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- Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
A parliamentary by-election happens when a seat in the House of Commons becomes vacant between general elections, whether because the sitting MP dies, resigns, goes bankrupt, is convicted of a crime or is subject to a recall petition. By-elections can often appear to break the mould of British politics, signify the seemingly terminal decline of a particular political party or indicate the end of a premiership. Some take on iconic status or attract celebrity candidates and are remembered several decades after they take place. Others quickly disappear into the depths of our memories. As these pages will testify, however, there's rarely a dull contest. In this latest anthology, Iain Dale picks the most consequential by-elections of the modern era and presents a series of thoroughly researched and absorbing essays by some of our finest political writers, including Sir Vernon Bogdanor, Sir John Curtice, Simon Heffer, Julia Langdon, Lord Lexden, Andrew Marr, Tim Shipman and many others. This remarkable book uncovers unique stories of political tragedy, triumph, success and failure, set against the backdrop of some of the most dramatic moments in British parliamentary history.
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In memory of my old friend and sparring partner Alex Salmond
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‘There is not a safe Tory seat in the country.’
– Victorious Liberal candidate Eric Lubbock after the Orpington by-election in March 1962
‘The straight choice.’
– Liberal campaign slogan used against gay Labour candidate Peter Tatchell in the 1983 Bermondsey by-election
‘It’s not the voting that’s democracy; it’s the counting.’
– Tom Stoppard
‘A politician thinks of the next election. A statesman, of the next generation.’
– James Freeman Clarke
‘Elections belong to the people. It’s their decision. If they decide to turn their back on the fire and burn their behinds, then they will just have to sit on their blisters.’
– Abraham Lincoln
‘One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.’
– Platoviii
Contents
Preface
IAIN DALE
Parliamentary by-elections are far from a unique British institution, yet there is something unique about the way we conduct them in this country. They often seem to take on a far greater political significance than, in retrospect, they really have. 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.
The one thing they all have in common is they each tell a story. Whether they occur because of the death of the sitting Member of Parliament, the corruption of an MP or simply the fact that the MP has had enough, there’s always a human tale to tell.
By-elections often attract celebrity candidates and therefore the media spotlight falls on a constituency that has maybe never hit the headlines before.
There’s rarely a dull by-election, as these pages will testify to.
When I published BritishGeneralElectionCampaigns1830–2019, a book on famous by-elections seemed the obvious follow-up. But were there really enough to warrant it? I sat down to compile a list off the top of my head and got to fifty without any trouble at all. In the end, after consulting experts and the general reader through social media, I came up with a list of 130, which I then had to whittle down. When I announced the list of seventy-five, there were howls of outrage that I hadn’t included x or y by-election, which is why the number I eventually settled on was a rather awkward eighty-eight. I suppose I could have just picked by-elections from the twentieth and twenty-first xivcenturies, but then we would have missed out the fascinating tales from by-elections going back to the eighteenth century. So here we are. Eighty-eight by-elections, and eighty-eight unique stories of political tragedy, triumph, success and failure.
By-elections have taken place for centuries, but few took on great significance until the Great Reform Act of 1832, which abolished rotten boroughs and constituencies which had only a dozen voters. Since then, the electoral franchise has grown, in stages, to include every adult over the age of eighteen, with a further extension to sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds under discussion.
Some by-elections are more interesting than others. If a challenger party is doing well in the polls, for almost whatever reason, the media will be far more interested than if it is just a contest between the established parties. Sometimes parties decide not to field a candidate in a particular by-election and urge their supporters to vote for another one. Occasionally, as in Clacton in 2014, an MP will cross the floor and join another party and seek the endorsement of their voters in a by-election.
In wartime, it is usual for by-elections to be uncontested, so if an MP dies, the party he or she belongs to stands a new candidate unopposed. This, of course, doesn’t prevent minor parties from standing. The same thing can, but doesn’t always, happen after a terror attack. In 1990, after Ian Gow was murdered by an IRA car bomb, the Liberal Democrats overturned a massive majority to win the seat of Eastbourne. Yet when Jo Cox and Sir David Amess were murdered, the main parties did not contest the ensuing by-election, although in each there was a plethora of minor candidates.
Up until 1926, by-elections were held more frequently because all ministers, upon being appointed to office, had to get the endorsement of their electorates.
You will find some fascinating facts in the statistics section. The swing from one party to another is perhaps the most important statistic to emerge from any by-election. Not once has there ever been a swing of more than 50 per cent. Only four times since 1945 has there been a swing of more than 40 per cent. In 2024, George Galloway won Rochdale from Labour for the Workers Party with a swing of 41.8 xvper cent. In 1973, sitting Labour MP Dick Taverne resigned his Lincoln seat and then won it back under the Democratic Labour banner with a 43 per cent swing. The second highest swing occurred in 2014 in Clacton when, as mentioned, Douglas Carswell defected from the Conservatives to UKIP and retained it with a 44.1 per cent swing. The biggest by-election swing of all time occurred in perhaps one of the most notorious by-elections ever, in Bermondsey in 1983, when the Liberals, in the shape of Simon Hughes, took the seat from Labour with a swing of 44.2 per cent.
