Previewing the two Parliamentary and four local by-elections of 19th October 2023

“All the right votes, but not necessarily in the right order”

Six by-elections on 19th October 2023, including two Parliamentary Specials. Grab a brew, and let’s dive straight in:

Tamworth

House of Commons; caused by the resignation of Conservative MP Chris Pincher.

Are you looking for hints? Well, you might find them here. We’ve come to Watling Street, an ancient road from Londinium to the Britannic Midlands which has been use since Roman times if not earlier. Generations of Romans will have passed this spot, remembering to slow down for the speed cameras in the village of Hints that lies just beyond this sign. Until early in the 21st century when this road was relieved by the modern dual carriageway of Thomas Guy Way, this sign directed traffic on the A5.

Turn around 180 degrees from this sign, and we find more hints. Half a mile away over rolling farmland, a construction site can be glimpsed: this is an early stage of work for the High Speed 2 railway line, which will run past here to connect London with a point on the West Coast Main Line somewhere north of Lichfield. That’s what investment in transport infrastructure — in the future of the country — looks like.

Even two and a half centuries ago, it was understood that investment in transport infrastructure was a good thing. This gave us the Birmingham and Fazeley Canal, authorised in 1784 and completed in 1789 to run from Birmingham up to this junction at Fazeley, next to Watling Street.

Behind the camera are Watling Street and the Birmingham and Fazeley Canal, which terminates here on the Coventry Canal; turn right for Coventry or left for a link to the Trent and Mersey Canal at Fradley. All of these waterways were built to get goods and raw materials around the country, and all of them are still navigable today. The canal junction turned Fazeley into an industrial village, with a brick-built parish hall on Watling Street which is still home to Fazeley town council. It’s a polling station for today’s by-election.

The canals might never have reached Tamworth, but the railways certainly did. Tamworth is a major railway interchange, where the Midland line from Derby to Birmingham flies over the West Coast Main Line; the town’s railway station is on two levels, at the point where the two lines cross. Some trains from Tamworth to Birmingham also call at Wilnecote station in the south of Tamworth’s urban area, while commuters in the rural hinterland also have the option of Shenstone station. Shenstone is located on West Midlands Trains’ Cross-City line, with regular services north to Lichfield and south to Sutton Coldfield, Birmingham and Bromsgrove. These good transport links, together with the M42 and M6 Toll motorways, mean that nearly all of the Tamworth parliamentary seat is within the Birmingham Travel to Work Area.

Which rather means that Tamworth town itself has been overlooked. Maybe this is by design. Located a couple of miles north of Watling Street, Tamworth was founded as an Anglo-Saxon town on ground next to the Rivers Anker and Tame. It became a wealthy and important town, and by the eighth-century reign of King Offa it was effectively the capital of the flourishing kingdom of Mercia. This was the largest, and for much of the eighth century the most powerful, of the seven kingdoms in what became England.

But in the ninth century much of eastern Mercia became Danelaw, and Wessex took over as the major Anglo-Saxon kingdom. Tamworth was close to the Danelaw boundary, and in a location that was difficult to defend notwithstanding the efforts of Æthelflæd, a daughter of Alfred the Great who ruled Mercia from 911 to 918. She fortified Tamworth in 913, and a millennium later this statue was erected to her in the town. Behind her is the later mediaeval fortification of Tamworth Castle, which as you can see from the scaffolding is still being built.

When the modern English county system was created later in the tenth century, the boundary between Staffordshire and Warwickshire was deliberately drawn right through the middle of Tamworth, creating bizarre situations like this town-centre street being a county boundary: Warwickshire on the right, Staffordshire on the left. Several reasons have been given for this division, from allowing Tamworth to call on the men of two counties for its defence to a deliberate decision by Wessex to curb the power of a rival regional capital by preventing it from dominating any county. It’s certainly made Tamworth’s parliamentary history very complicated, as we shall see.

On the Warwickshire side of the town centre, we find Tamworth Castle and its grounds, which are now given over to some rather spectacular gardens.

On the Staffordshire side, we have the parish church. This is a mediaeval structure and the fourth church on this site — the oldest stonework dates from 1350, after the previous church burned down. It’s claimed to be Staffordshire’s largest parish church, and it’s dedicated to a local figure, St Editha. She’s a rather obscure figure, but most sources agree that she was a tenth-century abbess associated with Tamworth and the nearby town of Polesworth.

Tamworth has some rather nice Georgian architecture, particularly around the town hall — which we’ll come to in a moment — but the architects of the postwar era have also left their mark. See for example the modern Tamworth council offices on the Staffordshire side, which have been faced with brick in a slightly vain attempt to make them fit in with their surroundings. As have the three tower blocks to the left of the camera, whose ugliness I’ll spare you here.

The old town hall is on the Warwickshire side, and is a building of 1701 commissioned by Thomas Guy, who was an MP for the town at the time. He was a bookseller and philanthropist who gave his name to Guy’s Hospital in London, which he also founded. You can’t see it here because of the temporary boarding, but the town hall is set above a ground-level arcade, where markets are still held today out of the weather.

Tamworth Town Hall has a major part in British political history. It was here, in December 1834, that the newly-appointed Prime Minister and Tamworth MP Sir Robert Peel, 2nd Baronet, gave an address to his electors. This became known as the Tamworth Manifesto, setting out the political principles upon which the Conservative Party has been based ever since — accepting the settlement of the 1832 Reform Act, and ensuring that the party would always reform to survive.

Despite its lasting historical fame, the Tamworth Manifesto might not have actually swung that many of the voters in Tamworth or further afield at the time. Peel and his brother William were elected unopposed as Tamworth’s Conservative MPs in the 1835 general election the following month, but the Conservatives’ parliamentary position remained dire. The Whigs had a majority in Parliament both before and after the 1835 election, and the only reason Peel had become Prime Minister was basically because King William IV had fallen out with the Whig leader and previous PM Viscount Melbourne. Peel struggled on as Prime Minister for a while after the 1835 election, but eventually resigned after a couple of months of what was obviously a lost cause. This was not the period of the political reforms which made Peel’s name: his foundation of the Metropolitan Police came earlier while he was Home Secretary, and the repeal of the Corn Laws took place during Peel’s second term as PM in the 1840s — where he had a majority in Parliament and was much more successful.

Tamworth itself had been a borough returning two MPs to Parliament since the sixteenth century, and the parliamentary borough boundaries were sensibly drawn to cover the whole town. No truck was had with the bizarre county line which sliced the town into two halves.

But, in 1885, Tamworth was disenfranchised. There was still a parliamentary seat called Tamworth following the 1885 redistribution, but this was a county division of Warwickshire which did not include the Staffordshire half of Tamworth town. Included within this seat was Tamworth’s castle, town hall and railway station, but not St Editha’s church. Also here was a large swathe of north-western Warwickshire: basically everything in that corner of the county which was not already part of Birmingham or Aston, so Sutton Coldfield, Erdington, Coleshill and Solihull were all part of this constituency. Indeed, the 1885 Boundary Commission had proposed the name “Coleshill” for the seat, but Parliament had other ideas — perhaps out of respect for Robert Peel’s legacy — and an amendment was passed to preserve the name “Tamworth”. This column has previously described the Tamworth seat of 1885–1918 in the Preview for the Birmingham Erdington by-election last year, so the next few paragraphs may be rather familiar.

The Tamworth constituency of 1885–1918 was consistently Conservative and often left uncontested. For most of this period it was represented by Sir Philip Albert Muntz, who had entered Parliament the previous year as an MP for the predecessor seat of North Warwickshire. Muntz weathered a strong challenge in 1885 from Birmingham businessman and Liberal candidate William Beale, prevailing by 53% to 47%; but after that he was only challenged twice more at the ballot box, in 1892 and 1906. He came from a Birmingham industrial family: Sir Philip was a son of George Muntz, an MP for Birmingham who gave his name to the brass alloy known as Muntz metal. This found extensive use in shipbuilding, and one notable use of Muntz metal was a sheath for the hull of the Cutty Sark.

Philip Muntz died in December 1908, aged 69. The resulting Tamworth by-election was won without a contest by the Conservative candidate Francis Newdigate-Newdegate, a Warwickshire county council alderman and former Grenadier Guardsman who was the owner of Arbury Hall in Nuneaton. Newdigate-Newdegate had been MP for Nuneaton until he lost his seat in the 1906 Liberal landslide. He faced only one contested election as MP for Tamworth, in January 1910, and was re-elected unopposed in December 1910.

Sir Francis Newdigate-Newdegate left these shores, with a knighthood, in 1917 to become Governor of Tasmania. The resulting second Tamworth by-election of February 1917 took place during the wartime electoral pact, although the Conservative candidate Henry Wilson-Fox might not have been opposed anyway given the safe nature of the seat. Wilson-Fox was a former business associate of Cecil Rhodes, serving as manager of Rhodes’ British South Africa Company, and his politics were very much in Rhodes’ imperial expansionist vein. His election to the Commons came shortly after he was one of the prime movers behind the founding of the Empire Resources Development Committee.

