Previewing the two Parliamentary and five local by-elections of 15th February 2024
“All the right votes, but not necessarily in the right order”
Seven polls on 15th February 2024, including two Parliamentary Specials:
Wellingborough
House of Commons; caused by the recall of Conservative MP Peter Bone.
Welcome to the 21st and 22nd by-elections of what has been an busy Parliament for electoral events — and there’s more to come yet. In less than three months’ time the whole of England and Wales will be going to the polls for local, mayoral and/or police and crime commissioner elections; then, or perhaps later, there will be a general election to renew all 650 members of the House of Commons. It’s going to be a busy year for political campaigners of all stripes, and much shoe leather will be expended.
So let’s get our order in for some new footwear by travelling to a corner of England which was built on the boot and shoe industry. We’ve come to Wellingborough, a medium-sized town located to the east of Northampton. This is a stop on the Midland main line from London to the cities of the East Midlands, and Wellingborough is less than an hour from central London on express trains. Perhaps because of that fast transport link, the town boomed in the second half of the twentieth century: the Hemmingwell and Kingsway estates were built primarily to house overspill population from the capital.
The Wellingborough parliamentary seat also takes in the towns of Rushden and Higham Ferrers, which are located further down the Nene valley, plus a small rural hinterland. The largest element of this is the small town of Finedon, whose name was originally “Thingdon” and comes from Old England words referring to a valley where assemblies or parliaments were held. A good omen for democracy. Finedon has a fine parish church which used to have a famous incumbent: the musician and radio presenter the Reverend Richard Coles, who grew up in this area and attended Wellingborough School, was the vicar of Finedon from 2011 to 2022.
Appropriately enough, Coles came from a shoemaking family. There are still some boot and shoe factories in this area, but cheap foreign imports have walked their way into the country: to survive, Northamptonshire’s manufacturers are having to target the more expensive, more high-quality and/or more niche end of the market. The 2005 film Kinky Boots, in which a shoe factory in the county pivots to the manufacturer of high-heeled boots for drag performers, was inspired by a real factory in the village of Earls Barton which had stayed in business by targeting the drag and fetish market. At the time, Earls Barton was part of the Wellingborough constituency; it was transferred to Daventry in 2010.
However, distribution has replaced footwear as a major economic sector in the Wellingborough area. The town is centrally located within England and isn’t very far from the trunk road network: there are fast road links south to London, north and west to the Midlands and beyond, and east to the container ports of the North Sea.
Over the decades the population of Wellingborough has grown pretty much in line with the rest of the UK; this and Wellingborough’s position close to the southern edge of Northamptonshire has resulted in some unusually stable parliamentary boundaries here. There are some Parliamentary Specials which this column have written which have been rather difficult to follow because of endless tinkering by the Boundary Commission, and we’ll see an example of that later with Kingswood; but everything which is currently in the Wellingborough seat has always been in the Wellingborough seat since its creation in 1918.
Before then the local parliamentary seat was East Northamptonshire, which covered a rather similar area to the current seat; the main difference was that the 1885–1918 East Northants seat also included Kettering and Irthlingborough. Perhaps because of all the jobs in the boot and shoe industry, the East Northamptonshire seat of 1885–1918 was a safe Liberal seat: only once during this period, when an Independent Labour candidate stood in December 1910, did the Liberal majority fall below 10 points.
For most of this period the Liberal MP here was Francis Channing, who was born in America (his grandfather William Ellery had signed the US Declaration of Independence) but educated in Britain. Channing originally made his career in UK academia as a fellow of University College, Oxford, where he lectured in philosophy. In Parliament Channing served on the Royal Commission on Agricultural Depression and on the Small Holdings Committee. He was made a baronet in 1906, and promoted to the Lords in 1912 as the first and only Lord Channing of Wellingborough.
Sir Francis Channing retired from the Commons in December 1910 and passed his seat on to another foreign-born MP. Leo Chiozza Money was born in Genoa into an Anglo-Italian family, originally with the name Leone Chiozza; “Money” was added to his surname in 1903 to reflect his interests. He was a prominent economic theorist and a fellow of the Royal Statistical Society; his 1905 book Riches and Poverty was an influential study of the distribution of wealth in the UK. Money had entered Parliament in 1906 as Liberal MP for Paddington North, but lost his seat in January 1910; East Northamptonshire proved to be a quick return for him. During the First World War Money was knighted and became a junior minister in the Ministry of Shipping; his keen eye for statistics and new ideas led to the development of convoys to protect transatlantic traffic from German U-boats.
By 1918 Sir Leo Chiozza Money was in the Labour Party, and he contested Tottenham South in the 1918 general election as a Labour candidate without success. Perhaps he should have stayed put in Wellingborough, which was the successor to the former East Northamptonshire constituency in the redistribution of that year. The 1918 boundaries of Wellingborough were quite similar to the current ones, additionally taking in Earls Barton, Irthlingborough and Raunds; Kettering was moved out to become the base for a seat of its own.
With all the boot and shoemaking here, it’s appropriate that Wellingborough’s first MP was an organiser of the National Union of Boot and Shoe Operatives. As such, Labour’s Walter Smith was well known in Wellingborough town and all the large shoemaking villages. He was well-known enough to defeat the Liberal candidate Milner Gray, who had the Coalition’s coupon, by 977 votes in a straight fight.
Walter Smith’s political roots were in Norwich, and he later served as an MP for that city — as did the MP who defeated him in Wellingborough in 1922. Geoffrey Shakespeare had recently finished his war-delayed studies at Cambridge, where he was president of the Cambridge Union, and in 1922 he was working as private secretary to David Lloyd George. In that capacity he attended the negotiations which resulted in the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty, of which he gave a memorable account in his 1949 memoir Let Candles Be Brought In. Shakespeare stood and won in Wellingborough as a National Liberal, the faction of the Liberals which supported Lloyd George; he defeated Walter Smith by 3,938 votes.
Labour got the Wellingborough seat back in 1923 after the Unionists stood and split the constituency’s right-wing vote. This marked the start of the long but rather obscure Parliamentary career of William Cove, who came from a mining family in the Rhondda but trained as a teacher rather than go down the pits.
In 1929 Cove left Wellingborough to return to South Wales, where he was elected in the Aberavon constituency vacated by Ramsay MacDonald. He successfully passed his old seat on to Labour’s George Dallas, a Glaswegian who was elected to Parliament at his fourth attempt. Dallas had worked in the Lanarkshire mines before becoming involved in the trade unions and doing a variety of jobs; he ended up in the Workers Union (now part of the TGWU) and became chairman of Labour’s National Executive Committee in 1937.
However, Dallas was soundly defeated in 1931 by Archibald James who became the first Conservative MP for Wellingborough. James had come to politics from a career in the Army and the Air Force, rising to the rank of Wing Commander in the RAF and winning the Military Cross. He had fought Wellingborough in 1929, coming third behind the Liberals; but in 1931 the right-wing vote was united behind James, who defeated George Dallas by 7,990 votes. Round 3 of James v Dallas resulted in another win for James, but Dallas cut the Conservative majority to just 372.
Such a marginal seat was always going to be difficult for the Conservatives to defend, and Wellingborough went back to Labour in the Attlee landslide of 1945. This was the first of four terms for Labour MP George Lindgren, who had previously been a railway clerk.
Lindgren held Wellingborough by just 926 votes in 1955, and he went back to his old job on the railways after losing his seat to the Conservatives in 1959 — although only by 606 votes. This was the start of the parliamentary career of Michael Hamilton, who went on to represent Salisbury in the Commons from a 1965 by-election to 1983.