It is, of course, the norm for a governing party to suffer in by-elections. Invariably, they will be suffering mid-term popularity blues. In only ten by-elections since the Second World War has there been a swing in favour of the governing party, the largest being in Hartlepool in 2019 when there was a 16 per cent swing from Labour to Conservative.
There is a lot of talk about safe seats and so-called ‘impregnable majorities’. Nowadays, there is no such thing. If you look at the list of the biggest majorities overturned in a by-election since 1945, the top three have occurred in the past ten years. In 2016, Lib Dem Sarah Olney overturned the Conservative Zac Goldsmith’s 23,015 majority by 1,672 votes. She lost the seat at the 2017 general election, then won it back in 2019. The second biggest majority to fall to the Lib Dems was in Tiverton & Honiton. Richard Foord vanquished a Tory majority of 24,230 and won with a majority of 6,144. But the biggest overall majority to be eliminated was 24,664 – achieved by Nadine Dorries in Mid Bedfordshire in the 2019 general election. She resigned her seat in solidarity with Boris Johnson and it was lost to Labour’s Alistair Strathern in the by-election, where he triumphed with a majority of 1,192.
Small majorities in by-elections are far from the norm. Only Alan Beith, in Berwick-upon-Tweed in 1973 for the Liberals, and Tory Fred Silvester in Walthamstow West in 1967 have won with double-figure majorities – fifty-seven and sixty-two, respectively. The smallest majority was achieved by Reform UK’s Sarah Pochin in Runcorn on 1 May 2025. In addition, only forty-four by-elections since 1945 have resulted in a three-figure majority – i.e. less than 1,000.
Turnout in by-elections is another subject which obsesses electoral geeks. Normally, turnout is far lower than in general elections, xvialthough there are exceptions to this. The biggest came in 1935, when Malcolm MacDonald retained Ross & Cromarty for National Labour with a 14 per cent swing. On reflection, this by-election should have been included in this book. It was also notable for Randolph Churchill coming within a whisker of losing his deposit. The second biggest increase in turnout came in Torrington in 1958 when the Liberals gained their first seat in a by-election since 1929. Mark Bonham Carter prevailed with a tiny majority of 219. Turnout increased by 11.4 per cent to 80.6 per cent.
Low turnouts occur when the voters don’t see the need for a by-election. Manchester Central gets the medal for the lowest turnout in a by-election, when only 18.2 per cent of the voters could be bothered to go to the ballot box in 2012. Since 1945, there have been seventeen by-elections with a turnout of under 30 per cent. Interestingly, of these seventeen, twelve have taken place since 2000.
Of course, by-elections represent a brilliant opportunity for fringe candidates or independents to show their wares. This means that there are usually more candidates in by-elections than in general elections. Most of them will not retain their deposits, but they don’t care. The most candidates to stand in a by-election was twenty-six, in 2008 at the Haltemprice & Howden by-election, which David Davis had caused by resigning his seat over the issue of civil liberties. In second place was Newbury in 1993, where nineteen candidates stood. David Rendel toppled the Conservatives.
Unless you are a serial candidate like William (Bill) Boaks or Screaming Lord Sutch from the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, there are very few people who contest more than one by-election. Among well-known politicians, Tony Benn holds the record for most fought – since 1945 – with four, in Bristol South East in 1950, 1961 and 1963 and Chesterfield in 1984. Roy Jenkins and Betty Boothroyd each fought three by-elections. Prior to that, Winston Churchill had fought five by-elections – Oldham in 1899, Manchester North West in 1908, Dundee in 1908, Dundee in 1917 and Westminster Abbey in 1924. The former and latter contests both feature in this book. Arthur Henderson not only fought five by-elections in Barnard Castle, Widnes, Newcastle upon Tyne East, Burnley and Clay Cross – he was victorious in all of them.xvii
Bill Boaks fought nineteen by-elections in various guises, most commonly railing against the Common Market. Of the nineteen, Beaconsfield in 1982, which also saw Tony Blair fighting as the Labour candidate, scored his highest vote – all of ninety-nine! He was a mere amateur compared to Screaming Lord Sutch, who fought thirty-four by-elections between 1963 and 1997. He achieved his best result in Rotherham in 1994, gaining 1,114 votes in the contest won by Labour’s Denis MacShane, who himself was to cause a by-election in 2012. This was the ninth by-election in Rotherham in 120 years. Sutch’s successor as the leader of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, Alan ‘Howling Laud’ Hope, has so far fought twenty-one by-elections.