The Staffordshire half of Tamworth was placed by the 1885 redistribution into the Lichfield parliamentary seat, which also contained Fazeley, Brownhills, Burntwood and Rugeley as well as Lichfield. In contrast to the Warwickshire side, the Lichfield seat of 1885–1918 was strongly Liberal when election time came around. The first two elections in this period were easy wins for the Liberal candidate Sir John Swinburne, 7th Baronet — which was no mean feat given that the Liberal Unionist candidate he beat in 1886 was Thomas Anson, who would later become the 3rd Earl of Lichfield and had all of that family’s advantages to support him. Swinburne had previously contested Lichfield in the 1880 general election, lost by 16 votes, and then had the win of the Conservative candidate Richard Dyott overturned by the Election Court for bribery; in the resulting by-election, Swinburne lost by 34 votes. Dyott and Swinburne both hold the dubious distinction of appearing before the Election Court more than once: Dyott had previously successfully fought off an election petition in 1868.

The only Liberal defeat of this period came in 1892 when Swinburne lost his seat to the Liberal Unionist candidate Leonard Darwin. Leonard was the fourth and, by his own admission, least intelligent son of Charles Darwin; his grandfather Josiah Wedgwood II had previously been an MP. Before entering Parliament Leonard Darwin had spent most of his career in the Army; afterwards he became a prominent supporter of eugenics, which is somewhat ironic given his surname. Darwin had polled 3,575 votes to Swinburne’s 3,564, giving him a majority of just eleven. Swinburne petitioned to the Election Court to challenge the result, but eventually withdrew the legal action before it got to trial.

In 1895 Leonard Darwin lost his seat to the Liberals by just 44 votes, 3,902 to 3,858. Again, it ended up before the Election Court: four electors of Lichfield (including Theophilus Levett, the Conservative who had won the 1880 by-election) challenged the win of the Liberal candidate Henry Fulford on grounds of bribery and corruption. This time, the legal action stuck: the Election Court found that Fulford had illegally paid canvassers and there were irregularities in his election expenses. His win was voided and the seat was declared vacant.

The resulting Lichfield by-election on 26th February 1896 was won by the Liberals’ Courtenay Warner, who increased the Liberal majority over Leonard Darwin to 528 and went on to hold the seat until 1923. Warner had previously served in the 1892–1895 Parliament as MP for North Somerset, so this was a quick return for him. He was a major landowner in the Essex town of Walthamstow, and developed several estates in that town for housing, one of which (the Warner estate) is named after him. Warner became the first Mayor of Walthamstow in 1929, and in 1910 he was appointed by the King as Lord-Lieutenant of Suffolk with the rank of baronet.

While all this was going on, the 1889 Local Government Act — which set up county councils for the first time — had led to a long-overdue rationalisation of county boundaries. The way in which this was done was that boroughs like Tamworth which were split between counties would be allocated to the county which had more of the population according to the 1881 census. By a majority of about 200 Tamworth officially became part of Staffordshire rather than Warwickshire, and the county boundary was moved east to the Midland railway line — transferring the castle and much of the modern town centre into Staffordshire.

The 1918 redistribution extended the Lichfield constituency south into the Black Country, adding in Aldridge, Pelsall, Great Barr and Kingstanding — which Birmingham Corporation would fill with houses during this period, resulting in this constituency’s electorate booming to over 90,000 voters by 1945. Sir Courtenay Warner stayed on as the Lichfield MP, being elected in 1918 with the Coalition coupon and narrowly holding off Labour in 1922 as a National Liberal candidate (the Liberal faction associated with Lloyd George). He retired in 1923 after 27 years as MP for Lichfield, and that was the end of Liberalism in this area.

In 1923 the new Liberal candidate for Lichfield finished third and lost his deposit, and the seat went to Labour for the first time. Its MP for this period was Frank Hodges, a South Wales coalminer who at the time was the general secretary of the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain. Hodges served for only one year, losing his seat in 1924 to the banker, former Cheshire cricketer and Conservative candidate Roy Wilson. Wilson defeated Hodges by 14,588 votes to 12,512 — this was the only time the Conservatives won Lichfield during this period. We’ll come back to that later. Roy Wilson stood down in 1929 after one term, and the Lichfield constituency was gained by the Labour candidate James Lovat-Fraser who was elected to Parliament at the third attempt — he had fought Llandaff and Barry in 1922 and Bristol Central in 1924.

Meanwhile in Warwickshire, the Tamworth constituency had also been affected by the 1918 redistribution. Erdington had been annexed by Birmingham by this point, and to make up the numbers the Tamworth seat expanded to take in more of the Birmingham stockbroker belt: places like Meriden, Dorridge and as far south as Tanworth-in-Arden became represented by the MP for Tamworth. A seat which was still called that even though it no longer contained the eponymous town. Yes, really.

The new “Tamworth” seat was politically just like the old one — very safe Conservative and often uncontested. Henry Wilson-Fox never faced a contest in the seat: he won the 1917 by-election unopposed as already stated, was re-elected unopposed in 1918 with the Coalition coupon, and was still in office when he died in November 1921 at the early age of 58. The resulting Tamworth by-election of 17th January 1922 went easily to the new Unionist candidate Sir Percy Newson, who had the Coalition coupon and defeated the Labour candidate George Jones — a Tamworth town councillor and general secretary of the Warwickshire Miners’ Association — by more than 2 to 1.

Sir Percy Newson was Ranulph Fiennes’ grandfather, and like his noted grandson Newson did most of his work abroad, specifically in India where he worked in banking and as a jute merchant. In 1920 he became the final president of the Bank of Calcutta, before its 1921 amalgamation into the Imperial Bank of India which Newson was the first governor of.

Perhaps because of his duties in the subcontinent, Newson stood down from the Commons in 1923 and passed the Tamworth seat on to Edward Iliffe, who won three terms of office and only faced a contest once, in 1929. Iliffe owned a newspaper publishing empire which controlled a number of regional titles in Birmingham and Coventry; he was also a part-owner of the Daily Telegraph.

Edward Iliffe resigned immediately after the 1929 general election to free up a seat in Parliament for Arthur Steel-Maitland, who had lost his seat in Birmingham Erdington at the election. That was a big loss to the party: Steel-Maitland was a high-profile Cabinet member, having served throughout the 1924–29 Baldwin administration as Minister of Labour. He duly won the Tamworth by-election of 2nd December 1929, defeating the returning Labour candidate George Horwill (a former railway clerk) by over 10,000 votes.

Arthur Steel-Maitland died in 1935 at the early age of 58. He had polled almost 85% in a straight fight with Labour in 1931, and in the resulting Tamworth by-election of 10th May 1935 nobody bothered to oppose the Conservative candidate John Mellor. Labour did stand here in the general election a few months later, when Mellor was re-elected by 79% to 21%.

These good 1930s performances for the Conservatives in the Tamworth constituency were not repeated over the county boundary in Lichfield, where the political context was very different. When the Labour leader/traitor (delete to taste) Ramsay MacDonald formed the National Government with the Conservatives in 1931, the Lichfield MP James Lovat-Fraser was one of the Labour MPs who rallied round MacDonald’s National Labour banner. As such, he was not opposed by the Conservatives in the 1931 or 1935 general elections, in which he was re-elected (first easily, then narrowly) in a straight fight with Labour.

James Lovat-Fraser died in 1938 at the age of 70. The resulting by-election was again not contested by the Conservatives: instead Beresford Craddock, who would later serve for 20 years as Conservative MP for Spelthorne, was the defending National Labour candidate. However, he narrowly lost the Lichfield by-election of 5th May 1938 to Labour’s Cecil Poole, who gained the seat by 23,856 votes to 22,760, a Labour majority of 1,096. Poole was re-elected much more easily in the 1945 Attlee landslide, defeating Craddock (who this time was a “National” candidate) by over 16,000.

By this point in time Kingstanding was full of houses, but the Lichfield constituency as a whole was just under the threshold of 100,000 electors which would have triggered action to it in the emergency redistribution of 1945. The Tamworth constituency, however, had swelled to 118,000 electors, and the 1945 boundary changes split it up. Essentially it was divided into two new seats called Solihull and Sutton Coldfield, with some smaller changes at the margins. Some parts of the Tamworth seat which had been annexed by Tamworth borough since 1918 were transferred to the Lichfield seat, but this only involved a few hundred electors: the eastern half of the modern seat was still Warwickshire at this point, and covered by the Sutton Coldfield seat. The outgoing Tamworth MP John Mellor sought re-election in Sutton Coldfield, and he won by just under 10,000 votes.

Major changes to the Lichfield seat had to wait for the main redistribution in 1950, when the Kingstanding area was removed to become the basis for a new seat called Birmingham Perry Barr. The outgoing Labour MP for Lichfield, Cecil Poole, sought re-election there. The rest of the seat, now renamed as “Lichfield and Tamworth”, elected Labour MP Julian Snow who been displaced from Portsmouth Central by the redistribution. Snow won six terms as MP for Lichfield and Tamworth but never had a majority greater than the 4,518 he enjoyed in the 1945 Attlee landslide, when the Conservative candidate was the former Cannock MP Sarah Ward.