Hamilton only served one term as Conservative MP for Wellingborough, losing his seat in one of the closest results of the 1964 general election: he polled 19,545 votes to Labour’s 19,592, giving a Labour majority of just 47 votes. Like George Lindgren before him, the new Labour MP for Wellingborough Harry Howarth was a railway clerk who had served on the national executive of the Transport Salaried Staffs Association. Howarth had also served two terms on Wembley council and was a justice of the peace for Middlesex.
Harry Howarth died in 1969, five days after his 53rd birthday. The resulting first Wellingborough by-election of 4th December 1969 came late in the 1966 Parliament with the second Wilson government in a spot of bother in the polls, and Howarth’s majority from the 1966 election of 2,233 votes was always going to be difficult to defend. In the event the Labour candidate John Mann lost by nearly 15 percentage points, or 6,049 votes, to the Conservative candidate Peter Fry.
Before entering Parliament Peter Fry was a Buckinghamshire county councillor who worked as an insurance broker; he had twice contested safe Labour parliamentary seats (Nottingham North in 1964, Willesden East in 1966) before getting the nomination for the Wellingborough by-election. He went on to break the political mould in Wellingborough and serve as the seat’s Conservative MP — a right-wing backbencher — for over 27 years.
There were a number of factors helping Peter Fry in this longevity, in that the Wellingborough seat changed dramatically during this period. It changed socially: the boot and shoe industry went into long-term decline, and by the 1990s transport and distribution were more important sectors of the local economy. It changed demographically: as stated earlier, Wellingborough’s rail link to London meant that some commuters settled here and some London overspill estates were built. And there were boundary changes, arising from the 1960s creation of the short-lived county of Huntingdon and Peterborough: the Peterborough constituency had previously included a huge swathe of rural eastern Northamptonshire around Oundle, which was transferred into the Wellingborough seat in 1974 and greatly shored up the Conservative majority. Without that boundary change, Fry would probably have lost in 1974; as it was, his majority was under 3,000 in both general elections of that year. The 1983 redistribution reversed this change, with rural eastern Northamptonshire transferred to the new Corby seat; but by then the demographic changes meant Wellingborough was out of reach for Labour in all but landslide conditions.
And in the end it took the Blair landslide of 1997 to dislodge Peter Fry, who went down to defeat in one of the closest results of that election. Paul Stinchcombe became, to date, the last Labour MP for Wellingborough, defeating Fry by 187 votes. Stinchcombe was a barrister specialising in environmental law; he had worked with Cherie Blair and wrote speeches for her husband as Prime Minister. He also had political experience as a former Camden councillor. After leaving Parliament he went back to the law, and took silk in 2011.
Paul Stinchcombe was defeated in 2005 by just 687 votes by Conservative candidate Peter Bone, who had lost by 2,355 four years earlier. Bone was a chartered accountant who had once been described by the Daily Mirror as “Britain’s meanest boss”, with the paper reporting in 1995 that he had hired a 17-year-old trainee on 87p per hour. He had served as a Southend-on-Sea councillor from 1978 to 1986, and Wellingborough 2005 was his fourth attempt to get into Parliament (in his first attempt in 1992 he had been up against Neil Kinnock, who was then leader of the opposition).
Over the 18 years since then, Peter Bone has cultivated a reputation as a right-wing and socially conservative backbencher, although this was interrupted by a short period in government in 2022 when he served Boris Johnson and Liz Truss as deputy leader of the Commons. He has seen his majorities bloom over the years, helped by an incident in the 2015 general election when Labour had to disown their Wellingborough candidate Richard Garvie following a fraud charge; UKIP took second place in Wellingborough at that election. In 2019 Peter Bone was re-elected for his fifth term of office with a majority of 18,540 votes, polling 62% of the vote against 26% for Labour candidate Andrea Watts.
Despite the fact that Wellingborough is close to the southern edge of Northamptonshire, the local authority here is North Northamptonshire council. This was created in a reorganisation which followed the financial failure of Northamptonshire county council in the late 2010s, and took over in 2020 from the former districts of Corby, East Northamptonshire, Kettering and Wellingborough.
There has been only been one set of local elections to North Northamptonshire council to date, in May 2021. That was a very good Conservative year, and the party had a big lead across the constituency. If we add together the votes from the seven wards wholly in the Wellingborough constituency plus Higham Ferrers ward (almost all of which is part of this seat), then the Tories polled 48% to 27% for Labour and 11% for the Liberal Democrats; the Conservatives won 23 out of a possible 24 council seats, with a Labour seat in Croyland and Swanspool ward (in Wellingborough town) being the one that got away. If anything, this understates the Conservative position given that the main missing element of this calculation is the more rural parts of Earls Barton ward, where the Conservative slate was strongly ahead in 2021. One of the Conservative councillors for Rushden South ward died in early 2023 and the resulting by-election was an easy Conservative hold.
So recent local election results look promising for the Conservatives here. However, there has been an unfortunate recent trend for Parliamentary by-elections to come out of the MPs Behaving Badly file. If we look at the 58 parliamentary by-elections which have taken place since the Conservatives came to power in 2010 (a total which includes the Rochdale poll later this month), then four have been caused by the MP involved being recalled (Fiona Onasanya, Chris Davies, Margaret Ferrier and Peter Bone, with a possible fifth recall petition to come in Blackpool South), six MPs (Mike Hill, Owen Paterson, Chris Matheson, Boris Johnson, David Warburton and Chris Pincher) resigned either before they faced a recall petition or in circumstances that would have probably have led to a recall petition being opened on them, four MPs (Eric Illsley, Denis MacShane, Chris Huhne and Patrick Mercer) resigned before the Recall of MPs Act was passed in circumstances which would now have resulted in a recall petition being opened on them, Phil Woolas was unseated by the Election Court for making false statements about an election opponent, and Imran Ahmad Khan’s offences were so serious that he would have been expelled from the Commons had he not resigned first. That’s a total of 18 MPs Behaving Badly out of 58 by-elections in just over 13 years, or 31% of the total; in the current Parliament, the proportion rises to 9 out of 22 or 41%. These are uncomfortably high percentages which don’t say much for the standard of our politicians.
What did for Peter Bone was bullying and sexual misconduct against a male member of his staff. The bad behaviour involved was in 2012 and 2013. The staff member involved had complained to the then Prime Minister in November 2017, and his father had complained two years previously, but the complaint was never resolved by the Conservative Party. In 2021 the staff member took his complaint to Parliament’s Independent Complaints and Grievance Scheme, which actually did something about it. The Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards opened an investigation, and in the end five counts of bullying and harassment and one count of sexual misconduct were upheld. The latter involved Bone indecently exposing himself to the staff member while they were sharing a hotel room on a work trip to Madrid. Bone appealed against the Commissioner’s findings, without success. He was suspended from the House of Commons for six weeks in October 2023, and a recall petition was opened on him; this was signed by 10,505 out of Wellingborough’s 79,402 electors, a turnout of 13.2%. It was enough to recall Peter Bone and force the second Wellingborough by-election.
In a by-election caused by the sexual misconduct of Peter Bone, the natural thing for the Conservatives to do was to select as their defending candidate Helen Harrison, who is Peter Bone’s partner. Harrison is a chartered physiotherapist and a North Northamptonshire councillor representing Oundle ward, which is not in this constituency. She was the Conservatives’ parliamentary candidate for Bolsover in 2017. Her nomination papers were signed by the present Mrs Bone and at least one character who has an entry in the Councillors Behaving Badly file: former Wellingborough Conservative councillor Bhupendra Patel, who was prosecuted for benefit fraud in 2013.
The Labour candidate is Gen (as in Genevieve) Kitchen, a former Newham councillor who lives in London and works in the charity sector. She grew up in Northamptonshire before moving to London for work.
Third here in 2019 and saving their deposit with 7.9% were the Liberal Democrats, who have selected Ana Gunn. She was the Lib Dem candidate for Northamptonshire police and crime commissioner in 2021, coming third with 15% across the county. The only other party to contest Wellingborough in 2019 was the Greens, who polled 3.5%; their candidate is Will Morris, an underwriting director who sits on Bozeat parish council within the constituency.