Fighting a by-election always used to be a good way for defeated MPs to find their way back into Parliament. However, nowadays, this happens rather less frequently. In the twenty-first century, it has only been achieved on three occasions, once by the DUP MP William McCrea and twice by George Galloway. Over the same period, a total of nine ex-MPs stood in by-elections but failed to be elected.
Since 1945, only six by-election victors have served fewer than 100 days in Parliament before defeat in a general election or death. They are Bobby Sands (Fermanagh & South Tyrone, 1981 – twenty-five), Michael Carr (Bootle, 1990 – fifty-seven), Oswald O’Brien (Darlington, 1983 – seventy-seven), George Galloway (Rochdale, 2024 – ninety-one), Margo MacDonald (Govan, 1973 – ninety-two), Jane Dodds (Brecon & Radnorshire, 2019 – ninety-nine).
In 2023, there was a lot of comment on the age of the winner of the 2023 Selby & Ainsty by-election, Keir Mather. He was a mere twenty-five years old, although looked younger. However, the youngest ever by-election winner was Esmond Harmsworth, who won the Isle of Thanet in 1919 at the age of twenty-one years and 170 days. The youngest ever woman was Bernadette Devlin, who won Mid Ulster in 1969 at the age of twenty-one years and 359 days. The oldest by-election winner was the Conservative John Benbow, who won Dudley in 1844 at the age of seventy-five or seventy-six.
The first woman to be elected in a by-election was Nancy Astor, who succeeded her husband at the 1919 Plymouth Sutton contest. She became the first woman to take her seat in the House of Commons. xviiiThe first woman to actually gain a seat in a by-election was Susan Lawrence, who won the East Ham North by-election in 1926, having previously sat for the same seat between 1923 and 1924.
The first ethnic minority candidate to be elected in a by-election was Ashok Kumar, who succeeded Tory MP Richard Holt in the 1991 Langbaurgh by-election. It wasn’t until 2007 that all three major parties fielded ethnic minority candidates in a by-election, in Ealing Southall.
There have only been four full calendar years in history without a single by-election – 1992, 1998, 2010 and 2020. The longest period since the Second World War with no by-election was 645 days, between 1 August 2019 and 6 May 2021.
General elections and by-elections are usually held on a Thursday. The last by-election not held on a Thursday was the Hamilton contest in 1978. Why? Because that evening, Scotland’s opening World Cup match was taking place, so the by-election was held on the Wednesday.
Due to an administrative error, the 1973 Manchester Exchange by-election was held on Wednesday 27 June 1973. In 1965, the Saffron Walden by-election, held to elect a successor to R. A. Butler, was held on Tuesday 23 March, and on the following day, David Steel was elected at the Roxburgh, Selkirk & Peebles contest. Up until the mid-1960s, it was common to hold by-elections on any day of the week (other than Sunday).
On rare occasions, a scheduled by-election may be overtaken by the calling of a general election and the dissolution of Parliament. In these cases, the by-election is cancelled, or in official language, countermanded. This has only happened three times since the First World War – Warwick & Leamington in 1923, London University in 1924 and Manchester Gorton in 2017.
There are many causes of a by-election, the most common being the death of the sitting MP. But since 1918, there have been six by-elections due to the MP being assassinated.
In 1922, Conservative MP Sir Henry Wilson was shot dead outside his home by the IRA. In November 1981, the Rev. Robert Bradford was shot by the IRA. Three years later, Sir Anthony Berry was killed in the IRA Brighton Bomb attack. In 1990, Conservative MP Ian Gow was killed at his home by an IRA car bomb. In 2016, Labour xixMP Jo Cox was killed by a white nationalist, and in 2022, Sir David Amess was stabbed to death at his constituency surgery. The only one of those where the incumbent party did not win the ensuing by-election was in Eastbourne in 1990, when the Liberal Democrats beat the Conservatives.
Since 1932, there have been ten by-elections caused by the MP’s suicide. The last was Gordon McMaster, the MP for Paisley, in July 1997.
Since 1933, twenty-three MPs have caused by-elections due to accidental death, many of them in car crashes.
In 2015, Parliament passed a law, the Recall of MPs Act, which allowed voters to petition for the ‘recall’ of an MP. So far, this has happened on four occasions. In 2017, Fiona Onasanya, Labour MP for Peterborough, was convicted for perverting the course of justice. A recall petition succeeded in 2019. In the same year, Brecon & Radnorshire was declared vacant after Conservative MP Chris Davies filed inaccurate expenses claims. In 2024, Peter Bone was recalled after accusations of bullying and sexual misconduct.
Since 1926, twenty-nine by-elections have been caused following a scandal involving the incumbent MP. More than half of these (sixteen) have occurred since the year 2000.