Julian Snow retired in 1970 and the Lichfield and Tamworth seat was gained for the Conservatives by the wonderfully-named Jack d’Avigdor-Goldsmid, who had come to politics from a long career as an Army officer; he retired with the rank of major-general. He was a D-Day veteran and had won the Military Cross “in recognition of gallant and distinguished services in Normandy”.

The 1955 redistribution moved eastern Tamworth out of the Sutton Coldfield constituency into a new seat called Meriden, which combined much of the Warwickshire coalfield around Atherstone with the Birmingham stockbroker belt around Meriden itself. With this interesting political mix Meriden proved to be a very marginal seat, and its first contest in 1955 set the tone: Labour’s Reg Moss defeated the Conservatives’ William Peel by 22,796 to 21,691, a majority of 1,105.

Moss was a schoolteacher, and he ended up going back to his career in the classroom after the Conservatives defeated him in 1959 by just 263 votes: 26,498 to 26,235. The new Conservative MP for Meriden, Gordon Matthews, likewise served only one term: before being elected he had been a chartered accountant and a director of Rackham’s department store in Birmingham, and he had stood in Birmingham constituencies in 1945 and 1950. In the 1964 general election Meriden was one of the last results to be declared, partly because it was again very close: Gordon Matthews ended up losing his seat to Labour’s Christopher Rowland by 29,425 votes to 29,062, a majority of 363.

Christopher Rowland was 35 years old at this point, but had been in politics since he was a student: he chaired the LSE Labour society in 1952, and then worked as a BBC producer and for the Booker distribution firm. He had had to leave the BBC when he stood in the 1959 general election as Labour candidate for Eastleigh.

In 1966 Rowland was one of a delegation of three Labour MPs who travelled to Rhodesia, where he was assaulted by a group of Ian Smith supporters. Despite this he was re-elected by over 4,000 votes in that year’s general election despite a strong performance from the Conservative candidate, a very young Jonathan Aitken, who actually polled more votes than Gordon Matthews had lost with two years earlier.

Christopher Rowland was taken seriously ill during a visit to his constituency in 1967, and he died shortly afterwards at the appallingly early age of 38. The resulting Meriden by-election of 28th March 1968 occurred at the pit of the second Wilson administration: Labour were defending three parliamentary seats in by-elections that day (Acton, Dudley and Meriden), and lost the lot. In the case of Meriden, it wasn’t even close: the defending Labour candidate Roderick MacFarquhar, who would later serve in the 1970s as MP for Belper in Derbyshire, was trounced by the Conservatives’ Keith Speed who won by over 15,000 votes. Speed, a Royal Navy veteran who had subsequently worked as a sales and marketing manager and in the Conservative Research Department, was re-elected in 1970 with over 40,000 votes and a majority of 4,724.

These huge vote totals in Meriden come from a large electoral register — the electorate here was over 100,000 at the 1970 general election. Tamworth was never a New Town, but it looks and votes rather like one because of huge population growth here after the 1950s. The modern Tamworth borough took on its current boundaries in 1965, and the expanded borough mushroomed with houses to accommodate overspill population from Birmingham.

The parliamentary boundaries caught up in 1974, when the whole town was united within the Lichfield and Tamworth parliamentary seat. This didn’t change the political complexion of the seat much, and Jack d’Avigdor-Goldsmid was re-elected in February 1974 with a majority of 1,807 over Labour’s Bruce Grocott. However, the rematch in October 1974 resulted in a win for Grocott by 331 votes, 29,872 to 29,541, with Lichfield and Tamworth becoming one of the gains which gave Labour its tiny majority in that election.

Bruce Grocott had been a university lecturer before being elected in Lichfield and Tamworth, which he served for only one term (most of his Commons career was as MP for The Wrekin, and later Telford). He was defeated in 1979 by the Conservatives’ John Heddle, who polled over 41,000 votes and won a majority of 8,448. Again, the Boundary Commission had failed to keep pace with the growth of Tamworth: there were over 100,000 voters on the roll in Lichfield and Tamworth at the 1979 general election, and major changes would be needed to the seat from the next redistribution.

The Boundary Commission’s solution was to separate Lichfield and Tamworth and place them in different constituencies for the 1983 election. Tamworth became the focus of a seat curiously named South East Staffordshire, which took in the town together with the countryside to the south and east of Lichfield. John Heddle successfully sought re-election for the Mid Staffordshire seat based on Lichfield, which left South East Staffordshire free for the new Conservative candidate David Lightbown. Lightbown was the leader of Lichfield council and served on Staffordshire county council, and away from politics he was an engineering executive. He had a safe seat, enjoying large majorities at the 1983, 1987 and 1992 elections, and in 1990 he joined the government in the Whips office.

Sir David Lightbown suddenly collapsed and died in December 1995 while watching the Varsity rugby match at Twickenham. He was 63 years old. The resulting South East Staffordshire by-election on 11th April 1996 was possibly one of the worst Conservative by-election performances of the Major government, and that’s in a crowded field with a lot of contenders. The Labour candidate Brian Jenkins, who had lost by 7,192 votes in 1992, pulled off a massive 22% swing to win with over 60% of the vote and a majority of 13,762.

Jenkins was a Tamworth councillor who had a long career before entering politics as an engineer and college lecturer. He was re-elected in 1997 as MP for the new Tamworth constituency, which was essentially a cut-down version of the former South East Staffordshire with less of a rural hinterland, with a majority of 7,496 over the Conservative candidate, Sir David Lightbown’s widow. The Tamworth seat was unchanged in the 2010 boundary review, so there have been six general elections on these boundaries in this century. The boundary changes for the next general election will change this seat only marginally.

All six Tamworth general elections in the 21st century have swung to the Conservatives. Tamworth became marginal in 2005, and five years later Brian Jenkins was defeated by Chris Pincher. Pincher improved the Conservatives’ position to the point that in December 2019 he was re-elected with just under two-thirds of the vote and a majority of 19,634.

Chris Pincher made it to government in June 2017 by joining the Government Whips office. He them resigned five months later amid allegations of sexual assault made by the former Olympic rower Alex Story, who described Pincher as a “pound shop Harvey Weinstein”. A party investigation determined that Pincher had not broken the code of conduct, and he was reappointed to the Whips office in January 2018 as Deputy Chief Whip. After a spell in the Foreign Office and two years as the minister for housing, Chris Pincher resumed the role of Deputy Chief Whip in February 2022.

On 30th June 2022 Chris Pincher resigned from the Whips office for the second time, after an incident at the Carlton Club in London the previous evening in which it was alleged that he had groped two men while drunk. This political scandal set off a chain of events which brought down the Johnson government a week later amid mass ministerial resignations; Boris Johnson had been briefed about the 2017 incident before he reappointed Pincher to the Whips Office.

The Commons Standards committee was not impressed when it looked into Pincher’s conduct, and in July 2023 they recommended that he should be suspended from Parliament for eight weeks. Pincher appealed against the suspension, without success. Facing a recall petition against him, he chose to resign from the Commons in September and trigger this by-election.

We are, of course, almost four years on from the December 2019 general election in which the Conservatives’ Chris Pincher beat the Labour candidate here by 66–24. There was a very similar result in the Staffordshire county council elections in 2021; if we take as a best fit for this constituency the six county divisions covering Tamworth plus Lichfield Rural East and Lichfield Rural South, then the Conservatives led Labour across the constituency by 61–26 and carried all eight county divisions.

Fast forward to May 2023 when all of the district wards in this seat were up for election, and we get a very different picture. May 2023 saw the best Labour performance in Tamworth borough for many years and a good opposition performance in Lichfield district as well: both councils went into No Overall Control and now have Conservative minority administrations. In Tamworth borough as a whole Labour polled 44% and won eight wards, the Conservatives polled 37% and won two wards, and 15% went to independent candidates.

Once we add in the raw votes from the Lichfield wards of (taking a best fit for the seat) Bourne Vale, Fazeley, Hammerwich with Wall, Little Aston and Stonnall, Mease Valley and Shenstone then the gap disappears and the Conservatives and Labour are virtually tied on 41% each with independent candidates on 14%. However, this total doesn’t actually include votes from the small Bourne Vale ward because the Conservative candidate there was elected unopposed. If Bourne Vale had polled, then the Conservatives would probably have had a small but clear lead across the Tamworth constituency. The number of councillors this represents is ten Conservatives, eight Labour and one Lib Dem: that Lib Dem is the former West Midlands MEP Phil Bennion, who is the Lichfield councillor for Mease Valley ward.

The Labour councillor elected in May 2023 for Amington ward in Tamworth resigned almost immediately in order to take up a post on the Civil Service fast stream. The resulting by-election was held two weeks ago on 5th October and resulted in a big swing to Labour since May, partly but not wholly due to the Conservative vote being split between a former Tory councillor for the ward and two other right-wing candidates, both of whom are back for this parliamentary by-election.

