem — until 1836, when the Ainsty officially became part of the West Riding. In 1644 the Ainsty was the scene of another bloody battle in another civil war, as Cavilier forces were defeated by the combined Parliamentarians and Scottish Covenanters at the Battle of Marston Moor; this effectively cost the Royalists the north of England.
Some indication of the Ainsty’s rural nature can be seen from a trip to Hammerton railway station, on the line from York to Harrogate. This is so thoroughly unmodernised that the signalman has to walk out into the road to open and close the level crossing gates, while the points and signals are controlled from ten levers on the station platform. The wooden shelter which protects the levers and other equipment from the weather, seen here painted in Northern Rail blue, is unique on the railway network and is Grade II listed. Hammerton has recently had its train service doubled, with departures now twice an hour to York and Harrogate.
Some new houses have sprouted up next to Hammerton station in recent years, and there may be more of this to come. Cattal, the next station up the line towards Harrogate, is proposed to become the centre for a new village called Maltkiln with around 3,000 homes, which would be by far the largest settlement in the Ainsty if it ever gets off the ground.
Selby has only been namechecked in a parliamentary seat since 1983, but there has in fact been a constituency based on the town ever since single-member constituencies became the norm in 1885. But for 98 years after that, the constituency covering Selby had a much more curious name.
With 290 electors on the roll, Barkston Ash — a village on the main road running south from Tadcaster — is one of the smallest settlements ever mentioned in a constituency name. However, the constituency name wasn’t really a reference to the village but to the ancient West Riding wapentake of that name, whose meeting place was an ash tree here which was said to mark the centre of Yorkshire.
As well as Selby and the parts of Tadcaster west of the river, the original Barkston Ash constituency stretched west into what is now West Yorkshire: it took in Wetherby, Garforth and a fair chunk of what is now the built-up area of eastern Leeds, including Roundhay Park. This was a safe Conservative seat which from its 1885 creation was represented by Sir Robert Gunter, 1st Baronet. A Crimean War veteran, Gunter had become rich through property development: his family gave their name to the Gunter Estate in the Kensington area of London, which was laid out by him in the 1860s and 1870s. After that Robert Gunter settled in Yorkshire and he was elected to Parliament by winning the Knaresborough by-election in 1884; but Knaresborough was disenfranchised by the following year’s redistribution, and Gunter transferred here. There were certainly seats to go round in Yorkshire: the boundary changes of 1885 had awarded the county fourteen new MPs. In 1885 Gunter defeated the Liberal candidate and future Chesterfield MP Thomas Bayley by 63–37, and in his four subsequent re-elections he was only challenged once, in 1892.
Sir Robert Gunter’s health started to fail in the early 1900s. In 1903 he gave his constituency party notice that he would stand down at the next general election, but he died in September 1905 at the age of 73 with that Parliament still going on. By this point the Conservative government of Arthur Balfour was extremely unpopular thanks to a number of controversial policies, including the question of tariff reform versus free trade, and the opposition Liberals had already gained six seats in by-elections that year.
The Barkston Ash by-election of 13th October 1905 pitted the defending Conservative candidate George Lane-Fox (a great-great-uncle of the Lastminute.com entrepreneur Martha Lane Fox) against the Liberals’ Joseph Andrews. Both of them were in their 30s and had been called to the Bar, with Andrews based in Leeds and Lane-Fox being a West Riding county councillor. In a huge upset, Andrews defeated Lane-Fox by 4,376 votes to 4,148, a majority of 228 votes. However, Andrews served for only a couple of months before the Balfour government resigned and the incoming Liberals called an immediate general election for January and February 1906; in the rematch, counter to the Liberal landslide of that year, Lane-Fox defeated Andrews by 4,894 votes to 4,246. Barkston Ash voted Conservative at every election thereafter.
This sequence of events gives Liberal MP Joseph Andrews a very unusual distinction. He is one of 93 people who have been elected to Parliament since 1900 but never took their seats. Of those, 84 were either members of Sinn Féin (69 of them elected in 1918) or otherwise stood on an abstentionist ticket; five died before they had the had the chance to take their seats (one of whom was elected posthumously), and the ill-fated Bobby Sands arguably falls in both of thosc categories. That leaves just Andrews and Henry Compton, a Conservative who won the New Forest by-election on the day after the Balfour government fell. Parliament had been prorogued in August 1905 and did not meet again until after the 1906 general election was over; Andrews and Compton both lost their seats in 1906, and so they never sat in Parliament.