For some reason the Wellingborough by-election has attracted far more fringe candidates than Kingswood, and I’ll take them in reverse alphabetical order. There are three independent candidates at the bottom of the ballot: Kev Watts is an Irchester parish councillor who was a Labour candidate for the former Wellingborough council in 2015; Marion Turner-Hawes was the Green candidate here in 2019 and is a Wellingborough town councillor; and Andre Pyne-Bailey gives an address within the constituency. Alex Merola is going for whatever far-right vote exists here as the Britain First candidate. Ankit Love has managed to find a loophole in the party registration rules by giving his name in his nomination papers as “Ankit Love JKNPP Jay Mala Post-Mortem”, in which JKNPP is the Indian political party he leads (the Jammu and Kashmir National Panthers Party) which is not registered with the UK Electoral Commission, while Jay Mala is his late mother. Reform UK have selected Ben Habib, a London-based businessman who was previously an MEP for London from 2019 to 2020. And the Official Monster Raving Loony Party’s candidate Nick the Flying Brick wants to abolish gravity, so he’ll no doubt be pleased to have floated to the top of the ballot paper.
The Boundary Commission have retained seven seats for Northamptonshire in the boundary changes, with some adjustments to take account of uneven population growth over the last two decades: as a result, the Wellingborough seat will be largely unchanged by the boundary review but will exchange its western rural fringes for Irthlingborough. The name will also be extended to “Wellingborough and Rushden”, even though Rushden has part of the constituency for over a century.
As stated, on paper Wellingborough is a seat the Conservatives should hold. We’ll now travel south-west from here to a seat which looks rather closer…
North Northamptonshire wards: Brickhill and Queensway, Croyland and Swanspool, Finedon, Hatton Park, Irchester, Rushden Pemberton West, Rushden South, Higham Ferrers (almost all), Earls Barton (part: Great Doddington, Great Harrowden, Hardwick, Isham, Little Harrowden, Orlingbury and Wilby parishes and part of Wellingborough parish), Irthlingborough (small part, no electors)
ONS Travel to Work Area: Kettering and Wellingborough
Postcode districts: NN6, NN7, NN8, NN9, NN10, NN14, NN29, PE8
Nick the Flying Brick (Loony)
Ana Gunn (LD)
Ben Habib (Reform UK)
Helen Harrison (C)
Ankit Love JKNPP Jay Mala Post-Mortem (Ind)
Gen Kitchen (Lab)
Alex Merola (Britain First)
Will Morris (Grn)
Andre Pyne-Bailey (Ind)
Marion Turner-Hawes (Ind)
Kev Watts (Ind)
December 2019 result C 32277 Lab 13737 LD 4078 Grn 1821
June 2017 result C 30579 Lab 18119 UKIP 1804 LD 1782 Grn 956
May 2015 result C 26265 UKIP 9868 Lab 9839 LD 2240 Grn 2218
May 2010 result C 24918 Lab 13131 LD 8848 UKIP 1636 BNP 1596 EDP 530 Grn 480 TUSC 249 Ind 240 Ind 33
Kingswood
House of Commons; caused by the resignation of Conservative MP Chris Skidmore.
Sometimes, the history and meaning of placenames can be obscure. No-one, for instance, has ever produced a satisfactory explanation for the ultimate meaning of “London” as a placename. We don’t have that problem with Kingswood, whose name is self-explanatory. However, this is very much one of England’s more obscure towns.
The King’s Wood itself was a royal forest. A thousand years ago the land around the city of Bristol was a hunting estate, used by the kings of Wessex and administered by the constable of Bristol Castle. “Forest” in its mediaeval sense refers to an area set aside for hunting rather than being a synonym for woodland, but clearly the King’s Wood had a lot of trees back in the day.
Underneath all that wood was coal, and in the late 17th century a mining industry began to develop here. The small Bristol coalfield peaked in the 19th century, and the mines had been basically worked out by the 1920s; there are very few signs today of Kingswood’s mining heritage other than the occasional sinkhole where old mineworkings collapse.
By the time that mining ceased in Kingswood, the growth of the city of Bristol had led to the town merging into that city’s urban area. However, Kingswood has never been incorporated into Bristol, and the city’s north-eastern boundary now cuts uneasily through miles of continuous housing development.
We have a similar history in the nearby towns of Hanham to the south and Mangotsfield to the north, both of which boomed in the 20th century as Bristol suburbia continued to grow. Mangotsfield was promoted into an urban district of its own in 1927; development in Hanham took a bit longer to get going; and the parish of Emersons Green, which is now the north-eastern corner of Bristol’s built-up area, was only developed for housing in the 1990s and 2000s. This is the location of the Bristol and Bath Science Park, which claims to have the world’s largest solar-powered chandelier.
The science park is linked to the outside world by the A4174, the Bristol ring road, which runs the length of the Kingswood constituency from north to south. This road doesn’t mark the end of Bristol’s suburbia; outside the ring road we have large residential suburbs like Oldland Common, Longwell Green and Cadbury Heath, together with the smaller village of Warmley which gave its name to the rural district that covered these areas until 1974. Oldland Common was the birthplace of the noted astronomer Sir Bernard Lovell, and the village’s secondary school is named after him. Longwell Green, reflecting the younger age of its houses, has a younger famous daughter: the gymnast Claudia Fragapane, who has two world bronze medals and five Commonwealth gold medals to her credit, is from here.
These suburbs are the sort of places we might see more of in future if the current issues over Britain’s housing are to be resolved: desirable places to live, with good-sized family houses, adequate transport links and plenty of jobs. Longwell Green ward makes the top 100 wards in England and Wales for “intermediate” occupations, Bitton and Oldland Common is in the top 100 for part-time employment — in fact, all the wards in this constituency have high levels of part-time employment.
When single-member parliamentary seats became the norm at the 1885 redistribution, the parliamentary borough of Bristol expanded to take in Stapleton, Horfield and St George — three areas which were then on the edge of the city. Bristol was bordered on the whole of its northern, Gloucestershire, side by the Thornbury parliamentary seat. As well as Thornbury itself and its substantial rural hinterland, the seat took in the whole of the current Kingswood parliamentary seat and the growing Bristol dock complex at Avonmouth. There was also a large rural swathe around Thornbury and Chipping Sodbury.
The Thornbury seat of 1885–1918 proved to be a tight marginal seat, and its first election set the tone. The Liberal candidate Stafford Howard defeated the Conservatives’ Benjamin Ackers by 4,834 votes to 4,689, a majority of 145. Both of them were sitting MPs: Ackers had won a by-election earlier that year for the predecessor seat of West Gloucestershire, while Howard — a descendant of the 12th Duke of Norfolk — had been displaced from East Cumberland by the redistribution. Stafford Howard was a barrister whose parliamentary career peaked during his short term as MP for Thornbury, in which he was briefly a junior minister in the India Office.
In 1886 Thornbury swung to the Conservatives, with Stafford Howard losing his seat to the Conservatives’ John Plunkett by 881 votes. Plunkett, who had recently finished his studies at Cambridge, was a young aristocrat; in 1889 he succeeded to his father’s titles and became the 17th Lord Dunsany. This was a title in the peerage of Ireland, meaning that Dunsany was not automatically elevated to the Lords and continued to sit on the green benches until he stood down from the Commons in 1892; the following year he was elected to the House of Lords, becoming one of the twenty-eight Irish representative peers. Dunsany is probably best described as a bit of an eccentric with an interest in all the new technologies of the day: when he died in 1899 Dunsany Castle in County Meath contained Ireland’s first telephone system and a fully functioning X-ray machine. Upon his death the title passed to his son Edward Plunkett, the 18th Lord Dunsany, who is remembered as a prolific author who pioneered the fantasy genre of fiction.