Chris Pincher had lost the Conservative whip as the result of the groping scandal, and never got it back. Indeed, the party opened a selection contest some time ago for their next parliamentary candidate for Tamworth, which was won on 19th June by Eddie Hughes. Since 2017 Hughes has served as the Conservative MP for Walsall North, a seat which has been rather severely hacked around by the Boundary Commission’s review: the successor seat of Walsall and Bloxwich is notionally Conservative but takes in a lot of Labour-friendly territory from the current Walsall South, and on current polling Hughes would have little chance of re-election there at the next general election. Tamworth looked a rather safer bet for Hughes — for about three weeks, until it became clear in July 2023 that Pincher would be facing a recall petition. If Hughes had been the Conservative candidate for the Tamworth by-election and won the seat, then that would have triggered a second parliamentary by-election in Walsall North because you can’t represent two constituencies at once. We’ll see later that things are different in Mid Bedfordshire, but Hughes has decided that the possibility of causing a consequential by-election is not worth it and he stood down as Tamworth’s prospective Conservative parliamentary candidate.

Having been forced to reopen nominations, the Tamworth Conservatives selected Andrew Cooper as their replacement defending candidate. He is an Army veteran who works for Network Rail as a railway engineer. He has been a Tamworth councillor since 2021, representing Mercian ward in the north-west corner of the town. Very long-term readers of this column will recall that the Conservatives have been underperforming for years in by-elections along the High Speed 2 route; see for example Chesham and Amersham, two years ago. Cooper will be hoping to buck that trend.

The Labour candidate is Sarah Edwards, who is a union organiser for Unite and a former NHS governor. She gives an address in the constituency. At the time of writing, she is the bookies’ favourite.

There may be a pub in Amington called the Liberal House, but Liberalism has not been a feature of Tamworth’s politics for many years. Nevertheless the Lib Dems did just about manage to save their deposit here in December 2019 with 5.3% of the vote, and their candidate Sunny Virk will be hoping to do the same. He is a barrister and mediator who gives an address in Coventry. The Green Party have selected Sue Howarth, who appeared in this column last year in relation to a by-election in the Dodderhill ward of Wychavon council in Worcestershire, which is where she lives (Andrew’s Previews 2022, page 368). On that occasion Howarth came within just 13 votes of winning a ward which the Greens had never previously contested, so starting from a fourth-place finish in 2019 with 2.0% is clearly no obstacle. Fifth here in 2019 with 1.8%, and also fifth in the Amington by-election two weeks ago with 1.6%, was former Tamworth councillor Robert Bilcliff who was elected for the UK Independence Party in Stonydelph ward in 2016 and served one term; he is still in UKIP, and he is back for another go.

To take the four other candidates in alphabetical order, Reform UK have selected Ian Cooper who contested the Amington by-election two weeks ago and finished fourth with 6.3%. Intending Conservative and Reform UK supporters should check carefully which Cooper they are voting for. Howling Laud Hope is back yet again for the Official Monster Raving Loony Party. Standing as an independent candidate is Peter Longman, who gives an address in Oxfordshire and is an entrepreneur associated with a group called Transport for Britain. And to finish off we have Ashlea Simon, the chairman of Britain First, who gives an address in Salford.

We saw earlier that the old Lichfield seat of the late 19th century regularly figured in the Election Court, and this by-election has revived that old tradition. Labour’s West Midlands branch had put up some Facebook and Instagram adverts implying that Andrew Cooper, if elected, would retire at the next general election to allow Eddie Hughes to stand and then collect the termination payout which the House of Commons gives to retiring MPs. This was false, as by the time the adverts went out Hughes had already stated that he would look for a different seat if the Conservatives hold the Tamworth by-election.

Last week Cooper took two West Midlands Labour officials to the High Court, seeking an injunction to stop the advert. The judge declined to grant an injunction on the grounds that while the statement was false, it was a statement about Cooper’s political rather than personal character and thus not a breach of electoral law. Labour did, however, undertake not to publish the advert and its false claims again.

Since I’ve had a pop at the Labour campaign, it’s only fair to to point out that the Conservative candidate Andrew Cooper has himself attracted controversy over a Facebook post from 2020, before he became a councillor, in which he implied that parents who were unable to feed their kids and who pay for TV packages, mobile phone contracts, nails/eyebrows/lips etc should “fuck off”. There speaks someone who had never tried to help anybody that couldn’t make their bills add up. Your columnist’s day job is to help people make their bills add up, and I can say from professional experience that, within reasonable limits, TV/internet packages and mobile phone contracts in particular are items which have every right to be on a household’s budget no matter how dire their financial situation might be. If Cooper is elected as MP for Tamworth he will quickly find himself dealing with a lot of his constituents who have trouble feeding their kids, and he’d better have a more professional answer for them than “fuck off”.

We wait to see what if effect, if any, these rows have on the by-election result.

That’s Tamworth, and those are your hints. Let’s now move south for our second Parliamentary Special of the week…

Staffordshire county council divisions: Amington, Bolebridge, Lichfield Rural East (part: all except Fisherwick and Whittington parishes), Lichfield Rural South (part: all except Hammerwich parish), Perrycrofts, Stonydelph, Watling North, Watling South
Tamworth council wards: all
Lichfield council wards: Bourne Vale, Fazeley, Hammerwich with Wall (part: Wall parish), Little Aston and Stonnall, Mease Valley, Shenstone, Whittington and Streethay (part: Elford, and Wiggington and Hopwas parishes)
ONS Travel to Work Area: Birmingham (most), Wolverhampton and Walsall (Little Aston with Stonnall ward, Shenstone ward and part of Hammerwich with Wall ward)
Postcode districts: B74, B75, B77, B78, B79, WS9, WS13, WS14

Robert Bilcliff (UKIP)
Andrew Cooper (C‌)
Ian Cooper (Reform UK)
Sarah Edwards (Lab)
Howling Laud Hope (Loony)
Sue Howarth (Grn)
Peter Longman (Ind)
Ashlea Simon (Britain First)
Sunny Virk (LD)

December 2019 result C 30542 Lab 10908 LD 2426 Grn 935 UKIP 814 Ind 431
June 2017 result C 28748 Lab 16401 LD 1961
May 2015 result C 23606 Lab 12304 UKIP 8727 LD 1427 Grn 1110
May 2010 result C 21238 Lab 15148 LD 7516 UKIP 2253 Chr 235
May 2005 result Lab 18801 C 16232 LD 6175 Veritas 1320 UKIP 1212
June 2001 result Lab 19722 C 15124 LD 4721 UKIP 683
May 1997 result Lab 25808 C 18312 LD 4025 Referendum Party 1163 UKIP 369 Lib 177

Mid Bedfordshire

House of Commons; caused by the resignation of Conservative MP Nadine Dorries.

All aboard the clown car for the seventh, and possibly the most long awaited, parliamentary by-election of 2023. And it’s a complete contrast to Tamworth as we travel from town to country.

Now, the Boundary Commissions have a bit of a rule of thumb when naming parliamentary seats. If you encounter a constituency called Mid Prettyshire, then you’ll often find it’s a rather diffuse set of small towns and villages with little in common except that they didn’t fit into the seats based on the county town of Prettyborough or the grittier development of Newton Industrial. And Mid Bedfordshire is a classic of this genre. What we have here is a collection of dozens of parishes located to the south of Bedford, the north of Luton and the east of Milton Keynes, with not much to link them together.

Indeed, there are only three settlements in the Mid Bedfordshire constituency which can properly be called towns. The largest of these is Flitwick, with a population of slightly under 14,000. This is located on the Midland railway line roughly halfway between Bedford and Luton, and it’s the last stop before Bedford for Thameslink trains from London. Perhaps because of the good rail link to the capital, Flitwick’s population has boomed in recent years.

Just to the north of Flitwick lies the similarly-sized town of Ampthill, which is of much older vintage: Ampthill was the only part of this seat to be an Urban District before the 1970s reorganisation of local government. This has been a market town since 1219, gaining its charter from Henry III; there was a mediaeval castle here, where Queen Catherine of Aragon lived in the 1530s and received the news that her marriage to Henry VIII was over. Nothing remains of the castle now: its site is located within parkland.

Mid Bedfordshire’s third town is Shefford, located at the eastern end of the seat. This is another mediaeval market town, but there is also a large military presence here. Shefford lies immediately to the north of the former airfield of RAF Henlow and immediately to the east of the major defence base at Chicksands. This has been a centre for military intelligence since the Second World War, when the site intercepted German military signals and sent them to Bletchley Park for decryption; after spending many years in the hands of the US Air Force during the Cold War, MoD Chicksands has been home to the Intelligence Corps of the British Army since 1997. Some of the site was sold off in 2004 for use by local government, and the headquarters of Central Bedfordshire Council lie immediately outside the base’s perimeter.

The southern end of this constituency consists of small villages up to the boundary with Luton; Toddington and Barton-le-Clay are the main population centres here. In the west we have a number of villages which look towards Milton Keynes, including the Duke of Bedford’s estate at Woburn which is well-known for its safari park. In recent years the upgrading of the Ridgmont junction on the M1 motorway — which now has a fast dual-carriageway road to Bedford plugged into it — has led to a riot of distribution warehouses springing up.