George Lane-Fox went on to have a long career as MP for Barkston Ash. He owned the stately home of Bramham Park, which was then part of the constituency, and restored it to a habitable condition: Bramham Park is still owned and run by his descendants. He served with distinction in the First World War with the Yorkshire Hussars, being wounded and mentioned in despatches. After the war was over he entered government, serving as Secretary for Mines in the Bonar Law and Baldwin governments of the 1920s. His constituency was redrawn in 1918, losing areas which had been annexed by Leeds but gaining the Ainsty (which had previously been part of the Thirsk and Malton seat), together with areas which are now York’s western suburbs.
Lane-Fox retired at the 1931 general election, entering the Lords two years later as the first Lord Bingley of the third creation. He had been run fairly close in 1929 by the Labour candidate Revd George Woods, who contested an impressive range of constituencies all over the country during his lifetime; Barkston Ash in 1929 was his first contest, and he later served as MP for Finsbury, Mossley and Droylsden. Woods stood again in Barkston Ash in 1931, but was trounced in the Conservative landslide of that year by the new Conservative candidate Leonard Ropner.
If Lane-Fox had been an aristocrat, Leonard Ropner was from one the great industrial families of the North. His grandfather Sir Robert Ropner had been born in Germany but made his fortune in Teesside and Hartlepool, founding a shipping line and acquiring a shipyard in Stockton-on-Tees. The family hasn’t been forgotten in Stockton, where there is a Ropner Park and a Ropner electoral ward. Leonard Ropner was a director of the family business who also had a distinguished First World War record; he commanded a Royal Artillery battery in France and won the Military Cross. He had entered parliament in 1923 as Conservative MP for Sedgefield, but lost his seat in 1929. Barkston Ash proved to be a much safer berth for him.
Ropner was only seriously challenged once in Barkston Ash, when he held the seat against the Attlee landslide by 24,438 votes to 24,322 for Labour, a majority of just 116. The Labour candidate on that occasion was Bertie Hazell, a Norfolk farm labourer who would later serve for six years as a Labour MP for the very agricultural seat of North Norfolk. Hazell was 101 years old when he died in 2009, making him the third longest-lived MP in British history.
Sir Leonard Ropner retired from the Commons in 1964 after thirty-three years’ service and passed the seat on to Michael Alison, who would also go on to serve for thirty-three years. Alison was a former Kensington councillor who came to the Commons straight from six years in the Conservative Research Department. He never attained high political office, but did serve on the lower rungs of government under Thatcher before spending his last ten years in Parliament as the Second Church Estates Commissioner, a post which by convention is held by a government MP. Religion is clearly important to the Alison family: Michael converted to evangelicalism, and his son James is a noted theologian in the Catholic tradition.
From 1983 Michael Alison’s constituency was heavily redrawn to take account of the new county boundaries in Yorkshire, which left Selby rather out on a limb: despite its location south of York, it was included within the county of North Yorkshire. Large parts of the Barkston Ash seat, including Garforth and Wetherby, had now become part of the city of Leeds and became the basis of a new seat called Elmet (which, confusingly, does not include the town of Sherburn in Elmet). Most of the Ainsty was also moved out of the Barkston Ash seat, to be replaced by areas which were east of the River Ouse and thus part of the East Riding until 1974: this area had been part of the Howdenshire constituency until 1983. To complete the picture, the constituency gained a number of York’s southern outer suburbs, including the University of York campus at Heslington, which were at the time part of the Selby council area. The Barkston Ash constituency was then renamed as Selby, after the local government district which covered almost all of its area.
From 1987 the Labour candidate for Selby was John Grogan, who had been the first Labour candidate to be elected as president of the Oxford University Student Union (not to be confused with the Oxford Union). He rode the Labour landslide to be elected to Parliament at his third attempt on the seat in 1997: Michael Alison retired that year, and Grogan defeated the former West Lancashire MP Ken Hind by a majority of 3,836.
John Grogan was re-elected twice more on small majorities, holding the seat in 2005 by just 467 votes over Mark Menzies (who now represents Fylde in Parliament). He is to date the only Labour MP, and the second non-Conservative MP of modern times, to represent Selby.