On only five occasions have there been by-elections caused by the previous result being declared void. The last occasion was in 2011, in Oldham & Saddleworth, because the winner of the seat in the 2010 general election was found guilty of knowingly making false statements about a rival candidate. In 1997, in Winchester, the general election was declared null and void because ballot papers which had not received the official mark would have affected the result, if counted. This is covered in detail later in this book.
There have also been nine by-elections which have been held after the sitting Member was disqualified. The last time this happened was in 1961, when Tony Benn had inherited a seat from his father in the House of Lords.
On only one occasion has a by-election been provoked by an MP being declared of unsound mind. That happened to Charles Leach, Liberal MP for Colne Valley, in 1916.
During the Second World War, there were twenty by-elections xxcaused by MPs dying while on active service, two more than in the First World War.
There was no scientific way of choosing which by-elections to include in this book. I did take advice, but in the end the selection is mine and mine alone. The best bit about editing a book like this is matching authors to their subjects. It’s like doing a jigsaw. As you will see, some of the contributors are well known in the fields of media, politics or academia. There are also several who are totally unknown but are people I am delighted to have given a chance to show what they can do. There are a number of young contributors who are under the age of thirty, all of whom have written quality essays on a par with those who have been around the block a bit.
Each of the contributors have been asked to adhere so far as is possible to a style guide, and I am delighted by the way they have done so. Some of the contributors, like Andrew Marr, reported on the by-election they wrote about at the time; others, like John Barnes, have or have had a relationship to the constituency they have written about.
Inevitably, there will be one or two errors in a text of 250,000 words. The team at Biteback and I have done our best to catch everything, but if you do spot an error, please do let me know at [email protected].
If you enjoy the book as much as I hope and think you will, please do share the book’s details on your social media, because the best way of marketing it is by word of mouth.
Iain Dale
TunbridgeWells
March 2025
1
Middlesex
13 APRIL 1769 MINISTRY GAIN
ROBIN EAGLES
Result:John Wilkes (Whig), 1,143, 79.2 per cent; Henry Lawes Luttrell (Tory), 296, 20.5 per cent (elected); William Whitaker (Rockingham Whigs), 5, 0.3 per cent; David Roache (Independent), 0, 0.0 per cent
Sizeofmajority:847
Swing: N/A
Name of previous MP and party: John Wilkes (Whig)
Reason for by-election:Expulsion from the House of Commons
Resultatpreviousgeneralelection:John Wilkes (Whig), 1,297, 42.2 per cent (elected); George Cooke (Tory), 827, 28.3 per cent (elected); William Beauchamp Proctor (Whig), 802, 27.4 per cent
Dateby-electioncalled:17 March 1769
Dateby-electiontookplace:13 April 1769
Sizeoftotalelectorate:3,500
Total number of votes cast: 1,444
Turnout: 41.3 per cent
By the spring of 1769, the government was thoroughly fed up with John Wilkes. Ever since he had returned from exile in France to participate in the 1768 general election, the controversial former MP for Aylesbury, journalist and convicted felon had thrown a veritable toolbox of spanners into the works. Eighteenth-century elections were often raucous affairs and Wilkes was far from the first person to seek to overturn a result, but he presented a whole new type of challenge to 2an administration ill-prepared to deal with someone so willing to test limits to their extremes.
As a consequence, few elections caused as much of a stir in the period as that for Middlesex in 1769. At the general election, Wilkes had caught the government on the hop by standing first for London and then, when unsuccessful there, for the notoriously impossible-to-control county of Middlesex. Populated as it was with numbers of small tradesmen and artisans, Middlesex was not a place where either the government or any particular aristocratic interest could ever call the shots. Wilkes understood this and, bolstered by a broad range of support, was able to create a movement which left the two sitting Members, William Beauchamp Proctor and George Cooke, fighting for their places. Where London had proved difficult, Middlesex was the perfect location for someone like Wilkes, and he had emerged at the end of that contest at the head of the poll.
Britain in the 1760s was undergoing significant political upset. The state of the economy was weak, prompting numerous groups to go on strike, among them coalheavers and sailors. Minor disputes and protests frequently morphed into more general rioting and disorder. Not everyone was committed to a particular cause, but plenty were happy to take advantage of circumstances to take to the streets and indulge in some more or less harmless forms of protest. After the dominance first of Sir Robert Walpole and then of the Pelhams (Henry Pelham and his brother, Thomas, Duke of Newcastle) under George II, there had also been significant instability at the top of government. Indeed, by the time the 1769 by-election was called, George III was on his sixth Prime Minister (the Duke of Grafton).