Also in this general area we find Cranfield. Originally another RAF base located in the countryside halfway between Bedford and what would become Milton Keynes, Cranfield became home in 1946 to the College of Aeronautics, which was promoted to university status in 1969. Cranfield University is a rather curious institution. It only admits postgraduate students, and it specialises in engineering, science and management courses. Its student body is certainly not the group of young adults you would associate with a normal university in the UK: more than half of Cranfield’s students are aged 30 or over.

The main communication links between Bedford and MK avoid Cranfield, running via lower ground to the south-east. This is the Marston Vale, which was once one of the UK’s major centres for brickworking. In the 1970s Bedfordshire produced one in five of England’s bricks, and the London Brick Company had a virtual monopoly on the area’s economy: the company developed the model village of Wootton Pillinge, which was renamed in 1937 as “Stewartby” after the London Brick Company’s president, Sir Percy Stewart. Bricks were still being made at Stewartby up until 2008, when Hanson (which had bought the London Brick Company in the 1980s) closed the site down as it could not meet UK sulphur emissions rules.

It was probably this industry that saved the Marston Vale railway line between Bedford and Bletchley from the Beeching Axe. This was the last surviving section of the Oxford to Cambridge “Varsity Line” and it’s due for an upgrade in the near future as part of the East West Rail project. However, there are currently no trains on the Marston Vale route: it has been replaced by buses since November 2022 following the collapse of Vivarail, the company which owned and maintained the converted London Underground units which previously worked the line.

The Marston Vale brings us to the edge of Bedford at the northern end of the seat. Here we can find a twenty-first century New Town: Wixams, just to the south of Bedford, is currently a riot of development between the A6 road and the Midland railway line. It declared independence as a parish within the Bedford council area in 2015, and the notice of poll for this by-election gives it an electorate of 3,140. The full Wixams development is projected to finish off larger than that, and this may lead to some local government changes in future: the development site straddles the boundary between Bedford borough and Central Bedfordshire district.

This lack of historic towns has meant that Bedfordshire has historically struggled for representation in Parliament. There were never any rotten boroughs in the county; and the redistribution of 1885, which created the single-member constituency system we still have today, gave Bedfordshire just three MPs. One of those went to the town of Bedford, while the rest of the county was divided into two constituencies called Biggleswade and Luton.

Slightly more than half of the current Mid Bedfordshire was in the Luton seat during this period. Partly thanks to Luton being a fast-growing industrial town, Luton was a Liberal seat throughout the period up to the First World War. Its first MP was by repute the most handsome man in the House of Commons: Cyril Flower, who transferred to Luton after his Brecon constituency disappeared in the 1885 redistribution, had made a fortune through property development in the London districts of Westminster and Battersea. MPs were not paid a salary until 1922, so before then you needed a source of independent wealth to be an MP.

Following the 1885 election, Cyril Flower was appointed to the third Gladstone administration as a Lord Commissioner of the Treasury. In those days senior Government posts like that were classed as offices of profit under the Crown, meaning that Flower’s seat in the Commons was vacated and he had to fight a by-election on 13th February 1886. He was re-elected unopposed, which was the norm for “ministerial” by-elections at the time: of the 23 ministerial by-elections in the 1885–86 Parliament, only four were contested.

Cyril Flower was translated to the House of Lords in 1892, taking the title of Lord Battersea after his properties. The resulting Luton by-election of 29th September 1892 was contested, and turned into quite a close contest between the Liberal Unionist candidate Oliver Duke and the Liberal candidate Samuel Whitbread, from the brewing family of that name. Whitbread won by 4,838 votes to 4,596, a majority of 242.

Whitbread retired from the Commons in 1895 (although he came back a few years later as MP for Huntingdon in the 1906–10 Parliament), and was replaced by Thomas Ashton. Ashton came from a millowning family in the textile industry of north-west England; he owned a number of cotton mills in the Cheshire town of Hyde, and was briefly MP for Hyde in the 1885–86 Parliament. He somehow managed to win five terms as MP for Luton on very small majorities: Ashton won by 186 votes over the Liberal Unionists in 1895, held on in the khaki election of 1900 by just 103 votes over the Conservatives, and his lead was under 1,000 votes in both 1910 elections.

In 1911 Thomas Ashton was promoted to the red benches, becoming the first Lord Ashton of Hyde. The resulting third Luton by-election on 20th July 1911 returned another candidate with a famous name: the winner was Liberal candidate Cecil Harmsworth, who defeated the Tories’ John Hickman by 7,619 votes to 7,006, a majority of 613. As you will have guessed, Cecil was from the Harmsworth newspaper family: Lord Northcliffe and Lord Rothermere, owners of the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror, were his older brothers. Cecil had previously sat as MP for Droitwich in the 1906–10 Parliament, so this was a quick return for him. During his period as MP for this area he briefly served as a junior Home Office minister in 1915 under Asquith.

The 1885 redistribution placed the northern end of what’s now Mid Bedfordshire, including Ampthill, within the Biggleswade seat. This had a much more exciting political history, swinging regularly between the Liberals and the Liberal Unionists (the group which split from the Liberals in 1885–86 over Irish Home Rule and went into alliance with the Conservatives). The first Biggleswade MP was the Liberals’ Charles Magniac, who had previously been one of the two sitting MPs for Bedford but was displaced here by the redistribution. Magniac was a very rich City financier who served as the first president of the London Chamber of Commerce on its foundation in 1882; he was a partner in Matheson and Company, which is still in business today under the name Jardine Matheson.

Charles Magniac lost his seat in 1886 to the Liberal Unionists’ Francis Baring, who had previously been a Liberal MP for Winchester. Baring was the son and heir of the former Indian viceroy the Earl of Northbrook, and was styled as Viscount Baring at this point in time.

In 1892 Biggleswade swung back to the Liberals and Baring lost his seat. The new Liberal MP was journalist and London County Councillor George Russell, who had written a biography of the party leader William Gladstone the previous year. The Grand Old Man returned the favour by appointing Russell straight to the government frontbench, as a junior minister in the India Office; in 1894 Lord Rosebery reshuffled Russell to the Home Office.

The 1895 general election saw the Liberal Unionists regain the seat. Their candidate was Lord Alwyne Compton, a younger son of the 4th Marquess of Northampton. Compton had previously been an Army officer, and he had fought in the Sudan during the 1884 campaign against the Mahdi.

When the Second Boer War broke out, Compton rejoined the Army and was commissioned into the Imperial Yeomanry. He served in South Africa with sufficient distinction to be awarded the Distinguished Service Order, and returned to the UK in 1901 to find that he had been re-elected unopposed as Liberal Unionist MP for Biggleswade in his absence.

The Liberal landslide of 1906 was a different matter, and Lord Alwyne Compton was soundly defeated by the Liberal candidate Arthur Black. Black was a lace manufacturer from Nottingham, where he was a councillor and had served as Mayor in 1902–03. He was re-elected narrowly in both 1910 elections, becoming the only Biggleswade MP to achieve re-election.

The 1918 redistribution kept Bedfordshire at three MPs, but disenfranchised the borough of Bedford. Instead Bedford became the centre of a county seat which took over most of the former Biggleswade constituency, while a new seat was created in the centre of the county. This was called Mid Bedfordshire, and there has been a Mid Bedfordshire constituency in the House of Commons ever since. The original seat of that name was larger than that of today, stretching east to Biggleswade and Sandy and west to Leighton Buzzard (but not Linslade, which was still part of Buckinghamshire then).

The Mid Bedfordshire seat started off as a Conservative versus Liberal contest rather like Biggleswade had been, and indeed the Biggleswade Liberal MP Sir Arthur Black sought re-election here in 1918. However, the coalition government’s coupon went to the Conservative candidate Max Townley, who defeated Black comfortably. Townley was a specialist in agriculture — he was a land agent for the Bedfordshire squire Lord St John of Bletso, and married his boss’s daughter — and he concentrated on agricultural matters during his term in parliament.

In 1922 Max Townley lost his seat to the Liberal candidate Frederick Linfield, a corn merchant who had started his political career in local government on the south coast: he served two terms as mayor of Worthing. In Parliament Linfield concentrated on colonial affairs, and when the 1924 general election was called he was in Uganda on parliamentary business. This is not a euphemism. It turns out that you can’t effectively campaign in a UK general election when you’re in east Africa, and Linfield lost his seat to the Conservatives’ William Warner by 12,317 votes to 11,356, a majority of 961.

William Warner came to politics from a long military career: he had been an Army officer in India in the 19th and 20th centuries, joined the Army again during the First World War and ended up as one of the first RAF officers, retiring with the rank of brigadier-general. Before being elected to Parliament in 1924 he had served one term as a London county councillor for Fulham.