In the 1990s there was local government reorganisation in North Yorkshire which saw the city of York become a unitary council. Unusually, this was accompanied by a major expansion of the York city boundaries so that all of the urban area, and some hinterland beyond, became part of the city. The 2010 parliamentary boundary review reflected this: North Yorkshire retained eight MPs, but these were now divided into two for York and six for the rest of the county. Accordingly York’s southern suburbs transferred from the Selby seat into the new York Outer constituency. This left the Selby constituency undersized, and the only option for bringing it back up to the average size for a North Yorkshire seat was to add the rural Ainsty area from the abolished Vale of York seat. The boundary changes effectively wiped out the Labour majority in Selby and recreated a safe Conservative seat, and Selby’s Labour MP John Grogan had little choice but to retire. He did later return to Parliament as MP for Keighley in 2017–19, and he will fight Keighley again for Labour at the next general election.
Rather than revive the name Barkston Ash, the new seat was named Selby and Ainsty. It has had only one MP to date. Nigel Adams is a local man who founded a telecommunications company before entering politics: he contested the then-Labour seat of Rossendale and Darwen in 2005 before being elected to Parliament in 2010. He joined the Whips office in 2017 and then became a junior government minister, serving in the Wales Office, the Culture department, the Foreign Office and finally the Cabinet Office under Theresa May and Boris Johnson. In recent month there was speculation that Adams had been lined up for a life peerage in Johnson’s resignation honours list; when this failed to materialise, he chose to resign from the House of Commons at the same time as Johnson.
As in the case of Somerton and Frome above, North Yorkshire is a county which has seen recent local government reorganisation in the form of a county council takeover. Selby council, together with Harrogate council which administered the Ainsty, disappeared in April meaning that local affairs here are now run from faraway Northallerton. Also as in the case of Somerton and Frome above, the extraordinary county council election in 2022 produced a backlash against the Conservatives who only just held their majority: the Tories won 47 seats out of 90, an overall majority of four which has since disappeared as a result of a by-election loss to the Lib Dems and a defection which we will mention below.
The constituency and county division boundaries in the Ainsty do not match up. If we take as a best fit for the constituency the county divisions wholly in the seat plus Ouseburn, then the 2022 North Yorkshire county elections here gave 42% to the Conservatives, 32% to Labour (who didn’t stand in the two Ainsty divisions), 13% to the Green Party and 13% to independent candidates. In councillor terms that’s 7 Conservatives, 5 Labour, 3 independents and one Green.
On the basis of that, this should be a seat the Conservatives should hold. They are defending a large majority of 60–25 over Labour from December 2019; in numerical terms that’s a lead of 20,137 votes. However, this will be affected by boundary changes which will come in for the next Parliamentary general election. The Ainsty will become the centre for a brand-new constituency called Wetherby and Easingwold which will cover the area to the west of York; this seat will also include Tadcaster, and will take a lot of the Conservative majority out of Selby and Ainsty. In compensation the revived Selby constituency now looks west, taking in the working-class ex-mining villages of Kippax and Methley which are part of the Leeds city council area and currently in the Elmet and Rothwell seat. The new Selby seat would have had a much smaller Conservative majority in December 2019, and on current polling it’s a seat which would vote Labour. So, all to play for here not just for this election, but also for the next.
A few days before Nigel Adams resigned from Parliament, the Conservatives had selected Michael Naughton as their prospective candidate for the future Selby constituency. This by-election is taking place on the current boundaries, so the Tories chose to reopen their selection contest; Naughton didn’t stand again, and the Conservatives’ defending by-election candidate is Claire Holmes. She is a lawyer who has appeared in this column before, having started her political career in May 2021 by winning a by-election to East Riding council in the South East Holderness ward.
The Labour selection went to Keir Mather, who has recently had the rather difficult job of handling public affairs for the Confederation of British Industry. He is 25 years old, and he will become the Baby of the House if he wins this by-election.
The Liberal Democrats didn’t have a single candidate here in last year’s county elections, but they did save their deposit in December 2019 with 8.6% of the vote. Their candidate is Matt Walker, who is a North Yorkshire councillor representing Knaresborough West division.
