A history of Britain in by-elections

British By-Elections, 1769-2025: The 88 By-Election Campaigns That Shaped Our Politics, Iain Dale (ed.), Biteback Publishing, £30

British by-elections became more significant following the Great Reform Act of 1832, once rotten boroughs were abolished and electorates grew in size, but they ‘often seem to take on a far greater political significance than, in retrospect, they really have’, writes Iain Dale in his preface. ‘At the time, they can appear to break the mould of British politics, signify the seemingly terminal decline of a particular political party or signal the end of a premiership. Some by-elections take on iconic status and are remembered several decades after they take place. Others quickly disappear into the depths of our memories, rarely to be thought about ever again.’

Apart from being a successful journalist, commentator, publisher, and broadcaster, Dale once fought a seat at a general election, though he has never fought a by-election. For this collection he has assembled an army of contributors, which includes historians, biographers, political journalists, politicians past and present, pollsters and activists. For the psephological nerds there is a statistics section in the back, which includes the largest swings and increases in percentage of votes, largest numerical majorities overturned, highest and lowest turnouts, smallest majorities, and so on.

Most by-elections are caused by the death of a sitting Member of Parliament. Apart from those resulting from deaths of MPs during wartime (42 in total), six (since 1918) have been the result of assassinations, ten (since 1932) the result of suicides, and 23 (since 1933) the result of accidental deaths. Since 1926, 29 have resulted from scandals, mostly since 2000. Only one by-election has been occasioned by an MP being declared of unsound mind. Until 1926 another cause of by-elections and the odd upset was the law that required MPs appointed as ministers to seek the endorsement of their constituents.

The collection begins with an essay by Robin Eagles, biographer of John Wilkes, about the famous Middlesex contest of 1769, in which Wilkes, the notorious radical journalist and convicted felon, challenged monarchical and parliamentary power in a county whose electorate was composed of unruly, independent-minded ‘small traders and artisans’. Wilkes represented an entity called the Society of Gentlemen Supporters of the Bill of Rights and his campaign demonstrated organisational brilliance with carriages and boats being laid on to bring voters from all across the county to the polling place at Brentford. Although he won by a huge majority (1,143 votes over 296 and five for the other two candidates), the Commons refused to seat him. Five years later he was finally admitted as an MP after a general election victory. He was also elected as Lord Mayor of London.

In 1828 the Irish County Clare by-election was so hotly contested that the population of the town of Ennis swelled from 12,000 to some 30,000. Daniel O’Connell’s victory forced the Duke of Wellington’s government to concede Catholic Emancipation in the teeth of Protestant opposition, including members of his own party. In the later estimation of William Gladstone, a reformed Parliament, as came about a few years later, would not have granted such a concession.

Sometimes the significance of a by-election is illusory and sometimes it is not immediately apparent. Take, for example, the Manchester by-election of 1867 in which the Liberal Jacob Bright defeated both the Conservative and a rival Liberal candidate, polling more than their combined vote. But what was significant about this by-election, as the journalist and pollster Peter Kellner states, was that it ‘gave British politics an accidental heroine, a key event in the story of women’s suffrage and a bitter constitutional argument that was finally settled six decades later’. As the result of an oversight, Mrs Lily Maxwell, a widow and shop-owner, found that her name was added to the voting list and she was allowed a vote, following which hundreds of women were permitted to vote in the general election of 1868, even though the Court of Common Pleas had ruled against two women whose names had been removed from the register of voters, with one judge arguing that the denial of the vote for women was ‘a privilege of that sex’. Bright, who had not mentioned women’s suffrage in the 1867 by-election, became one of its most assiduous supporters.

Barnard Castle was, in 1903, the scene of a by-election in which the leadership of the Liberal Party ‘conspired to deliver Labour its fifth MP and assisted in placing into Parliament the man [Arthur Henderson] who would become Labour’s first ever Cabinet minister and serve three spells as its party leader’. As explained by David Laws, a former Liberal Democrat Minister in the Cameron-Clegg Coalition, the Liberals did a deal with the Labour Representation Committee to gain a short-term victory over Balfour’s Conservative government, but effectively surrendered the North of England to Labour in the long term.

The 1904 Norwich by-election, in which a Free Trade Liberal routed a protectionist Conservative, betokened the landslide Liberal victory of 1906, but was also one of the first occasions when a large number of motor cars were used to convey voters to the polls (in this instance mainly Conservative voters).

Winston Churchill fought more by-elections than most senior politicians; five in total, although he lost three of them, whereas Labour’s Arthur Henderson also fought five and won them all.

Churchill had switched from Tory to Liberal free-trader in 1906, but when he was appointed president of the Board of Trade in 1908 he was obliged to seek re-election (because of the ‘antiquated and anomalous… technicality’ of Clause 25 of the Succession Act of 1707). Arrayed against him in the Manchester North West by-election of April 1908 was a motley collection of special interests: suffragists, barmaids (who resented his support for efforts to control their employment), some disaffected Jews and Irish Catholics. Indeed, says historian Pippa Catterall, Churchill ‘primarily attributed his defeat to the Catholic priesthood’. Fifteen years later, Churchill found himself sitting around the same Cabinet table as the Tory who defeated him by 429 votes, William Joynson-Hicks. A couple of years after that, the requirement of ministers to stand for re-election was done away with by a Private Member’s Bill.