Lord Dunsany successfully passed the Thornbury seat on in 1892 to the new Conservative candidate, who defeated the Liberals’ Stafford Howard by 5,202 votes to 4,978, a majority of 224. This marked the start of the Parliamentary career of Charles Colston, who came from a noted Bristol family which in the 1890s was best known for philanthropy and good works in the city; the slaveowning past of its most prominent former member Edward Colston (the one whose statue ended up in Bristol harbour a few years back) had been basically forgotten at this point. Charles Colston was descended from Edward’s niece Mary and lived in the Wiltshire stately home of Roundway Park; he was a JP and deputy lieutenant for Wiltshire. He served three terms of office as MP for Thornbury, being re-elected for his final term in 1900 without a contest.
But Thornbury fell to the Liberals in the landslide of 1906, and rather comfortably so. Seeking a fourth term of office, Charles Colston went down to defeat by 7,370 votes to 5,240, with the Liberal majority of 2,130 votes being a record for the seat. Colston ended up in the Lords ten years later as the first Lord Roundway; meanwhile, Thornbury’s representation was taken over by the wonderfully-named Liberal MP Athelstan Rendall.
Rendall went on to have a rather long parliamentary career, being re-elected in both 1910 elections and winning a fourth term in 1918 after the First World War was over. He was a solicitor by trade, and very much on the radical wing of the Liberal Party as indicated by his memberships of the Fabian Society and the Cobden Club. He received the Coalition coupon at the 1918 election, at which he was opposed only by the National Party — a short-lived and very right-wing Conservative splinter group. The redistribution of 1918 moved Avonmouth and its docks out of the Thornbury seat — they had been incorporated into Bristol by this point — and replaced it with some Gloucestershire villages to the north around Berkeley. At this point, Kingswood was the only Urban District within the constituency.
Athelstan Rendall fell out with the Coalition in 1920 and joined the opposition benches, but he did seek re-election as a Liberal candidate in 1922 — and was narrowly defeated. Labour contested the Thornbury seat for the first time, and split the left-wing vote: the Labour candidate Joseph Alpass, of whom more later, polled 5,749 votes while Randall lost to the Conservative candidate by just 104.
That brought Herbert Woodcock into the Commons for the first of his two non-consecutive terms of office. Woodcock was a businessman who served as an alderman of Bristol; he was also a Territorial soldier, and when the First World War broke out he had been commanding officer of the 6th Battalion of the Gloucestershire Regiment. Woodcock’s first term in the Commons was a short one: in 1923 the left-wing vote in Thornbury was united behind Athelstan Randall, who returned for his fifth and final term of office with a thumping majority. (Herbert Woodcock later returned to the Commons as the Tory MP for Liverpool Everton in 1924–29, in the days when Liverpool was capable of electing Tory MPs.)
In 1924 the three-way split reasserted itself and Thornbury went back to the Conservatives. The new MP was Derrick Gunston, who had served with distinction in the First World War as an Irish Guards officer, winning the Military Cross. In 1929 he came out on top of one of the closest three-way splits ever seen in a Parliamentary election, polling 13,914 votes to 13.614 for the Liberals’ John Day and 13,445 votes for Labour’s Godfrey Elton — all three candidates were separated by just 1.2 percentage points. Gunston’s re-elections in 1931 and 1935 were much more comfortable. In 1938 he was created a baronet.
Sir Derrick Gunston went down to defeat in 1945 seeking a fifth term of office, as Labour won the Thornbury constituency for the first time. Here we meet again Joseph Alpass, who had been the first Labour candidate for the seat 23 years earlier; in the interim Alpass had served as MP for Bristol Central in the 1929–31 Parliament. He was a long-serving Gloucestershire county councillor and alderman, who lived and worked in Berkeley as an auctioneer.
The redistribution of 1950 split the Thornbury seat up. Thornbury itself was transferred into a new and short-lived seat called Stroud and Thornbury, while the rest of the constituency — Kingswood, Mangotsfield and Chipping Sodbury — became a new parliamentary seat called South Gloucestershire. This was the first Parliamentary berth for a rising star of the Labour Party. Anthony Crosland’s studies at Oxford had been interrupted by the Second World War, in which he participated in the Allied landings at Taranto and fought in Italy and southern France; afterwards he went back to Oxford, completing the PPE course in twelve months before becoming an economics tutor. He won the new South Gloucestershire seat easily, with a majority of 6,138 over the Conservatives.
Having come into being only five years earlier, the South Gloucestershire seat was radically redrawn just five years later at the 1955 redistribution. This split up the area of the modern Kingswood constituency for the first time, because Kingswood and Mangotsfield urban districts were included within Bristol constituencies for the first time; South Gloucestershire retained only the Warmley rural district, the then-rural fringes of the current Kingswood seat.
Kingswood town itself was transferred into the Bristol South East constituency, which had been created in 1950 and spanned both sides of the River Avon: on the north side were Kingswood and St George, on the south side were Brislington, Stockwood and part of Hengrove. The Stockwood area had been filled with council houses by Bristol Corporation between the wars, and Bristol South East proved to be a safe Labour seat for nearly all of its existence.
This was a seat associated with famous names. The first MP for Bristol South East was Sir Stafford Cripps, who at the time of the 1950 general election was Chancellor of the Exchequer. Cripps then resigned from the government and the Commons later that year on health grounds, and the resulting by-election on 30th November 1950 was won by a young man called Anthony Wedgwood Benn.
Tony Benn came from a political dynasty. Both of his grandfathers had been Liberal MPs, and his father William Wedgwood Benn had twice served in Cabinet: as India secretary in the 1929–31 government, and as Attlee’s first Air secretary. Anthony had followed his father into the Royal Air Force at the tail-end of the Second World War, before reading PPE at Oxford and becoming president of the Oxford Union in 1947. He was elected to Parliament at 25, on the day after 23-year-old Thomas Teevan won a by-election for the Unionists in Belfast West; however, Benn was sworn into the Commons one day before Teevan and became Baby of the House for that one day. Benn then resumed the title of Baby of the House when Teevan lost his seat in Belfast West at the 1951 general election. Kingswood was added to his Bristol South East constituency in 1955, with Benn winning his second term of office with a reduced majority of 8,047 over Bristol city councillor Robert Cooke (who would later serve for two decades as the Conservative MP for Bristol West).
One fly in the ointment for Anthony Wedgwood Benn was that his father had been elevated to the peerage in 1942 as the first Viscount Stansgate. The first-born son Michael Wedgwood Benn had then been killed serving in the Second World War, which left Anthony as the heir to his father’s titles — something which he was not happy about at all. Matters came to a head on 17th November 1960 when William Wedgwood Benn died and Anthony succeeded to his father’s title as the second Viscount Stansgate. His seat in the Commons was automatically vacated.
Scenes ensued. Benn refused to accept his title and did not request a writ of summons to the Lords. Instead, he attempted to renounce his peerage. The matter ended up before the House of Commons Privileges Committee, which decided that the renunciation had no effect and Benn had indeed ceased to be a member of the House. The debate on the Privileges Committee’s report took up an entire day of Commons business on 13th April 1961, in which the House rejected a motion that Benn be allowed to speak from the Bar of the House of Commons and approved the committee’s report by 204 votes to 126.
The Labour whips were now able to move the writ for the Bristol South East by-election of 4th May 1961, which was to be a rerun of the 1959 contest between Labour’s Viscount Stansgate and the Conservatives’ Malcolm St Clair, who was a dairy farmer and a retired Army officer. Benn had defeated Stansgate in 1959 by 26,273 votes to 20,446, a majority of 5,827. In the by-election, Stansgate increased his majority to 13,044 votes. St Clair then petitioned to the Election Court.