The pendulum swung back to the Liberals for the last time in 1929 when Warner was defeated by Liberal candidate Milner Gray, who — in an interesting case of what’s almost nominative determinism — ran a firm in Luton which made ladies’ hats. Gray sought re-election in 1931, although it’s not clear exactly what flavour of Liberal he was: he was a supporter of Ramsay MacDonald’s National Government but he wasn’t officially part of John Simon’s National Liberal group, and in the end the Conservatives stood against him. The Tory candidate Alan Lennox-Boyd defeated Milner Gray by 1,487 votes, and Mid Bedfordshire has had Conservative MPs ever since.

Lennox-Boyd broke the mould of Mid Bedfordshire politics and went on to have a very long career in Parliament, serving as an MP for 29 years. His political career peaked in the 1950s, when he became minister of transport in the second Churchill government before joining the Cabinet in 1954 as Colonial Secretary, a role he held for five years under Churchill, Eden and Macmillan. On his watch, independence was granted to Cyprus, Ghana, Malaya and Sudan, and the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya was put down. Lennox-Boyd saw off a 1955 attempt to apply immigration controls to New Commonwealth citizens by threatening to resign; despite this, he was very much on the right wing of the Conservatives and was associated with the Monday Club in later years.

In 1960 Alan Lennox-Boyd was raised to the peerage and entered the House of Lords as the first Viscount Boyd of Merton. He was appointed a Companion of Honour later that year. The resulting first Mid Bedfordshire by-election on 16th November 1960 saw the Conservatives defending a majority of 5,174 over Labour, who had moved into second place in the seat in 1945. Labour reselected their 1959 candidate Bryan Magee, a philosopher who later had a broadcasting career and served as a Labour and SDP MP for Leyton. Magee, however, lost the 1960 by-election to the Conservatives’ Stephen Hastings, who increased the Conservative majority to over 6,000.

A cousin of the journalist Max Hastings, Stephen Hastings — like his predecessor Alan Lennox-Boyd — had a rather international background and right-wing views. He had spent some of his early years living on a farm in Rhodesia, served with distinction during the Second World War in North Africa and Italy (winning the Military Cross for commanding a group of Italian partisans who liberated Piacenza), and then worked abroad for MI6 for a time in the 1950s. Hastings was a major supporter of the Ian Smith régime in Southern Rhodesia, which effectively kept him off the frontbench during his 23 years as a Conservative MP; however, he was a friend of Margaret Thatcher, and entertained the Thatchers during the Falklands War at Milton Hall in Cambridgeshire. (Milton Hall was owned by his second wife Lady Elizabeth Hastings, who had inherited it from her father Earl Fitzwilliam.) Outside Parliament Sir Stephen Hastings was a master of the Fitzwilliam Hunt, and he raised millions of pounds for the 2001–06 restoration of Peterborough Cathedral.

Sir Stephen Hastings won seven terms of office as MP for Mid Bedfordshire, only being seriously challenged in 1966 when Labour cut his majority to almost 3,000. He passed on a rather different Mid Bedfordshire seat to his Conservative successor in 1983. The redistribution of that year saw major changes to the seats in southern Bedfordshire, changes which were essentially reversed in 1997: the two compact and urban Luton seats were expanded into the countryside, with Luton North now reaching as far north as Flitwick. The Woburn area also transferred to the redrawn seat of South West Bedfordshire. In compensation, Mid Bedfordshire expanded north to take in the Bedford suburb/satellite town of Kempston.

North Luton was also a Conservative seat in the period 1983–97, while it included Flitwick. Its MP during this period was yet another Monday Club rightwinger, John Carlisle, who had won the predecessor seat of Luton West in 1979.

The new Mid Bedfordshire still proved to be safely Conservative and a safe berth for the new MP Nicholas Lyell, who had been MP for Hemel Hempstead in the 1979 parliament before moving here. Sir Nicholas was a successful barrister who during his time as Mid Bedfordshire’s MP went on to become one of the UK’s longest-serving law officers: he was Solicitor-General throughout the 1987–92 Parliament, before being promoted to Attorney-General for the 1992–97 Parliament. Lyell’s time on the frontbench was marked by severe criticism of his role in the Matrix Churchill “arms to Iraq” affair, while he also suffered major financial losses in 1989–92 as a Lloyd’s name.

The 1997 boundary changes awarded a sixth seat to Bedfordshire, which was created in the north of the county. Bedford town (with Kempston) became an urban constituency of its own for the first time since 1918, and a new North East Bedfordshire seat was created which took in Biggleswade and Sandy. Mid Bedfordshire lost those areas but got Flitwick and Woburn back. That basically created the seat we have today, as the 2010 redistribution changed the Bedfordshire seats only marginally.

Sir Nicholas Lyell decided to seek re-election in 1997 in North East Bedfordshire, and the Mid Bedfordshire Conservative nomination went to Jonathan Sayeed. He was a businessman and Royal Navy veteran who became one of the 20th century’s first ethnic minority MPs when he gained Bristol East from Tony Benn in 1983. Sayeed’s progress up the greasy pole was interrupted when he lost his seat in 1992, but even in 1997 conditions Mid Bedfordshire proved to be a much safer berth. From 2001 to 2003 he was on the Conservative frontbench as a junior DEFRA shadow minister, before resigning in order to vote against the Iraq war.

In 2004 the Sunday Times reported that Jonathan Sayeed was a shareholder in a company which organised luxury holidays in the UK and charged its clients up to £500 per day for access to the Palace of Westminster, that access being through Sayeed. Although Sayeed and the company involved both denied the allegations, the Commons Standards and Privileges Committee were not impressed: in February 2005 they recommended that Sayeed be suspended for ten sitting days, a sanction which these days would lead to a recall petition. Jonathan Sayeed lost the Conservative whip, and he was not a candidate in the 2005 general election shortly afterwards — ostensibly he retired on health grounds.

The Mid Bedfordshire Conservatives then selected Nadine Dorries, a native Liverpudlian who had previously worked as a nurse, as head of a school in Zambia, and in the childcare sector. Dorries had previously stood for Parliament in Hazel Grove in 2001 and she had been an unsuccessful candidate for Macclesfield council in 2002; Mid Bedfordshire in 2005 was her first election win.

Nadine Dorries’ Parliamentary career has certainly been a colourful one, which included a brush with the Election Court: an independent candidate who polled 0.7% against her in 2015 alleged that Dorries had made false statements about his personal character, but the Court threw his claim out on a technicality. In 2012 Dorries lost the Conservative whip for a time after appearing on the ITV programme I’m A Celebrity, which involved being in Australia while Parliament was sitting; a belated entry in the Commons register of interests revealed that Dorries was paid a total of £20,228 for being the first celebrity to be evicted by the public that year. In 2020 she was the first MP to be diagnosed with COVID-19.

Dorries’ time on the frontbench came under the Boris Johnson premiership, initially as a junior health minister before she joined the Cabinet in 2021 as culture secretary. She served in that role for a year, having fun stoking the culture wars, before returning to the backbenches to write novels when Johnson left office in September 2022. In June 2023 Dorries announced her resignation from the Commons with “immediate effect”, in what looked for all the world like a strop at her not being given a peerage in Johnson’s resignation honours list; but it took her until the end of August to overcome writer’s block and actually compose a resignation letter. Which is why this by-election is being held only now.

As in Tamworth, the outgoing Conservative MP is defending a very large majority from the last general election. In December 2019 Dorries polled 60% of the vote, with Labour as her nearest challenger on 22% and the Lib Dems running third on 13%. That’s a Conservative majority of 24,664 votes, which is bigger than the Tamworth majority of 19,634; however, Mid Bedfordshire is an oversized seat with over 90,000 electors on the roll, whereas Tamworth’s register is almost bang on the UK average of 71,000. In percentage terms, Tamworth is the safer seat with a Conservative majority of 42.6 percentage points against 38.1 percentage points in Mid Bedfordshire.

Bedfordshire county council was abolished in 2009, so there has been only one set of local elections here since then: that was in May 2023, when the whole of Central Bedfordshire council and the elected mayor and council in Bedford were up for election. As in Tamworth, both of these councils turned in rather messy results. The Conservatives had controlled Central Bedfordshire council since its creation in 2009, but that council went hung in 2023; independent councillors are now the largest bloc, and they are running the show there. Bedford council has been hung for many years, but this is less of a problem because Bedford has an elected mayor; in 2023 the Conservatives gained the mayoralty from the Liberal Democrats who had held it since a 2009 by-election, largely thanks to the abolition of the two-round system. Mayor Tom Wootton was elected with less than a third of the vote on a freak vote split, and he will struggle to control Bedford council for the next four years.

If we add up the votes cast in May from all of the Central Beds or Bedford wards which are wholly or partly in the seat (except for Bedford’s Cauldwell and Great Denham wards, only small corners of which are here), then we end up with a very fragmented result: 32% for the Conservatives, 27% for independent candidates, 16% for Labour and 13% for the Lib Dems. In councillor terms that translates to 18 Conservatives, 10 independents and one each for the Lib Dems and Greens. Not the sort of thing you expect to see in true-blue affluent England, although it should be noted that Mid Bedfordshire has one of the highest proportions of any constituency of households who own their home with a mortgage. Those people are not likely to look favourably on the interest rate rises of recent years.