Fourth here in 2019 was someone else who has appeared in this column before. Mike Jordan is a former Selby councillor who has flitted between the Conservatives and the regionalist Yorkshire Party in recent years; he was the Yorkshire Party candidate for Selby and Ainsty in December 2019, polling 3.4%, but was then elected to North Yorkshire council in 2022 as the Conservative candidate for Camblesforth and Carlton (the division which covers Drax). When this by-election was called Jordan defected back to the Yorkshire Party, costing the Conservatives their majority on the county council, in order to stand as their candidate in this by-election. He has managed to mess up his nomination papers for this by-election in such a way that his space on the ballot paper will contain the Yorkshire Party’s logo but no description.
The candidate who finished fifth and last here in 2019 with 3.2% is also back for another go. Arnold Warneken has since been elected to North Yorkshire council as the Green Party councillor for Ouseburn division in the Ainsty, which covers the proposed new large village of Maltkiln. For what it’s worth, on my research visit his division was full of Green stakeboards.
Eight other candidates have been nominated. Top of the ballot paper is Andrew Gray, an independent candidate from Harrogate who claims to be the AI-powered candidate. I suppose it had to happen at some point. Dave Kent, who gives an address in the constituency in the village of Hambleton, is standing for Reform UK. Nick Palmer, a local who runs a social enterprise helping jobseekers, is an independent candidate. The Heritage Party have selected Guy Phoenix, who runs an IT business. Sir Archibald Stanton, a self-described West Yorkshire toff who is the candidate of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, is seeking to stop the Country going to the dogs by banning greyhound racing. The SDP have selected John Waterston, a Selby pub landlord who had a stall outside the Abbey on my research visit. Luke Wellock, a “seasoned sustainability professional and proud father”, is standing for the Climate Party. Last on the ballot is, to quote his nomination papers, “Yorkshire Tyke” Cllr Tyler Wilson-Kerr, a former Yorkshire Party figure who is the youngest candidate on the ballot at 24; Wilson-Kerr works for an aerospace engineering firm in Leeds, and the council he sits on is Aberford and District parish council which is part of the Leeds city council area. There are no interlopers from foreign parts: all thirteen candidates in this by-election give addresses in Yorkshire.
This column likes to highlight pubs which do their bit for democracy by serving as polling stations, so shoutouts are due to the following: the Comus Inn in Cambleforth, the Sloop Inn in Temple Hirst, the George and Dragon in Whitley and, bringing this piece full circle to a satisfying close, the White Swan in Wighill.
At the time of writing one constituency poll of this by-election has been attempted. JL Partners surveyed 502 electors between 26 June and 4 July 2023 for the website 38 Degrees, with topline figures of 41% for Labour and 29% for the Conservatives. Any Labour lead would be a big swing from the December 2019 result, let alone a 12-point lead; and there has of course been plenty of time since for the electors to change their minds. But if the votes which come out of the ballot boxes on Thursday night and Friday morning add up to a dramatic result in Selby and Ainsty, there’s really only one thing to say.
North Yorkshire council divisions: Appleton Roebuck and Church Fenton, Barlby and Riccall, Boroughbridge and Claro (part: Allerton Mauleverer with Hopperton, Flaxby and Goldsborough parishes), Brayton and Barlow, Camblesforth and Carlton, Cawood and Escrick, Cliffe and North Duffield, Monk Fryston and South Milford, Osgoldcross, Ouseburn (part: all except Dunsforths and Marton cum Grafton parishes), Selby East, Selby West, Sherburn in Elmet, Spofforth with Lower Wharfedale and Tockwith, Tadcaster, Thorpe Willoughby and Hambleton, Washburn and Birstwith (part: Weeton parish)
ONS Travel to Work Area: York (most), Leeds (Monk Fryston and South Milford), Harrogate (Spofforth and Lower Wharfedale), Wakefield and Castleford (Womersley and Kirk Smeaton)
Postcode districts: DN6, DN14, HG3, HG5, LS17, LS22, LS24, LS25, WF8, WF11, YO8, YO19, YO23, YO26
Andrew Gray (Ind)
Claire Holmes (C)
Mike Jordan (Yorkshire Party)
Dave Kent (Reform UK)
Keir Mather (Lab)
Nick Palmer (Ind)
Guy Phoenix (Heritage Party)
Sir Archibald Stanton (Loony)
Matt Walker (LD)
Arnold Warneken (Grn)
John Waterston (SDP)
Luke Wellock (Climate Party)
Tyler Wilson-Kerr (Ind)
December 2019 result C 33995 Lab 13858 LD 4842 Yorkshire Party 1900 Grn 1823
June 2017 result C 32921 Lab 19149 LD 2293 UKIP 1713
May 2015 result C 27725 Lab 14168 UKIP 7389 LD 1920 Grn 1465 TUSC 137
May 2010 result C 25562 Lab 13297 LD 9180 UKIP 1635 BNP 1377 EDP 677
Llanfarian
Ceredigion council, Wales; caused by the resignation of Liberal Democrat councillor Geraint Hughes.