Stansgate was, of course, ineligible to be an MP. He knew it, the House of Commons doorkeeper (who refused Benn entry to the chamber when he tried to take his seat) knew it, most of the people who had voted for him knew it, and the Conservatives had decided to make absolutely sure that anybody in Bristol South East who wasn’t aware that Stansgate was disqualified as a peer would be informed of that fact. During the by-election campaign St Clair’s campaign took out a large number of newspaper adverts, and put up posters close to every polling station in the constituency warning that Benn was disqualified from being an MP and any votes for him would have no effect.
These elaborate precautions enabled St Clair to win his Election Court case. In 1955 two IRA prisoners, who were disqualified from being MPs following convictions for treason felony, had been elected to Parliament as Sinn Féin candidates in Northern Ireland. In each case the Ulster Unionists were found to have made every attempt to inform the voters that their opponents were disqualified, and the Election Court not only unseated the sitting MPs but awarded the seat to their opponents, on the grounds that the Sinn Féin voters knew their candidate was disqualified and therefore had thrown away their votes. The same precedent was followed here: the Conservatives’ legal team satisfied the Court that all of Benn’s voters knew he was disqualified and that they had thrown away their votes. The Court unseated Viscount Stansgate and declared that Malcolm St Clair, as the only other candidate, had won the by-election.
Ironically, St Clair was also the heir to a peerage: his cousin, the 17th Lord Sinclair, had no children at that point in time. Benn continued to campaign outside Parliament for a change in the law to allow peers to renounce their titles, and St Clair gave an undertaking that if Parliament passed such a law then he would resign from the Commons.
A number of other Conservative MPs in the 1959–64 Parliament were heirs to peerages and liable to lose their seats in the Commons at any moment, so there was an upside for the Macmillan government in legislating to reform the Lords. The result was the Peerage Act 1963, which allowed members of the House of Lords to disclaim their peerages within one year of succeeding to their title or within one year of the passing of the Act; the Act also allowed all Scottish peers and female holders of hereditary peerages to sit and vote in the Lords. Elizabeth II gave royal assent to the Act at 6pm on 31st July 1963; twenty-two minutes later, the second Viscount Stansgate had disclaimed his peerage and again become plain Anthony Wedgwood Benn. Malcolm St Clair made good on his undertaking and immediately resigned from the Commons; the resulting Bristol South East by-election of 20th August 1963 had no Conservative or Liberal candidate, and Tony Benn returned to the Commons in triumph with almost 80% of the vote. The new provision allowing peers to disclaim their titles came in handy for the government a couple of months later, when Harold Macmillan resigned as Prime Minister and was replaced by the Earl of Home — or, as he quickly became, Sir Alec Douglas-Home MP.
Tony Benn was easily re-elected as MP for Bristol South East in 1964, 1966 and 1970. He served on the Labour frontbench throughout the first two Wilson governments, first as Postmaster General and then as Minister of Technology after the 1966 general election. In the first of those capacities Benn officially opened the official secret now known as the BT Tower in 1966, while his stint administering the white heat of technology gave us the computer firm ICL (now Fujitsu), British Leyland and the development of Concorde.
The UK’s Concorde aircraft were built at Filton, which in 1955–74 was part of the South Gloucestershire constituency. This covered the (then) rural parts of what is now the Kingswood constituency plus Thornbury and Berkeley, reversing their transfer to Stroud and Thornbury in 1950.
Labour’s Anthony Crosland didn’t seek re-election in the redrawn seat, instead contesting Southampton Test (which he lost), and on its new boundaries South Gloucestershire was won by the Conservatives’ Frederick Corfield. Corfield had started his career as an Army officer, and spent most of the Second World War as a German prisoner; he passed law exams while in a prisoner of war camp, but legal work didn’t suit him and Corfield ended up as a farmer. He was elected in 1955 with a majority of 1,726 votes over new Labour candidate Edward Bishop (who would later serve as MP for Newark in the 1960s and 1970s); despite a number of close contests after that, Corfield went on to represent South Gloucestershire throughout the period 1955–74.
Completing the picture, from 1955 to 1974 Mangotsfield was included within the urban seat of Bristol North East. This was a closely-fought marginal throughout the period, represented in turn from 1955 by William Coldrick for Labour; from 1959 by Alan Hopkins of the National Liberal Party (who were in alliance with the Conservatives, and eventually merged with them in 1968); from 1966 by Labour’s Raymond Dobson; and from 1970 by the Conservatives’ Robert Adley, who would later find a much safer berth in Christchurch.
In February 1974 the Kingswood parliamentary seat came into being for the first time, originally with rather similar boundaries to those of today, the main difference being that all of Mangotsfield was included. The seat was originally defined as covering Kingswood and Mangotsfield urban districts and Warmley rural district; in April 1974 these local government units merged into a single Kingswood council, a second-tier district under Avon county council.
Surprisingly, the first election for the new Kingswood seat turned out to be a three-way contest. The Liberal candidate Jack Aspinwall made a serious effort and came third with over 26% of the vote; the Conservatives’ Charles Irving, wbo shortly afterwards would become a long-serving MP for Cheltenham, came second with 35%; and Labour’s Terry Walker, an accountant, won the seat with 39% of the vote and a majority of 1,641. Walker was defeated in 1979 by Jack Aspinwall, who had left the Liberals after his two 1974 campaigns here and joined the Conservatives; it was a close result, with Aspinwall’s majority being 303 votes. Terry Walker stayed on in elected politics in this area for many years after losing his Parliamentary seat, serving on Avon county council and then South Gloucestershire council from 1981 to 2015.
The Kingswood seat had a major redraw in 1983, shifting to the west to take in eastern parts of Bristol proper: the Hillfields and St George areas of eastern Bristol were now included here, while the rural fringes of the seat were transferred into the new and bizarrely-drawn Wansdyke constituency. In its initial form Wansdyke stretched south from what would become Emersons Green all the way south to Midsomer Norton, while also completely surrounding the city of Bath; Keynsham was the seat’s main population centre. The Kingswood MP Jack Aspinwall sought re-election in Wansdyke, which proved to be a safe seat for him until his retirement in 1997.
The boundary changes wiped out the Conservative majority in the revised Kingswood, meaning that the Tories would have to gain the seat all over again in 1983. And they did, just, with Labour’s Terry Walker failing to return to the Commons by 1,797 votes. This marked the start of the long, if slightly accident-prone, parliamentary career of Robert Hayward. Lord Hayward, as he now is, is a noted political commentator who for many years has effectively been the Conservatives’ in-house psephologist. If Hayward says something about our elections and how they are run then it would be wise to listen to him; so his recent description of Andrew’s Previews as “historical and electoral tours de force” meant a lot to your columnist.
Robert Hayward was appointed OBE in 1991 for his work supporting the families of Gulf War hostages. But his House of Commons seat was too marginal to permit a government career, and Kingswood was a Labour gain in the 1992 general election when Roger Berry won the seat at his second attempt. Berry was leader of the Labour group on Avon county council, and lectured in economics at Bristol University; his academic career had previously included a four-year spell at the University of Papua New Guinea. Hayward may have masterminded a few national victories for the Conservatives, but his personal electoral record went on to include being the losing Conservative candidate in the 1993 Christchurch by-election, which remains a contender for one of the Tories’ worst ever by-election performances.
The 1997 redistribution moved most of the ex-Gloucestershire parts of the Wansdyke constituency back into Kingswood, which lost the St George area to Bristol East; Wansdyke still extended north of the Avon, but that seat now only covered Oldland Common and Hanham. Both Kingswood and Wansdyke were Labour seats during the Blair and Brown years, with Roger Berry continuing in Kingswood and Dan Norris surprisingly winning three terms in Wansdyke. Norris had been a teacher, child protection officer and Bristol city councillor before entering Parliament. He lost his seat in 2010 to Jacob Rees-Mogg, but now has an important role in the area’s local government as Mayor of the West of England. South Gloucestershire is one of the three boroughs (along with Bristol, and Bath and North East Somerset) within Norris’ mayoral area.