It was into this unstable environment that Wilkes, the ultimate eighteenth-century lord of misrule, sidled in, peddling a variety of causes, though all of them based on the very broad theme of ‘liberty’. Just how unstable things were in Middlesex is shown by the fact that the April 1769 by-election was the fourth the voters of the county had been required to respond to since the general election at the end of March the previous year. It was the third involving Wilkes, the other one being caused by the death of George Cooke, who had been replaced in December 1768 by Wilkes’s lawyer, John Glynn. Wilkes’s 3return at the general election had shocked the political establishment and resulted in his expulsion from the Commons in January 1769. In February and again in March, he stood for re-election unchallenged but each time was declared ineligible by the Commons. The king took a close interest in the results and received detailed reports from Lord North telling him what was happening in Parliament. By the time of the third by-election in April, patience had worn thoroughly thin with Wilkes’s constant re-elections and the administration had determined on finding someone willing to stand against him.
The timing of the April by-election was very much driven by the need to achieve a resolution to the preposterous stand-off between Commons and electors, who were determined to return Wilkes whatever Parliament might say to the contrary. Indeed, it might be said that by the time of the final by-election, Wilkes had effectively already won. After his initial election in 1768, he had surrendered himself to the courts and been sentenced to twenty-two months in prison. Fighting the campaigns from his cell, he had been able to cast himself as a martyr and from prison oversaw the beginning of a movement that would outlive this particular election – and in many ways outlive him too. For the administration, they hoped one way or another to bring to an end the disruption Wilkes represented, hoping that ejecting him from the Commons would deprive him of the oxygen his campaign required. It had precisely the opposite effect.
Alongside the two main candidates, Wilkes and Luttrell, a ministry supporter in Parliament who had taken the Chiltern Hundreds so that he might be free to take Wilkes on, there were two others. Little is known about one of them, Daniel Roache, who seems to have opted not to appear on the day. The other, William Whitaker, risked humiliation and struggled to gain any support at all.
Possibly the most striking feature of this campaign, though, was the absence of the principal candidate: Wilkes. Missing candidates at polls were not entirely unusual in the period. Pitt the Elder did not bother to turn up to his election at Bath in 1757 and there are several examples of MPs being elected while overseas. The future Prime Minister Lord Shelburne, for example, was elected an MP while serving with the army on the Continent.
4Wilkes’s absence was somewhat more unusual, though. He was not there because he was in jail, serving out his sentence for his earlier convictions for libel and pornography. This did not mean, of course, that there were not plenty of his supporters in attendance. One of the key features of all Wilkite elections was the superb organisational ability of both Wilkes himself and his associates. Carriages and boats were laid on to convey voters from the far reaches of Middlesex – a sprawling county reaching from Berkshire in the west to Essex in the east, Hertfordshire in the north to Surrey in the south – to the polling place at Brentford. Detailed advice was spread through the newspapers telling prospective voters where to gather and which routes to avoid, to minimise the risks of violence between the various sets of supporters. On arrival at Brentford, each was to be given a blue cockade, the Wilkite colour, and placards inscribed with popular slogans, such as ‘Wilkes and Liberty’. In spite of the establishment’s concerns about the disorder that followed Wilkes everywhere, he and his lieutenants were eager to ensure that their voters were well disciplined and knew how and when to appear to the best advantage.
Wilkes’s people may have been well drilled but, for the most part, Luttrell was able to rely on a better class of voter. Among those polling for him were at least seven knights or baronets, along with two Irish peers. There were fellow MPs – Martin Bladen Hawke, son and heir of the naval hero Admiral (Lord) Hawke, who had himself been elected to Parliament in the 1768 general election; George Augustus Selwyn, MP for Gloucester; and Sir Roger Newdigate, 5th Baronet, the long-standing MP for Oxford University. There were also higher-class artisans, like Frederick Kuhff, a confectioner on the Haymarket, who counted the king among his clientele.
No titled voters backed Wilkes, but he was able to draw on a broad base of smaller tradesmen and artisans, like Silvanus Odell, who seems to have been a butcher originally from Bedfordshire, along with a smattering of professional types and established men in the City of London. These included Liscombe Price, an attorney, and respectable tradesmen, like Isaiah Fleureau, a cutler of Huguenot descent operating on the Haymarket. It is not clear whether the Edward Gibbons from Marylebone polling for Wilkes was the same as Edward Gibbon, the 5historian and future MP, whom Wilkes certainly knew well from his days as a militia officer, or indeed Gibbon’s father, also Edward, himself a former MP. John Horn of Brentford was almost certainly the Brentford curate John Horne (later Horne Tooke), at that point one of Wilkes’s most important adjutants but later a fierce rival.
The result demonstrated clearly to the ministry – and the authorities in the Commons – that the populous county of Middlesex would not take a hint and that for as long as Wilkes continued to stand, they would vote for him. However, having finally found someone willing to stand against him, the establishment was in no mood to accept the outcome. Two days after the poll, the Commons took the result into consideration and voted to overturn it, Wilkes being deemed, once again, ineligible. His votes were considered void, and Luttrell was seated as the candidate with the highest number of legitimate votes. It was not just in Parliament and Middlesex itself that the election had an impact. In the City of London, where Wilkes was already developing a powerful interest, things began to run against the supporters of government, and in June one of Wilkes’s voters and close supporters, John Sawbridge, MP for Hythe and a future Lord Mayor of London, was elected sheriff on a Wilkite ticket.