At the Westminster Abbey by-election in March 1924, Winston Churchill ‘re-ratted’, to use his own memorable phrase. He had lost a formerly safe Liberal seat in 1922 and lost another contest as a Liberal in November 1923 before undergoing a sudden Damascene conversion to the Tory cause precipitated by a fear of rampant socialism. He stood as an unofficial Conservative candidate (actually, a Constitutionalist, because that was how the local Tory association designated itself) and yet he had the backing of Conservative Central Office, while the Conservative candidate was the choice of the local association. Senior Tories were divided over support for the two candidates. The Times called it ‘the most remarkable election known in Westminster since the Ballot Act [of 1872] did away with the hustings’ and the campaign was marked by a carnival atmosphere. Churchill was pelted with turnips in Covent Garden, chorus girls stuffed envelopes with election literature for him, and his campaign organiser, Brendan Bracken, was stabbed during a street affray. A car with Labour insignia followed Churchill’s car and sought to drown out his voice with its horn and the rattles of its occupants, only it was not a Labour car at all. Labour accused the Churchill campaign of making them look bad. (Their candidate, Fenner Brockway, stood in defence of socialism.)

Early editions of the newspapers announced Churchill’s victory, but in the final count he lost to his rival Tory by 43 votes. Still, Churchill went on to win Epping for the Conservatives at the general election in October 1924 whereupon he was made Chancellor of the Exchequer. Lord Lexden’s scintillating essay about the Westminster Abbey by-election includes the piquant detail that it came as a shock to one Labour supporter when Churchill ‘wept unashamedly’ at the result, because he had never seen a man cry in public before.

By-elections can foreshadow an insurgent force. This was especially so in the age before opinion polls. A little over a year after the Easter Rising in Ireland, Éamon de Valera’s victory for Sinn Féin in East Clare in July 1917 gave indication that the Irish Parliamentary Party, which had sent dozens of MPs to Westminster since the 1880s, was soon to be replaced as the dominant contingent among Irish MPs. The IPP had won 74 seats in 1910. At the 1918 general election, Sinn Fein, which had won six by-elections in 1917-18, won 73 seats, whereas the IPP was reduced to a mere six.

The Liberals were gradually eclipsed after 1918, first overtaken by Labour and then reduced to an insubstantial rump. ‘The great irony of the 1957 Carmarthen by-election was that the person condemning the Liberals to their lowest-ever number of MPs should be someone from the Lloyd George family’, writes Roger Awan-Scully. Lady Megan Lloyd George won the seat for Labour and held it until her death in 1966, whereupon it fell to Plaid Cymru in another by-election.

The Orpington by-election of 1962, in which the Liberal candidate, Eric Lubbock, defeated the Conservative candidate in the dying days of the Macmillan government, was the first by-election to have the declaration of the result shown on television and the first in which tactical voting was ‘seen as decisive in determining the outcome’, argues professor of government Philip Norton (Baron Norton of Louth). Orpington is perhaps most famous for the coinage ‘Orpington man’ to denote a significant shift in voter allegiance based on underlying socio-economic factors as opposed to mere discontent with specific policies or government decisions. (It was the first in a long line of such coinages, viz. ‘Essex man’, ‘Telford man’, etc.) Yet Orpington man, supposedly indicating a Liberal resurgence, actually proved to be ‘stillborn’, as Norton puts it, as some factors in the Liberal victory were peculiar to the constituency, while others pertained to economic mismanagement by the government. Even so, Lubbock’s victory put paid to Macmillan’s ‘image as the unflappable Prime Minister’.

In the 1963 Bristol South East by-election, Tony Benn faced no opposition from the Conservatives and Liberals, essentially a recognition of his long and principled campaign as the inheritor of his father’s hereditary peerage to be granted the legal right to stand for election to the House of Commons. Although the outcome of the by-election was predictable, as Lee Evans points out, with Benn winning close to 80 per cent of the vote, ‘the road to Benn’s victory – featuring a death, two by-elections, a court case and an Act of Parliament – was one of the most dramatic and unpredictable of the twentieth century’. It was notable for Benn’s idiosyncratic campaign strategy: ‘Starting at 6 a.m., he would go and greet people in the bus queues, board the bus and meet everyone before getting off at the next stop. “People are delighted as they have nothing to do or read on a bus and are anyway quite captured.”’

Alec Douglas-Home emerged as de facto Conservative leader in 1963, chosen by a small ‘charmed circle’ of party grandees, and had already kissed hands as Prime Minister, when he was obliged, as a resigning hereditary peer (the 14th Earl of Home), to fight a by-election, since it was understood that no peer, in the 20th century, could feasibly serve as Prime Minister. George Younger, who had been selected as a candidate for the Kinross & West Perthshire by-election, nobly stood aside (though with the quid pro quo of a guaranteed safe seat at the earliest subsequent opportunity). ‘For nearly three weeks’, as Andrew Holt explains, ‘the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom served without holding a place in either House of Parliament and without holding the leadership of a political party.’

The outcome of the by-election was never in doubt and yet it was a decidedly peculiar contest, as Holt reminds us. Travelling almost 1,000 miles across this vast rural Scottish constituency, Home made nearly 50 speeches in small venues, sometimes three in a day, and owing to the constant media attention had to make a different speech in each instance, aided by two young speechwriters from the Conservative Research Department, Nigel Lawson and John MacGregor (both future Cabinet ministers) – an incipient trend. Oddly, television was of little use since one of the candidates refused to appear. The Kinross & West Perthshire by-election ‘saw a sitting Prime Minister travel a constituency in a way that would have been impossible in the midst of a general election’ and ‘the campaign had elements of anachronism, with a visible clash between the old and the new… While the result was expected, it was a unique scenario that is unlikely to be repeated’.

Each of the essays in this collection is illuminating and this would seem to be the result of Dale’s firm brief to his contributors that they should not only identify the significance of their allocated by-election, both in immediate political terms and as part of a wider picture across time, but also leaven their observations with choice details about the events and personalities involved. The jargon and clotted sentence construction of much modern academic discourse is nowhere to be found within these pages. ‘There’s rarely a dull by-election’, says Dale, because ‘there’s always a human tale to tell.’