In 2010 the Kingswood seat returned to something close to its original boundaries, as the Boundary Commission gave three whole seats to South Gloucestershire district. The seat now includes no part of the city of Bristol. This improved the Conservative position, and Labour’s Roger Berry lost in 2010 to the Conservatives’ Chris Skidmore by 2,445 votes.
Chris Skidmore had represented the Kingswood seat since then, being appointed OBE in 2022 for parliamentary and public service. He was born in the constituency in Longwell Green, read modern history at Oxford and then worked as an advisor to Conservative MPs and for right-wing think tanks. In between all this Skidmore found the time to write four books on fifteenth and sixteenth-century British history, including biographies of Richard III and Edward VI; this week he appeared on an episode of Iain Dale’s Presidents, Prime Ministers, Kings and Queens podcast, discussing the short life and even shorter reign of Edward V.
Skidmore’s Parliamentary career saw him co-write a rather more notorious political book, Britannia Unchained, which was published in 2012 and also had contributions from some other ambitious young Conservative MPs: Kwasi Kwarteng, Priti Patel, Dominic Raab and Liz Truss. Skidmore was the only one of the five authors of Britannia Unchained who never served in Cabinet; he was on the frontbenches of Theresa May and Boris Johnson’s governments in a number of roles, but his career stalled at junior ministerial level. One of those ministerial jobs was as minister of state for energy and clean growth, which Skidmore held on an interim basis for two months in 2019; in that capacity, he signed into law the UK government’s net zero pledge.
After being sacked from the Conservative frontbench in 2020, Skidmore built on that work by campaigning for the UK to keep to its targets to reach net zero in carbon dioxide emissions. And that was what eventually led to his resignation on 5th January 2024, which was in protest at the Sunak government’s introduction of the Offshore Petroleum Licensing Bill to expand North Sea oil and gas extraction.
Skidmore’s resignation gives the Conservatives a problem — not just for this by-election, but potentially in the coming general election too. The Kingswood seat is due to disappear in the coming boundary review, a victim of the four current Bristol seats being oversized. The southern suburbs and villages will be transferred into Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg’s constituency of North East Somerset, which will be renamed as “North East Somerset and Hanham” in consequence. The rather shorter previous seat name “Wansdyke” has clearly disappeared down the back of the settee. Emersons Green will be transferred into the Filton and Bradley Stoke constituency, another Conservative seat currently represented by Jack Lopresti. Kingswood town and Mangotsfield will form part of a completely new seat called Bristol North East, which is projected to be safely Labour even in December 2019 conditions. Chris Skidmore had already announced he would not seek re-election some time before he handed in his notice; assuming the Conservatives hold this seat, the by-election winner will need to find a different berth in the Commons in very short order.
Mind, that’s a big assumption to make these days. Skidmore won his fourth term of office in 2019 with a percentage lead over Labour of 56–33 and a majority of 11,220 votes. If Labour can replicate some of their recent by-election performances, that should be well within their range.
Indeed, if we look at the 2023 local election results here for South Gloucestershire council, we can see that this gap had effectively closed. Aggregating the votes cast in the wards wholly within the constituency plus Emersons Green gives 38% for the Conservatives, 35% for Labour and 14% for the Liberal Democrats; the 18 councillors on those wards split equally between the Conservatives and Labour. The 2023 vote shares given here flatter the Conservatives for two reasons: the main missing element of the calculation is 35% of Staple Hill and Mangotsfield ward, which is the strongest Labour ward in South Gloucestershire, and Labour also didn’t contest Longwell Green ward last year. Overall in South Gloucestershire the Conservatives lost control at the 2023 local elections; there is no overall majority, and a coalition of Labour and the Liberal Democrats is running the show.
The leader of the opposition Conservative group on the council is Sam Bromiley, who is the defending Conservative candidate for this by-election. He represents Parkwall and Warmley ward within this constituency, and he is the only candidate to give an address in the constituency.
The Labour candidate is Damian Egan, who had served since 2018 as the elected Mayor of Lewisham in south London. Egan had grown up in Bristol, and he had already been selected as the prospective Labour candidate for the new seat of Bristol North East — defeating the unpopular elected mayor of Bristol, Marvin Rees, for the nomination. Damian Egan resigned his mayoral post when his nomination papers went in for this by-election, so Andrew’s Previews will be in Lewisham for a Mayoral Special in three weeks’ time.
Third place here in 2019 went to the Lib Dems, who polled 6.9% and saved their deposit. They have selected Andrew Brown, who is a Bristol city councillor. Another Bristol city councillor on the ballot is Lorraine Francis for the Green Party, who are starting from fourth place with 2.4%.
The fifth party which was on the ballot here in 2019, the Animal Welfare Party, has not returned. However, we have two new parties standing. Reform UK, after dithering a little over whether to stand here, have nominated Rupert Lowe who was a Brexit Party MEP for the West Midlands from 2019 to 2020; Lowe was previously chairman of Southampton FC in the 1990s and 2000s, and saved his deposit in his only previous Parliamentary campaign in 1997 — that was for the Referendum Party in the Cotswold constituency, where he lives. Completing a candidate list of six is UKIP’s Nicholas Wood, who lives in Surrey and stood as a UKIP candidate for Elmbridge council and for Surrey county council last year.
Just one more thing before we leave this week’s Parliamentary Specials to consider the five local by-elections which are also taking place this week. These special editions of Andrew’s Previews take a lot of time and work to write, so if you’ve enjoyed or learned something from this week’s column and would like to say “thank you” with a small financial donation, that would be greatly appreciated. Here’s the link.
South Gloucestershire wards: Bitton and Oldland Common, Hanham, Kingswood, Longwell Green, New Cheltenham, Parkwall and Warmley, Woodstock, Emersons Green (most), Staple Hill and Mangotsfield (part)
ONS Travel to Work Area: Bristol
Postcode districts: BA1, BS15, BS16, BS30, BS31, BS36
Sam Bromiley (C)
Andrew Brown (LD)
Damian Egan (Lab)
Lorraine Francis (Grn)
Rupert Lowe (Reform UK)
Nicholas Wood (UKIP)
December 2019 result C 27712 Lab 16492 LD 3421 Grn 1200 Animal Welfare Party 489
June 2017 result C 26754 Lab 19254 LD 1749 Grn 984
May 2015 result C 23252 Lab 14246 UKIP 7133 LD 1827 Grn 1370 BNP 164 TUSC 84 Vapers in Power 49
May 2010 result C 19362 Lab 16917 LD 8072 UKIP 1528 BNP 1311 Grn 383 EDP 333
Briton Ferry East; and
Rhos
Neath Port Talbot council, Glamorgan; caused respectively by the resignation of independent councillor Chris James and the death of Plaid Cymru councillor Marcia Spooner.
Let’s have some light relief after all that, shall we? We’ll start by crossing the Severn Bridge west from Bristol and travelling into Wales along the M4 motorway. This motorway once came to a screeching halt at Baglan, just to the north of Port Talbot, after which there was a gap in the M4 until it reappeared to the north-east of Swansea; to reach the city of Swansea, travellers had to join the A48 and cross its viaduct over the River Neath. An impressive structure, but one that could not be brought up to motorway standards. The gap in the motorway was eventually filled in 1994, and the M4 now crosses the river on an impressive viaduct of its own.