The true victor of the campaign was, of course, Wilkes. Just before the election, a new organisation had been founded: the Society of Gentlemen Supporters of the Bill of Rights (SSBR). While its major function was as a subscription organisation intended to settle Wilkes’s debts, it also had an important role as a campaigning political outfit. Wilkesism rapidly became about a great deal more than Wilkes himself and at the 1774 general election, several candidates stood on SSBR tickets, espousing a shared set of aspirations for reforming the franchise.
Having chosen to appear as the government’s champion against Wilkes, Luttrell never really recovered his reputation. He had shown a very personal animus against Wilkes prior to standing for Middlesex, and he was to find his victory came at considerable personal cost. For months after the election, he was personanongrataboth within and outside Parliament, Horace Walpole recording that he ‘did not dare to appear in the streets or scarce quit his lodgings’. There were even petty legal actions, such as one by a coffeehouse keeper, who sued one 6of Luttrell’s servants to recover a debt of £16.19s for a breakfast she had provided to Luttrell’s supporters. By 1771, he had had enough and attempted to resign the seat but was not allowed to do so. Subsequently, he even suggested that Wilkes should be given the seat after all, but that was also ignored. For the final two years of the parliament, he largely based himself in Ireland. Nevertheless, this was not the end for Luttrell in Parliament. In 1774, he stood for his previous seat of Bossiney, being returned on the local grandee’s interest. He then represented two more seats, Plympton Erle and Ludgershall, during the remainder of his long career, which only ended with his death in 1821 – having outlived his rival by nearly a quarter of a century.
The decision to sit Luttrell rather than Wilkes was of huge significance. It emphasised the Commons’ insistence that they maintained the right to adjudicate on who should be seated in Parliament rather than the electorate itself. In resolving to void all of Wilkes’s 1,143 votes, it was argued that it was as if those casting them had each chosen to spoil their ballots. For Wilkes, the whole affair represented another stage on his journey to dominating popular politics. He had caused a furore back in 1763 with his newspaper, TheNorthBriton; now, he showed the authorities how effectively he was able to harness the power of the crowd. What was to come was the development of a new force based on the SSBR and Wilkes’s successful move into the City of London. He would ultimately secure election as Lord Mayor, the same year as his eventual return to the Commons in the 1774 general election. Ironically, all of this eventually outstripped Wilkes himself. Circumstances would later persuade him to transform himself once more into a far more respectable sort of public figure, ending his days as an elder statesman and noted patron of the arts. But the movement he had inspired would continue to grow, helping to inform the later radical movements of the 1790s and early 1800s.
Robin Eagles istheeditoroftheHouseofLords1660–1832sectionatthe History of Parliament and the author of Champion of English Freedom: The Life of John Wilkes, MP and Lord Mayor of London (Amberley, 2024).
2
County Clare
5 JULY 1828 IRISH CATHOLIC GAIN FROM TORY
RICHARD A. GAUNT
Result:Daniel O’Connell (Irish Catholic), 2,057, 67.69 per cent; William Vesey Fitzgerald (Tory), 982, 32.31 per cent
Size of majority: 1,075
Swing: N/A
Name of previous MP and party: William Vesey Fitzgerald (Tory)
Reason for by-election: Promotion to ministerial office
Resultatpreviousgeneralelection:William Vesey Fitzgerald (Tory) and Lucius O’Brien (Tory) both elected unopposed
Dateby-electioncalled:12 June 1828
Dateby-electiontookplace:1–5 July 1828
Sizeoftotalelectorate:8,557
Total number of votes cast: 3,039
Turnout: 35.5 per cent
The County Clare by-election of July 1828 remains unique in the history of UK parliamentary by-elections. While it acted, like many such contests, to expose differences within the government of the day on a controversial and long-standing issue, the result of the election led directly to a major constitutional change – the granting of Catholic emancipation (the right for Catholics to sit as MPs) – in April 1829. This outcome not only represented a government U-turn of the first order but generated divisions among its traditional supporters which contributed to its subsequent downfall in November 1830.