The only other poll to take place in Bedfordshire since the last general election is the election for Bedfordshire Police and Crime Commissioner in May 2021. This was won by the Conservatives’ Festus Akinbusoye with a 42–35 lead over Labour in the first round, rising to 54.1–45.9 in the runoff.

Police and Crime Commissioner Festus Akinbusoye is the defending Conservative candidate in the Mid Bedfordshire by-election. If he is elected to Parliament then that would trigger a county-wide by-election for a new PCC within 35 working days, and it would mean that I get to write the Police and Crime Commissioner by-election rant yet again. Akinbusoye was born in Nigeria and came to the UK at 13; he grew up in London before moving to Bedfordshire and was the Conservative candidate for West Ham in 2015. He lives in the constituency, in Shefford. In a contest where all of the top three parties have been top of the betting odds at some point, at the time of writing he is the bookies’ favourite.

Another candidate who has moved from London up to Bedfordshire is Labour’s Alistair Strathern, who until recently was a Waltham Forest councillor; this column will be in Waltham Forest next week to discuss the by-election to replace him in Higham Hill ward. Strathern’s day job is as a climate lead (whatever that is) with the Bank of England; before his council resignation he was Waltham Forest’s cabinet member for 15-minute neighbourhoods.

The Liberal Democrats have selected Emma Holland-Lindsay, who is a charity worker for the National Federation of Women’s Institutes. She is a Central Bedfordshire councillor representing Leighton-Linslade South ward, which is not in this constituency.

Three other candidates stood and lost their deposit here in 2019, and two of them are back for another go. The Greens start from fourth place with 3.8%; they have selected Cade Sibley, who lives within the constituency in the village of Toddington. Retired corporate executive Alan Victor failed to live up to his surname last time, finishing fifth as an independent with 1.3%, but wasn’t far off being elected to Central Bedfordshire council in May as an independent candidate for Cranfield and Marston Moretaine ward; he is standing in this by-election with the nomination of the True and Fair Party, a group associated with the anti-Brexit litigant Gina Miller. Finishing last here at the last three general elections, most recently with 0.8%, is Ann Kelly of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party who has a better electoral track record than that might suggest: Kelly has previously served as mayor of Flitwick, twice. Her policies for office include a pledge not to appear on I’m a Celebrity or any other show involving jungles and eating bushtucker.

There have been two published opinion polls for this by-election, both of which were commissioned by the Labour Party or a Labour-supporting group so it’s difficult to know what credence to give them; for what it’s worth, both polls had freak vote splits with Labour in first or tied for first place on very low vote shares. Interestingly both polls prompted for an independent candidate who may be on track to save his deposit. Gareth Mackey is the chairman of Central Bedfordshire council for 2023–24, and he is an independent councillor for Flitwick where he has served three times as mayor and, judging from the May 2023 council results, has a big personal vote.

Of the other candidates, first alphabetically is Sid Cordle who is standing for the Christian Peoples Alliance. Prince Ankit Love Emperor of India comes here hootfoot from the campaign trail in Rutherglen, where he lost his deposit two weeks ago. Reform UK have selected Dave Holland, who lives in the constituency in Shillington; he is the managing director of an IT company. Chris Rooney, who was an independent candidate for Coventry South in the 2015 general election, is standing for an outfit called “Mainstream” which your columnist has not previously heard of. Alberto Thomas is the candidate of the Heritage Party, and last of the 13 candidates on the ballot paper is Antonio Vitiello for the English Democrats.

Whoever wins may well have to defend a rather different seat when the next general election comes along, probably within the next year. As already stated Mid Bedfordshire is an oversized constituency, and the Boundary Commission’s changes cut it down to the correct size by removing the eastern end of the seat around Shefford. Most of this area will go into a new seat called Hitchin, which will cross the border between Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire.

Before we leave Mid Bedfordshire, if I can just say a couple of things. These by-election previews take a lot of time and effort to research and write. If you’ve enjoyed them and you would like to show your appreciation of that, please feel free to make a donation to the Local Elections Archive Project (link). And if you’d like to read more pieces in this style at your leisure, there are paperback collections going back to 2016 in the Andrew’s Previews books, which are available to buy now (link to 2022 edition).

While you’re waiting for the two Parliamentary results to come through, don’t forget that there are also four local by-elections on today’s undercard. Three of them are in the Severn valley…

Central Bedfordshire wards: Ampthill; Aspley and Woburn; Barton-le-Clay and Silsoe; Clifton, Henlow and Langford (part: Clifton parish, Stondon parish, part of Henlow parish within Shillington, Stondon and Henlow Camp ward before 2009); Cranfield and Marston Moretaine; Flitwick; Houghton Conquest and Haynes; Meppershall and Shillington; Northill (part: Old Warden and Southill parishes); Shefford; Toddington; Westoning, Flitton and Greenfield
Bedford wards: Bromham (part: Stagsden and Turvey parishes); Cauldwell (part: Progress Way parish ward of Elstow parish); Great Denham (part: within Turvey ward before 20211), Wixams and Wilstead (part: Village parish ward of Elstow parish, part of Stewartby parish within Wootton ward before 2011, Wilshamstead parish, Wixams parish); Wootton and Kempston Rural (part: Wootton parish, part of Kempston Rural parish within Turvey ward before 2011)
ONS Travel to Work Area: Bedford (northern section), Luton (southern section), Milton Keynes (western section), Stevenage and Welwyn Garden City (eastern section)
Postcode districts: LU2, LU3, LU4, LU5, LU7, MK17, MK42, MK43, MK45, SG5, SG16, SG17, SG18

Festus Akinbusoye (C‌)
Sid Cordle (CPA)
Prince Ankit Love Emperor of India (Ind)
Dave Holland (Reform UK)
Emma Holland-Lindsay (LD)
Ann Kelly (Loony)
Gareth Mackey (Ind)
Chris Rooney (Mainstream)
Cade Sibley (Grn)
Alistair Strathern (Lab)
Alberto Thomas (Heritage Party)
Alan Victor (True and Fair Party)
Antonio Vitiello (EDP)

December 2019 result C 38692 Lab 14028 LD 8171 Grn 2478 Ind 812 Loony 536
June 2017 result C 38936 Lab 17953 LD 3798 Grn 1794 Loony 667
May 2015 result C 32544 Lab 9217 UKIP 8966 LD 4193 Grn 2462 Ind 384 Loony 294
May 2010 result C 28815 LD 13663 Lab 8108 UKIP 2826 Grn 773 EDP 712

Alveley and Claverley

Shropshire council; caused by the resignation of Conservative councillor Elliot Lynch.

For the second month in row, this column travels to the countryside east of the Shropshire town of Bridgnorth. Last month we saw the Conservatives somehow contrive to lose Worfield, one of their safest wards in the county, to the Liberal Democrats.

Worfield ward lies north-east of Bridgnorth; this time we’ll go south-east to the ward of Alveley and Claverley, which in the 2021 census made the top 100 wards in England and Wales for Christianity (66.1%). Alveley is a former pit village in the Severn valley, roughly halfway between Bridgnorth and Kidderminster. Claverley is an agricultural village to the east of Bridgnorth, which is probably best known to the outside world as the former home of Mary Whitehouse: her then home in Claverley was the original headquarters of the National Viewers and Listeners Association.

Politics doesn’t get much more socially conservative than Mary Whitehouse, nor much more politically Conservative than this corner of Shropshire. Alveley and Claverley ward was drawn up for the first elections to the modern Shropshire council in 2009, and all four elections here to date have comfortably returned Conservative councillors. The most recent poll was in 2021, giving a Conservative lead of 69–22 over the Liberal Democrats. This ward is part of the safely-Conservative Ludlow parliamentary seat, which will be renamed as South Shropshire for the next general election.

The outgoing councillor Elliot Lynch is standing down after six years’ service. He was first elected for Alveley and Claverley in 2021, and in the previous Shropshire council term he had represented Bridgnorth West and Tasley ward.

All three candidates for this by-election are parish councillors. Defending for the Conservatives is Jonathan Davey, a local businessman who has previous local government experience as a High Peak councillor in Derbyshire: he represented Buxton Central ward from 2007 to 2011. The Liberal Democrats have selected Colin Taylor, who represented Alveley ward on Bridgnorth council up to its abolition in 2009 and previously contested this division in 2013 and 2017. Also standing is Ann Philp who is the ward’s first Labour candidate. The Shropshire Star have interviewed all the candidates, and you can find out more here (link).

Parliamentary constituency: Ludlow
Parliamentary constituency (from next general election): South Shropshire
ONS Travel to Work Area: Telford (Alveley, Quatt Malvern and Romsley parishes), Wolverhampton and Walsall (Claverley parish)
Postcode districts: DY7, DY12, WV5, WV6, WV15

Jonathan Davey (C‌)
Ann Philp (Lab)
Colin Taylor (LD)

May 2021 result C 859 LD 275 Grn 105
May 2017 result C 919 LD 302
May 2013 result C 653 UKIP 270 LD 175
June 2009 result C 797 LD 430 Ind 394
Previous results in detail

Warndon Parish

Worcestershire county council; and

Warndon Parish South

Worcester council; both caused by the death of Conservative councillor Andy Roberts.