These bridges replaced a ferry crossing which gave the nearby town of Briton Ferry its English-language name. (Its Welsh-language name is Llansawel, where “llan” refers to a church and the meaning of “sawel” is obscure.) Located on the eastern side of the Neath, this is an industrial town which had been a centre of iron and steelworking since the 17th century. There’s still a lot of industry around here, as reflected in Briton Ferry East ward making the top 50 in England and Wales for “lower supervisory and technical” occupations (9.3%) — for how long given the troubled future of the nearby Port Talbot steelworks, who knows? East ward is located on the eastern side of the South Wales main line, on which can be found Briton Ferry railway station which has a limited Transport for Wales service.
The A474 road links Briton Ferry via Neath to Rhos, which is a rather different sort of place. Rhos is a pit village on the south side of the Swansea Valley, not far south-east of Pontardawe. There was still coalmining going here into the 21st century, as we can see from the fact that Rhos division includes the site of the Gleision Colliery. This is a privately-owned drift mine which was the loaction of Wales’ worst recent mining disaster: a routine underground blast in September 2011 resulted in the mineworkings being suddenly flooded, and four miners were killed.
Both of these industrial places are covered by the Neath Port Talbot local government district, which was controlled by Labour from its 1996 creation until they lost control in 2022. Labour were still the largest party on the council following the 2022 election with 27 out of 60 seats, but they were shut out of power by a coalition between independent and Plaid Cymru councillors. This coalition only has 28 seats, with two Lib Dems and a Green councillor giving it confidence and supply: the two independent councillors for Dyffryn ward are in opposition. The ruling coalition is defending both by-elections today; if they lose both seats, then the Dyffryn independents would hold the balance of power. Council control could well be on the line here.
Briton Ferry East is a strongly Labour ward in normal circumstances, and nobody opposed the Labour candidate here in 2004 or 2012. However, both of the previous Labour councillors subsequently left the party and sought re-election as independent candidates: Colin Morgan lost re-election in 2017 to Chris James, who held his seat in 2022 by a margin of just two votes, 351 to 349. In percentage terms, that’s 45–44. This ward is part of the Aberavon parliamentary seat, which will be redrawn for the next Westminster election with the name Aberafan Maesteg; this seat is represented in Cardiff Bay by David Rees, the Dirprwy Lywydd or Deputy Presiding Officer of the Senedd, while its Westminster MP is Stephen Kinnock, son of the former Labour leader Neil Kinnock and husband of the former Danish prime minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt.
Rhos is currently part of the Neath constituency, whose Labour MS Jeremy Miles is the Welsh Government minister for education and the Welsh language. He is one of the two candidates in the current contest to replace Mark Drakeford as the leader of Welsh Labour. The local MP Christina Rees, ex-wife of the former Welsh secretary Ron Davies, has recently got the Labour whip back after she was suspended from the party in October 2022. Rees is standing down at the next Westminster election, not that she has much choice in that: a large chunk of the current Swansea East seat is being added to the Neath constituency in the boundary changes, and Labour have already selected the outgoing Swansea East MP Carolyn Harris to fight the new Neath and Swansea East constituency.
The Neath and Swansea East constituency, however, will not include the Rhos division. The Pontardawe area is instead being injected into a parliamentary seat with a very different electoral tradition, becoming the Cwm Tawe part of the new seat of Brecon, Radnor and Cwm Tawe. In recent years the Brecon and Radnorshire constituency has been often been a close contest between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, as this column discussed in its preview for the 2019 Westminster by-election; however, Labour were competitive in that seat back in the days when the mining town of Brynmawr was part of Brecknockshire, and the addition of Cwm Tawe might well change the electoral arithmetic again. In this context it is noticeable that the Lib Dems are standing in the Rhos by-election, whcih is the first time they have contested this seat for nearly 20 years.
The Rhos by-election follows the death in October of Plaid Cymru councillor Marcia Spooner, who had represented this ward since winning the last Rhos by-election in November 2019 and was re-elected in 2022 with a 55–45 lead over Labour. Spooner previously sat for this ward from 2008 to 2012. The Briton Ferry East by-election is to replace Chris James, who resigned from the council at the end of the year. There is currently a third vacancy on the council following the death of long-serving Labour councillor Sheila Penry, so Andrew’s Previews will be back in Neath before too long.
One independent candidate has come forward to succeed Chris James in Briton Ferry East: he is Kris Pemberton, a driving instructor who is the mayor of Briton Ferry. Also on the town council is Labour candidate Gareth Rice, who is a firefighter. Stephanie Woodhouse completes the ballot paper for the Green Party.
The Rhos by-election is being defended by Plaid Cymru, who have selected Pontardawe town councillor Matty Vincent. Labour have reselected Noel Davies who was the losing candidate here in 2022; he is a soldier and bandsman of the Salvation Army. Also standing are Susan Jay for the Liberal Democrats, Kathy Oakwood for the Green Party and independent candidate Bob Woolford.
Briton Ferry East
Westminster and Senedd constituency: Aberavon
Westminster constituency (from next general election): Aberavon Maesteg
ONS Travel to Work Area: Swansea
Postcode district: SA11
May 2022 result Ind 351 Lab 349 PC 87
May 2017 result Lab 405 Ind 318
May 2012 result Lab unopposed
May 2008 result Lab 558 C 266
June 2004 result Lab unopposed
Previous results in detail
Rhos
Westminster and Senedd constituency: Neath
Westminster constituency (from next general election): Brecon, Radnor and Cwm Tawe
ONS Travel to Work Area: Swansea
Postcode district: SA8
May 2022 result PC 486 Lab 403
November 2019 by-election PC 359 C 162 Lab 145
May 2017 result Lab 440 PC 297 C 227
May 2012 result Lab 393 PC 265 Ind 223
May 2008 result PC 578 Lab 346
June 2004 result Lab 369 PC 234 LD 163 Grn 82
Previous results in detail
Four Marks and Medstead
East Hampshire council; caused by the resignation of Liberal Democrat councillor Joanna Nelson.
We now come to two Liberal Democrat defences in wards within the orbit of London. The village of Four Marks can be found within the Hampshire hills on the main road between Alton and Winchester; this is a nineteenth-century village created by the railways around Medstead and Four Marks railway station, which opened here in 1868 and is the highest station in southern England by altitude. There was no mediaeval settlement here, and the name of Four Marks refers to a quadripoint within the village where four ancient parishes met. Appropriately, the Boundaries doctors’ surgery is located very close to where this quadripoint used to be. The railway station is no longer part of the National Rail network: it’s operated as a tourist attraction as part of the Watercress Line, a heritage railway between Alton and Alresford.
The local authority here is East Hampshire council, which covers both the Alton area and the A3 corridor around Petersfield, which is where the council offices are. This is a council where the Conservatives mislaid a large majority in 2023, although the Tories are still running the show in coalition with a Whitehill and Bordon localist group. The local MP is Damian Hinds, who has represented East Hampshire since 2010 and has been a Conservative frontbencher on and off since 2015; he sat in Cabinet as education secretary under Theresa May, and he is currently a junior minister in that department.
The East Hampshire constituency is safe for the Conservatives, as was the local county council division of Alton Rural in 2021. Four Marks and Medstead was like that in 2019, but was very close between the Lib Dems and Conservatives in 2023. The Lib Dems’ Joanna Nelson topped the poll with 43% of the vote, but her running-mates were some way behind that and the Conservatives held the other two seats with 40%. Nelson then resigned from the council in January, with the remaining Conservative district councillors’ report to that month’s meeting of Four Marks parish council rather acidly noting that she had “failed to find enough time to engage with the role or her fellow councillors and delivered little”.
The by-election to replace Joanna Nelson is a straight fight. Defending for the Liberal Democrats is Roland Richardson, who is a member of Wield parish council to the north-west of this ward. Challenging for the Conservatives is Kerry Southern-Reason, an interior designer who specialises in care home interiors; her firm is based in this ward.