In January 1828, the Duke of Wellington became Prime Minister of a 8Tory administration which attempted to maintain the delicate balancing act of its predecessors since 1812. Emancipation remained an ‘open’ question, which ministers could support or resist individually, while the government remained uncommitted, though in effect opposed, to its passage through Parliament. The 1820s had witnessed growing support for emancipation within the House of Commons, although ‘No Popery’ sentiment remained widespread among the population at large. Buoyed in part by the success of the anti-slavery movement, the Catholic Association was established in Ireland in 1823 to step up the campaign for emancipation. It was efficiently organised and run, not least because of the enthusiastic participation of the Catholic clergy. Such was its effectiveness as an organisation, that Lord Liverpool’s Tory government banned it between 1825 and 1828. Ministers were particularly worried by the association’s use of the ‘Catholic Rent’, a membership subscription which was charged at a minimum rate of a farthing a week. The rent was paid by people from every social class and every religious denomination to fund the association’s activities in support of emancipation; during 1828 alone, it brought in some £23,000.
As the Catholic Association resumed its legal status, during 1828, events at Westminster provided it with a major opportunity for embarrassing Wellington’s government. The resignation of several pro-Catholic ministers in May 1828 necessitated a Cabinet reshuffle in which William Vesey Fitzgerald became president of the Board of Trade. Under the Succession to the Crown Act of 1707, promotion to an ‘office of profit under the crown’ required the candidate to put themselves forward for re-election. Consequently, Fitzgerald had to fight a by-election at County Clare, which he had represented since 1818. Fitzgerald was a popular constituency MP with landlords and tenants alike and was supportive of emancipation. The Catholic Association had already pledged itself in January 1828 to oppose any government candidate when the occasion arose and, after several alternatives were considered, Daniel O’Connell, the leader of the association, agreed to contest the seat.
O’Connell had risen from relatively prosperous Catholic roots in County Kerry to become an accomplished lawyer and a political leader of wit, skill and daring. He had plagued successive Tory governments 9with his oratory and impudence, consciously modelling himself on Simón Bolívar, ‘The Liberator’ of Spain’s former South American colonies during the 1820s. O’Connell seemed the obvious candidate to take on Fitzgerald but remained conscious of his opponent’s popularity and pro-emancipation sentiments and aware of the influence which local landlords exerted over their tenantry, who enjoyed the right to vote as forty-shilling freeholders.
In order to differentiate himself from Fitzgerald and appeal beyond the electorate of County Clare to Ireland itself, O’Connell issued an election address which struck the partisan and sectarian tone that was to hallmark the contest. Fulminating against Fitzgerald as a false friend to Catholics (‘If he be sincerely our friend, let him vote for me’), he pledged himself not only to removing the hated oaths required of MPs (oaths which denied ‘the sacrifice of the mass, and the invocation of the blessed Virgin Mary, and other saints’) but also to a ‘Radical REFORM in the representative system’ and the redistribution of the surplus wealth of the established church in Ireland. He was bold enough to propose the repeal of the Acts of Union between Great Britain and Ireland, which had come into force in 1801, but, when the address was subsequently published as an election leaflet and distributed in its thousands, this clause was omitted.
O’Connell’s election platform ranged far beyond the achievement of emancipation, though this was clearly the centrepiece of his campaign. It proved discomfiting not only to Protestant Irish supporters of emancipation, who were alienated by its naked sectarianism, but to landlords and members of the gentry, who rallied to Fitzgerald as a bulwark against the social and political revolution which O’Connell held out to them.
By contrast, O’Connell mustered vocal support from the Catholic priesthood. Some 150 priests were involved in O’Connell’s election campaign at County Clare, with prominent support offered by Reverend James Warren Doyle (Bishop of Kildare), Father Tom Maguire of Leitrim and Father John Murphy of Corofin. Murphy proved particularly adept at persuading various contingents of tenantry – marched to the poll in feudal style by their landlords in order to vote for Fitzgerald – to cast them off and vote for O’Connell instead. In an age of open 10voting, it took especial courage for tenants to defy the wishes of their landlords, on pain of eviction, but defy them they did, heartened by the knowledge that this was a Catholic tenant revolt on a massive scale.
The contest took place at the Court House in the county town of Ennis. In a sharp contrast with the bacchanalian excesses illustrated in William Hogarth’s famous eighteenth-century election scenes, sobriety prevailed throughout the town. The Catholic Association had issued general orders against the distribution of spirits and against any sort of (alcohol-fuelled) disturbance. As Robert Peel, the Home Secretary and Leader of the House of Commons, subsequently observed to Sir Walter Scott, ‘I wish you had been present at the Clare election, for no pen but yours could have done justice to that fearful exhibition of sobered and desperate enthusiasm.’ The prevailing tone of temperance among the electorate did not prevent O’Connell and his supporters using Mrs Carmody’s tavern as their unofficial campaign headquarters – their liquid enjoyments interrupted only by Father Murphy’s stern intonations against allowing the ‘wolf … on the walk’ (alcoholism) to take root among them.