Let’s have some light relief after all that, shall we? There are three local by-elections on the undercard to today’s three title fights, and we’ll start with something completely different by travelling to mid-Wales. The Llanfarian division of Ceredigion covers a number of small villages in the hills immediately to the south and south-east of Aberystwyth; the largest of these is Llanfarian itself, which is located in the valley of the River Ystwyth on the main road from Aberystwyth to Cardigan. This was once quite a densely populated valley because there is metal in those hills: silver, lead and zinc mining were very important industries here, and to this day the Ystwyth has high levels of those metals in its waters. These days Llanfarian is in the top 60 wards in England and Wales for those working in the education sector, thanks to its proximity to the university in Aberystwyth.
One other product of the lead mines in the area was the construction of the Vale of Rheidol Railway, which opened for traffic in 1902. This is a narrow-gauge railway running from Aberystwyth to Devil’s Bridge which has one station within this division, at Glanyrafon; this serves a local industrial estate and the nearby villages of Moriah and Capel Seion. By 1902 leadmining in Ceredigion was already in decline, and tourism has always been the Vale of Rheidol railway’s main functions; this despite the fact that it was the only one of the Great Little Trains of Wales to end up in the hands of British Rail. From 1968 until privatisation in 1989, the Vale of Rheidol was British Rail’s only service operated by steam power, and its locomotives carried the BR double-arrow logo.
There has been a Llanfarian electoral division in this area for a very long time. In the 1892 Cardiganshire county council elections it was gained from the Conservatives by the Liberal candidate Matthew Vaughan-Davies, whose Tan-y-bwlch estate covered some of this area. Vaughan-Davies was then elected to Parliament in 1895 as Liberal MP for Cardiganshire and held the seat until 1921, when he transferred to the Lords as the first and only Lord Ystwyth. He was the oldest MP elected in the 1918 general election.
The modern-day successor to Cardiganshire county council is the unitary Ceredigion council, which has had a Llanfarian division on these boundaries since it was set up in the 1990s. From 1991 — when Ceredigion was still a district under Dyfed county council — the local councillor here had been Alun Jones, who was a memnber of Plaid Cymru except in the 2004 election when there was a falling-out with Plaid and he was re-elected as an independent. Plaid Cymru hold a majority on Ceredigion council and also represent this area at other levels of government: Ceredigion’s MP Ben Lake and MS Elin Jones were both elected on the Plaid ticket, although Elin Jones currently has a non-partisan role as Llywydd (presiding officer) of the Senedd.
In 2022 Alun Jones stood down as the councillor for Llanfarian after 31 years’ service, leaving an open seat which was left untouched by boundary changes in Ceredigion that year. This was gained by Geraint Wyn Hughes of the Liberal Democrats, who defeated Plaid’s new candidate Simon Warburton by 68–32 in a straight fight.
Hughes resigned from Ceredigion council in May after twelve months in office because he is taking up a new job as a manager with the property services group Countrywide, which will involve travel all over south Wales. He does not feel he can combine this with his democratic duties, and his new role almost certainly pays better than being a councillor as well.
Defending this seat for the Liberal Democrats is David Evans, who gives an address in Llanfarian. The Plaid Cymru candidate this time is Karen Deakin, who is from Capel Seion and has experience on the community council. And the Conservatives are standing here for the first time since 2012: they have nominated Jack Parker from Aberystwyth.
Westminster and Senedd constituency: Ceredigion
Westminster constituency (from next general election): Ceredigion Preseli
ONS Travel to Work Area: Aberystwyth
Postcode district: SY23
Karen Deakin (PC)
David Evans (LD)
Jack Parker (C)
May 2022 result LD 524 PC 246
May 2017 result PC unopposed
May 2012 result PC 391 LD 164 C 27
May 2008 result PC 361 LD 248 C 41
June 2004 result Ind 340 PC 318
May 1999 result PC 564 LD 115
May 1995 result PC 359 LD 192
Previous results in detail
Nunnery
Worcester council; caused by the death of Labour councillor Simon Cronin.