Parliamentary constituency: East Hampshire
Parliamentary constituency (from next general election): East Hampshire
Hampshire county council division: Alton Rural
ONS Travel to Work Area: Basingstoke
Postcode districts: GU34, SO24
Roland Richardson (LD)
Kerry Southern-Reason (C)
May 2023 result LD 1181/1065/1057 C 1094/1090/1046 Lab 453/264
May 2019 result C 1439/1281/1263 LD 819 Grn 671 Lab 222/196/145
Previous results in detail
Tring West and Rural
Dacorum council, Hertfordshire; caused by the resignation of Liberal Democrat councillor John Mottershead.
There was an Old Person of Tring,
Who embellished his nose with a ring;
He gazed at the moon,
Every evening in June,
That ecstatic Old Person of Tring.- Edward Lear, A Book of Nonsense
Our second Lib Dem defence of the week comes on the northern slopes of the Chiltern hills, in the market town of Tring. This has been a location for passing trade for centuries thanks to location in a natural gap in the hills: Tring’s high street is derived from the route of the Roman Akeman Street, while the Grand Union Canal and the West Coast Main Line pass close by. Tring railway station, which is a couple of miles to the east of the town, has frequent commuter trains towards London and Tring itself is now something of a commuter town.
The Tring West and Rural ward has a few oddities. It covers the Tring Rural parish, centred on the village of Long Marston, which was created in 1894 from the parts of the former Tring parish that were not included in Tring urban district; this parish is a curious salient of Hertfordshire, surrounded on three sides by Buckinghamshire. The part of Tring town included in the ward takes in the Natural History Museum at Tring, which was founded by and used to be named after the former Aylesbury MP Walter Rothschild of the banking Rothschild family; this is one of the largest dead zoos in the world, with an unrivalled collection of stuffed animals.
This ward also takes in the western half of the two-mile-long Tring Bypass, which has a curious history. It was built to full motorway standards and opened in 1973, with the number A41(M), as the first section of an intended motorway between Watford and Tring. Funding for the rest of the motorway was not forthcoming, and the Tring Bypass was downgraded to an A-road in 1987. The new road to Watford was eventually built in the 1990s as a dual carriageway, but short of motorway standards.
The A41 dual carriageway and the West Coast Main Line link together the Dacorum district of Hertfordshire, whose largest centre of population is the new town of Hemel Hempstead. Dacorum council has recently been taken over by the Liberal Democrats, who now run all the local government districts in western Hertfordshire. They have a rather small majority, with 27 out of 51 seats plus this vacancy.
Tring West and Rural ward was created in 2007. It was marginal between the Conservatives and Lib Dems at its first three elections, but the Lib Dems pulled away here in 2019 and 2023 and now have a large majority; the 2023 elections here gave 50% to the Liberal Democrats, 24% to the Conservatives and 18% to the Green candidate. The ward is part of the Tring division of Hertfordshire county council, which is also safely Lib Dem.
Tring is currently part of the South West Hertfordshire seat, which has represented since 2019 by the Conservatives’ Gagan Mohindra; however, for the next general election it will be transferred into a completely new constituency called Harpenden and Berkhamsted. This is projected to be safely Conservative in 2019 conditions, but the notional result here is affected to some extent by the fact that the outgoing South West Hertfordshire Conservative MP David Gauke sought re-election as an independent candidate in 2019 and polled 26%, finishing in second place. His votes will be up for grabs when the next Westminster election comes along.
This by-election is being defended by the Liberal Democrats and is to replace John Mottershead, who was first elected here in May 2023. He was granted leave of absence from the council in November on health grounds, and submitted his resignation a month later.
Defending for the Liberal Democrats is Caroline Smith-Wright, a Tring Rural parish councillor who was once the cooking editor of Good Housekeeping magazine. The Conservatives have selected Mike Hicks, a former mayor of Tring who previously represented this ward on Dacorum council from 2015 to 2019. Standing for the Greens is Joe Stopps, who runs a music agency and represents a number of well-known performers. James Lawler completes the ballot paper for Labour.
Parliamentary constituency: South West Hertfordshire
Parliamentary constituency (from next general election): Harpenden and Berkhamsted
Hertfordshire county council division: Tring
ONS Travel to Work Area: Luton
Postcode district: HP23
Mike Hicks (C)
James Lawler (Lab)
Caroline Smith-Wright (LD)
Joe Stopps (Grn)
May 2023 result LD 1035/844 C 501/462 Grn 376 Lab 164/153
May 2019 result LD 899/824 C 529/507 Grn 438 Lab 171
May 2015 result C 1244/1162 LD 1076/859 UKIP 419 Grn 400 Lab 313/209
May 2011 result LD 1017/890 C 940/851 Lab 219/211
May 2007 result C 919/866 LD 895/883 Lab 93/88
Previous results in detail
Avenue
Kingston upon Hull council, East Yorkshire; caused by the resignation of Labour councillor Marjorie Brabazon.
Our final by-election of the week is in the big city of Kingston upon Hull. We’ve come to the Avenues, a series of four streets — Victoria, Park, Westbourne and Marlborough Avenues — about a mile north-west of Hull city centre which were built in the Victorian era for the city’s middle classes. These are wide streets with big houses and large gardens — an area very much in demand for those in Hull with sufficient money. Also here we have a series of lower-status Victorian terraces known as the Dukeries (because the streets are named after ducal seats) together with some more typical Hull housing to the east of Princes Avenue. The southern end of the ward was once occupied by the Hull Botanical Gardens, which went out of business in 1889; shortly afterwards the gardens’ site became home to Hymers College, an independent day school with around 1,000 pupils on its books.
Back in the day this area would have had a lot of Conservative voters, but these days Conservative local candidates struggle to reach three figures in Avenue ward. Hull city council is now a Lib Dem and Labour duopoly, with the Lib Dems currently in majority and Labour in opposition. Avenue ward tends to be closely fought between the parties, and currently has a split of two Labour councillors and one Lib Dem; Labour won the most recent local election here last year with a 51–36 margin, and the Lib Dems will be defending this seat in May. Boundary changes for the next general election will catch up with ward boundary changes in 2018 and unite the whole of Avenue ward within the Hull North and Cottingham constituency: this is the successor to the current Hull North, which is the safest Labour parliamentary seat in the city.
However, this by-election has exposed some issues within Hull Labour. Marjorie Brabazon, who had represented Avenue ward since 2014, tendered her resignation from the council in January after being disciplined by the Labour group. The day afterwards, another Labour councillor — former Lord Mayor Steve Wilson — left the party and went independent, giving a new composition of 32 Lib Dems, 23 Labour, 1 independent and this vacancy.
Defending the Avenue by-election for Labour is Karen Wood, who runs an environmental organisation called Down to Earth Hull. The Lib Dem candidate Rhiannon Beeson runs a marketing agency and founded a fairy trail in the area — if you go canvassing in the Avenues and the Dukeries this February half-term, watch out for the fairies. Also standing are James Russell for the Green Party; the ward’s regular Conservative candidate Alex Hayward; and Michael Whale, who is actually the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition candidate but is on the ballot paper as an independent due to paperwork issues.
Parliamentary constituency: Hull North (most), Hull West and Hessle (small parts)
Parliamentary constituency (from next general election): Kingston upon Hull North and Cottingham
ONS Travel to Work Area: Hull
Postcode districts: HU3, HU5
Rhiannon Beeson (LD)
Alex Hayward (C)
James Russell (Grn)
Michael Whale (Ind)
Karen Wood (Lab)
May 2023 result Lab 1662 LD 1174 Grn 330 C 94
May 2022 result Lab 1764 LD 1520 Grn 280 C 108
May 2021 result LD 1759 Lab 1297 Grn 364 C 189 Ind 143
May 2019 result Lab 1630 LD 1614 Grn 411 C 114
May 2018 result Lab 1910/1760/1686 LD 1847/1813/1727 Grn 647 C 198/162/150
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