Our two urban by-elections both come further down the Severn valley in the city of Worcester. The north-east corner of Worcester’s urban area, next to junction 6 of the M5 motorway, is the parish of Warndon: comfortable middle-class estates on the edge of the city, combined with a large business park next to the motorway junction (this is the Worcester stop for long-distance coaches) and part of the site of the Worcestershire Royal Hospital at the southern end.

Warndon Parish returns one member of Worcestershire county council and is divided into two wards for elections to Worcester city council. The county council has a large Conservative majority which Warndon Parish is part of. Andy Roberts had been the county councillor here since 2009, and he was re-elected in 2021 for a fourth term of office with a 61–17 lead over Labour.

In normal political times, this sort of result would also be reflective of the two Warndon Parish wards of Worcester city council. These are not normal political times, and the May 2023 Worcester elections resulted in a wipeout for the Worcester Conservatives who lost every single ward they were defending. Warndon Parish North ward went to the Lib Dems and Warndon Parish South to the Greens, whose lead of 65–22 last May is completely out of kilter with every other result in South ward over the 19 years since it was created. In fact, the Greens did so well in South ward that they carried the Warndon Parish county division as a whole: the combined shares of the vote for the two wards last May were 39% for the Green Party and 25% each for the Lib Dems and Conservatives, in that order. Rather a difference from two years previously.

Worcester city council now stands at 13 Labour councillors, 10 Greens, 7 Conservatives plus this vacancy and 4 Lib Dems. Labour and the Greens run the city in coalition. The city council has the same boundaries as the Worcester parliamentary seat, which the Conservatives will have to defend at the next general election; the current Conservative MP Robin Walker, who chairs the Commons Education select committee, is not seeking re-election.

So these look like difficult by-elections for the Conservatives to defend following the passing in August of Andy Roberts, at the age of 74. Roberts had spent no less than 37 years as a fireman before entering politics: he was first elected to Worcestershire county council in 2001, lost his seat in 2005, was elected to Worcester city council in 2006 and returned to the county council in 2009. Roberts served as Mayor of Worcester in 2009–10, and at the time of his death he was the county council’s cabinet member for children and families.

The county council by-election in Warndon Parish has a field of four candidates, all but one of whom are serving Worcester city councillors. The odd one out is defending Conservative candidate Lucy Hodgson, who lost her city council seat in Warndon Parish South in May after 20 years’ service. Labour have selected Robyn Norfolk, who has represented St John ward since 2021. The Greens and the Lib Dems have both picked the councillors who won Warndon Parish South and North in May, Andrew Cross and Sarah Murray respectively.

Lucy Hodgson is not seeking to return to the city council in her former ward, so we have a completely different ballot paper for the city by-election. The defending Conservative candidate for Warndon Parish South is Janet Lippett. The Greens, who did so well here five months ago, have selected Katie Collier who contested Bedwardine ward in May. Also standing are Sunil Desayrah for Labour, Paul Jagger for the Lib Dems and Paul Hickling for Reform UK. Whoever wins will have their term cut short to May 2024, when Worcester city council will hold a full council election on new ward boundaries; the city will then move off the thirds electoral cycle.

Warndon Parish

Parliamentary constituency: Worcester
Parliamentary constituency (from next general election): Worcester
Worcester council wards: Warndon Parish North, Warndon Parish South
ONS Travel to Work Area: Worcester and Kidderminster
Postcode districts: WR4, WR5

Andrew Cross (Grn)
Lucy Hodgson (C‌)
Sarah Murray (LD)
Robyn Norfolk (Lab)

May 2021 result C 1773 Lab 484 Grn 450 LD 180 SDP 16
May 2017 result C 1564 Lab 596 LD 215 UKIP 154 Grn 136
May 2013 result C 958 UKIP 636 Lab 476 Grn 208
June 2009 result C 1753 Grn 664 Lab 440
May 2005 result C 2390 Lab 1730 LD 957 Grn 218
Previous results in detail

Warndon Parish South

Parliamentary constituency: Worcester
Parliamentary constituency (from next general election): Worcester
Worcestershire county council division: Warndon Parish
ONS Travel to Work Area: Worcester and Kidderminster
Postcode districts: WR4, WR5

Katie Collier (Grn)
Sunil Desayrah (Lab)
Paul Hickling (Reform UK)
Paul Jagger (LD)
Janet Lippett (C‌)

May 2023 result Grn 1206 C 414 Lab 183 LD 42
May 2022 result C 863 Lab 382 Grn 284 LD 90
May 2019 result C 571 Grn 537 Lab 248 UKIP 116 LD 81
May 2018 result C 820 Lab 406 Grn 82 LD 81 UKIP 35
May 2015 result C 1659 Lab 776 UKIP 401 Grn 219
May 2014 result C 798 UKIP 329 Lab 274 Grn 112
May 2011 result C 998 Lab 443 Grn 172
May 2010 result C 1687 Lab 821 Grn 348
May 2007 result C 821 Lab 267 Grn 159
May 2006 result C 878 Lab 334 Grn 151
June 2004 result C 933/895 Lab 372
Previous results in detail

Horsleys

Surrey county council; caused by the resignation of Residents for Guildford and Villages councillor Colin Cross.

For our final poll of the week it’s time to return to affluent rural England. We come to Surrey outside the M25 motorway, to a county division of seven parishes east of Guildford which runs from the North Downs to the River Wey.

The Horsleys of the name are the twin villages of East and West Horsley, which lie in a landscape influenced by aristocratic landowners with a taste for large rambling country houses. East Horsley has Horsley Towers, a Gothic pile which has been home at various times to the computer programmer Ada Lovelace and the aviator Thomas Sopwith. West Horsley has the rather more restrained 16th-century West Horsley Place, which was unexpectedly inherited by Bamber Gascoigne when his great-aunt died in 2014. Gascoigne erected an opera house in the grounds of West Horsley Place and made the old house available for filming: the BBC comedy series Ghosts is made there.

This area has excellent transport links to London. One of the railway routes from London to Guildford passes through the division, with stops at Effingham Junction and Horsley (in East Horsley); while car drivers can use the A3 London-Portsmouth road some distance to the north. Within this division we find the village of Ripley and the Royal Horticultural Society’s garden at Wisley, just off the M25 motorway. Until recent ward boundary changes in Guildford were implemented this was Lovelace ward, named in honour of Ada Lovelace and the family she married into.

Much of Surrey has been a disaster for the Conservatives in recent local elections. The local authority here is Guildford council, where the Tories crashed and burned in 2019 against an alliance of the Liberal Democrats and localist groups; in the 2023 local elections the Lib Dems won a small overall majority and were able to dump their coalition partners. Of the three wards wholly or partly in this division, Effingham ward voted Lib Dem while the other two wards returned full slates for localists: the Residents for Guildford and Villages in Clandon and Horsley ward, and the Guildford Greenbelt Group in Send and Lovelace ward.

This localist takeover extends to county level too. Horsleys division was gained by the Residents for Guildford and Villages group in the 2021 Surrey county council elections: they defeated the Conservatives by 48–37. The division is part of the Mole Valley parliamentary seat represented since 1997 by the Conservatives’ Sir Paul Beresford, who is standing down at the next general election.

One focus for all this localism is, as you have probably guessed, nimbyism. The localist parties here particularly oppose a proposed development of 1,700 homes on the former Wisley airfield, and the Residents for Guildford and Villages county councillor Colin Cross essentially resigned in protest at the developer reaching an agreement with Surrey county council over the conditions needed for planning permission.

Defending the resulting by-election for the Residents for Guildford and Villages is Dennis Booth, a former mayor of Guildford who lost his seat on Guildford council in May’s elections. The Conservative candidate is Alexander Stewart-Clark, who runs a timber business in Effingham and was an unsuccessful candidate for Send and Lovelace ward in May. Also standing are Paul Kennedy for the Lib Dems and John Barnes for Labour.

Parliamentary constituency: Mole Valley
Guildford council wards: Clandon and Horsley (part: East Clandon, East Horsley and West Horsley parishes), Effingham, Send and Lovelace (part: Ockham, Ripley and Wisley parishes)
ONS Travel to Work Area: Guildford
Postcode districts: GU4, GU23, KT11, KT23, KT24, RH5

John Barnes (Lab)
Dennis Booth (Residents for Guildford and Villages)
Paul Kennedy (LD)
Alexander Stewart-Clark (C‌)

May 2021 result Residents for Guildford and Villages 2214 C 1735 LD 536 Lab 149
May 2017 result C 2450 LD 1731 Grn 134 UKIP 108 Lab 108
May 2013 result C 2177 UKIP 750 LD 429 Lab 258
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). The 2022 edition is out now! You can also support future previews by donating to the Local Elections Archive Project (link).

Andrew Teale