Our two English local by-elections today are both a town or city where the Conservatives performed very badly in May’s local elections. Their result in Worcester, a city which had a Conservative majority from 2021 to 2022, was particularly eye-catching: in May the Tories lost all seven seats they were defending on Worcester city council, and fell to third place on the council. Labour are now the largest party with 12 seats plus this vacancy, against 10 Greens, 8 Conservatives and 4 Lib Dems. The city’s governance arrangements are rather complicated, and the council currently has a Labour leader and Green deputy leader.
For this by-election we’ve come to Worcester’s Nunnery ward. This is named after Nunnery Wood, part of a country park on the eastern edge of the city. The wood is owned by Worcestershire county council, and some land just to the south of it was developed in the 1970s as the brutalist home of what was then Hereford and Worcester county council. On the far side of Nunnery Wood is the Worcestershire Royal Hospital, the main general hospital for the county, part of which is in this ward. The Nunnery ward runs downhill into the city from here as far as the railway line towards Oxford and Bristol: Shrub Hill railway station lies at Nunnery ward’s north-west corner.
In local elections since 2010 this has normally been a safe Labour ward, with the exception of a Conservative win in 2021; the Tory councillor resigned less than a year later and Labour won the resulting by-election in May 2022. Before 2010 an independent slate did well here, but they are now long gone.
2021 was also the year of the last Worcestershire county council elections, at which the Nunnery county division (which has very similar boundaries to this ward) was gained by the Conservatives. The Worcester parliamentary seat has had the same boundaries as the city council since 1997 and is unchanged in the forthcoming boundary review: the Conservative MP Robin Walker, who is chair of the Commons Education select committee, is standing down at the next election and his seat will definitely be on the Labour target list.
This by-election is to replace the late Labour councillor Simon Cronin, who was first elected here in 2007 when he gained his seat from an independent councillor. He was re-elected for a fifth term of office, with a 48–32 margin over the Conservatives, just days before his death in May at the age of 64. Cronin’s successor will need to seek re-election in May 2024, when Worcester will get new ward boundaries and change from the thirds electoral system to whole-council elections.
Defending for Labour is Elaine Willmore, who works in the NHS and gives an address in the ward. The Conservatives have reselected Allah Ditta, who is the local county councillor and has twice served as mayor of Worcester; until his defeat here in May Ditta had sat on Worcester council for the city-centre Cathedral ward. Also standing are Scott Butler for the Lib Dems and independent candidate David Carney, who will improve on his fifth-place finish here two months ago because this time there are only four candidates.
Parliamentary constituency: Worcester
Parliamentary constituency (from next general election): Worcester
Worcestershire county council division: Nunnery
ONS Travel to Work Area: Worcester and Kidderminster
Postcode districts: WR4, WR5
Scott Butler (LD)
David Carney (Ind)
Allah Ditta (C)
Elaine Willmore (Lab)
May 2023 result Lab 1018 C 688 Grn 182 LD 134 Ind 108
May 2022 double vacancy Lab 1156/959 C 728/661 Grn 302/186 Ind 171 LD 127
May 2021 result C 1129 Lab 807 Grn 214 LD 56 British Resistance 28
May 2019 result Lab 726 C 484 Grn 258 UKIP 198 British Resistance 17
May 2018 result Lab 1017 C 713 Grn 149 UKIP 111 British Resistance 17
May 2016 result Lab 1136 C 407 UKIP 348 Grn 139 British Resistance 9
May 2015 result Lab 1627 C 1252 UKIP 737 Grn 253 BNP 40
May 2014 result Lab 1107 C 570 BNP 286 Grn 234
May 2012 result Lab 1011 C 554 Grn 168 BNP 150
May 2011 result Lab 1122 C 673 LD 196 Grn 190 BNP 182
May 2010 result Lab 1761 C 1394 Grn 456 BNP 368
May 2008 result Ind 1115 Lab 707 BNP 353 Grn 141
May 2007 result Lab 804 Ind 700 C 355 BNP 289 Grn 134
May 2006 result Lab 711 Ind 524 BNP 420 C 364 Grn 167
June 2004 result Ind 1233/951/747 Lab 701/604 C 482
Previous results in detail
St Margaret and South Marston
Swindon council, Wiltshire; caused by the death of Labour councillor Pamela Adams.
Our final by-election today takes place south-west of Worcester on the western edge of Swindon. The Romans tramped past here for many years along the route of the Ermin Way, and the main settlement of this ward takes its name from their road. Stratton is a common name for settlements located on Roman roads, coming from Old English words referring to a farm on a “street” or paved road; in this particular instance we need a disambiguator, and the name of the local thirteenth-century church dedicated to St Margaret was added to the name.
It probably helped this association that in the fourteenth century the landowner in Stratton was Queen Margaret, a daughter of King Philip III of France who became the second wife of Edward I. They married in 1299 when he was 60 and she was 20; this sort of thing happened in the days when international politics was less House of Cards and more Game of Thrones. Despite the huge age gap Edward and Margaret were fond of each other, and she accompanied him on his campaigns against Scotland while also bearing him three children.
Stratton St Margaret has now been swallowed up by the growth of the town of Swindon. This fate has not yet befallen the neighbouring parish of South Marston, which may be due to the fact that the land between the two parishes has been in heavy industrial use for a very long time. During the Second World War an airfield and aircraft factory were built here; after the war was over the site was taken over by Vickers-Armstrongs-Supermarine who made RAF aircraft and Vickers components until the 1980s. Then the Japanese car firm Honda moved in, and from 1985 to 2021 South Marston was the site of Honda’s only UK car factory; its 3,500 workers and their wages underpinned the economy of the ward. The former Honda site has now been sold to an American logistics firm.
To the north of the former Honda site is the South Marston Industrial Estate, part of which is in this ward; here can be found large distribution centres for Aldi and B&Q. To its south is another large warehouse next to the Great Western main line railway, which is the book storage facility for Oxford’s Bodleian Library. The Bodleian is one of the six legal deposit libraries for the UK and Ireland, meaning that it is entitled to claim a free copy of every book published in this country. That includes the Andrew’s Previews books, which are probably lurking somewhere in that Wiltshire warehouse. If you’d like to get your own copy of a Previews book and help cover the cost to me of sending those legal deposit copies, you can do so here: (link).
The current St Margaret and South Marston ward was drawn up in 2012. It has often been close between the Conservatives and Labour, but it took until 2022 for Labour to break through here by a majority of 92 votes in a straight fight. The 2023 result here was completely out of kilter with everything that had gone before, with Labour gaining a second seat in the ward by the large margin of 50–39 over the Conservatives. St Margaret and South Marston was one of nine Swindon seats which Labour gained in 2023, enabling Labour to take overall control of Swindon council directly from the Conservatives: following May’s elections there were 33 Labour councillors, 22 Conservatives, a Lib Dem and an independent. The ward is part of the North Swindon parliamentary seat, a safe Conservative constituency represented by Justin Tomlinson MP.
Labour are defending this by-election following the unexpected death in May of councillor Pamela Adams, who gained this ward from the Conservatives in 2022. She was 71 years old, and was a retired teacher. Before joining Swindon council she had previously been a parish councillor in the Swindon suburb of Highworth, and she served as mayor of Highworth in 2014–15.
The by-election to replace Adams is a straight fight. Defending for Labour is Joseph Polson, who has previously stood in Swindon council elections for the Lib Dems; he works for the Economic and Social Research Council, a quango which funds research and training in social sciences. Challenging for the Conservatives is Matthew Vallender, who returns from May’s election; he works in the constituency office for the local MP.
Parliamentary constituency: North Swindon
Parliamentary constituency (from next general election): Swindon North
ONS Travel to Work Area: Swindon
Postcode districts: SN1, SN3
Joseph Polson (Lab)
Matthew Vallender (C)
May 2023 result Lab 1645 C 1289 Grn 224 LD 148
May 2022 result Lab 1497 C 1405
May 2021 result C 1984 Lab 1207 Grn 195 Ind 106
May 2019 result C 1381 Lab 1336 UKIP 378
May 2018 result C 2011 Lab 1678 UKIP 125 Grn 120 LD 94
May 2016 result C 1409 Lab 880 UKIP 393 LD 81 Grn 75
May 2015 result C 3157 Lab 1511 UKIP 1175 Grn 304
May 2014 result C 1351 Lab 1039 UKIP 893 LD 160
May 2012 result C 1409/1174/1105 Lab 1009/1009/941 Grn 437 LD 229
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