Fitzgerald was proposed at the election by an influential local landlord, Sir Edward O’Brien, and seconded by Francis Gore, a lawyer whose forebears included a nail maker – a fact which was treated with derision by O’Connell and his principal supporters, Charles James Patrick O’Gorman Mahon (who nominated him) and the Protestant liberal Thomas Steele (who seconded him). Fitzgerald made a widely appreciated speech to the assembled crowd, culminating with an affecting peroration in which he shed tears for his ailing father, who had opposed the Acts of Union. O’Connell retorted with a characteristic put-down, offering the barbed comment that he had ‘never shed tears in public’ – a statement which served to diminish any sentiment in favour of his opponent.
In common with pre-reform election contests, the poll extended across several days. Polling of O’Connell’s supporters was initially delayed by enforcing the requirement (usually waived by mutual agreement) for every Catholic voter to formally declare their loyalty by obtaining a magistrate’s certificate to that effect. Magistrates proved unusually reluctant to sit, in order to take and certify the oath, until 11O’Connell found a sympathetic magistrate who dealt with cases in batches.
Such was the celebrity which surrounded the contest, and especially O’Connell, that the population of Ennis, which was around 12,000 in normal times, swelled to some 30,000 people – comprising electors, campaigners and their relatives, including their wives and children. O’Connell’s campaign supplied them with vouchers to spend on provisions in local shops and taverns: some 650 payments, totalling nearly £7,000, were made. This was financed by a successful fundraising campaign spearheaded by Patrick Vincent Fitzpatrick and by the resources of the Catholic Association buoyed by the restoration of the Catholic Rent. At the start of the contest, O’Connell had been voted election expenses of £5,000; this sum was later raised to £8,000 – a testament to the seriousness with which the contest was treated by the association.
Realising general expectations, O’Connell triumphed in the by-election with 2,057 votes to Fitzgerald’s 982, securing two-thirds of all votes cast in the contest. About 300 additional votes for O’Connell were disqualified on technical grounds. It was the wholesale revolt of the forty-shilling freeholders, powerfully assisted by the promptings of the Catholic clergy, ‘wot won it’ for him. As the defeated Fitzgerald observed, in writing to Peel after the result:
All the great interests broke down and the desertion has been universal. Such a scene as we have had! Such a tremendous prospect as it opens to us! … The conduct of the priests has passed all that you could picture to yourself! … It was a hopeless contest from the first! Everything was against me … I do not understand how I have not been beaten by a greater majority.
At the opening of the new session of Parliament on 5 February 1829, Peel introduced a Catholic Relief Bill in the House of Commons, encompassing the effective realisation of Catholic emancipation. The seven months which elapsed between O’Connell’s spectacular by-election victory and the government’s momentous U-turn had been spent in concerted attempts by Wellington to convince first Peel, then his Cabinet, then King George IV, to embrace the measure – however 12reluctantly – while the tone of public sentiment on the subject became progressively more heated. Throughout this period, O’Connell remained the elected, though unseated, MP for County Clare. When the time came to test his position with the House of Commons, O’Connell refused to take the existing oaths, the House refused to concede and he was forced to fight a fresh by-election for County Clare, in expectation of returning to Parliament after emancipation had passed. O’Connell was subsequently re-elected for County Clare, without opposition, on 30 July 1829.
Nor did O’Connell succeed in preventing the suppression of the Catholic Association and the disfranchisement of the Irish forty-shilling freeholders – measures which the government insisted on introducing, as corollaries to emancipation, in the hope of fending off perpetual agitation and potential electoral anarchy. O’Connell had initially resisted disfranchisement, given his indebtedness to the freeholder vote in Clare. However, with the prize of emancipation within reach, he accepted the measures as necessary overtures to try and calm Protestant anxieties.
For the Wellington government, the granting of emancipation was a wholly unexpected and unlooked-for achievement, given the Protestant complexion of the Cabinet after May 1828 and the long-proclaimed opposition to the measure of its leading members, especially Peel. Above all others, it placed a question mark over his reputation for political consistency, which was never expunged and which subsequent events (notably the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846) only served to reinforce. More immediately, the passage of emancipation, in the face of significant anti-Popery feeling in the country, converted some (though by no means all) of the government’s Ultra-Tory supporters to embrace the cause of parliamentary reform, for they were convinced that emancipation had only been passed because of the influence which ministers had brought to bear through its electoral resources and government patronage. William Gladstone, though a supporter of emancipation, later observed that a reformed parliament would never have passed the measure. Such was the level of resentment at the government’s ‘betrayal’ of its Protestant heartland, after April 1829, that the ministry could never be sure of its political standing during the 13remainder of its time in office. Assailed on all sides and faced with growing demands for parliamentary reform, it resigned office in November 1830, ending the long period of Tory rule which had begun in 1807 and paving the way for a decade of Whig reforms, commencing with the ‘Great’ Reform Act of 1832.
DrRichardA.GauntisanassociateprofessorinhistoryattheUniversityofNottingham.AnexpertinBritishpoliticalhistoryc.1780–1850,heisthe co-editorofthejournalParliamentary History andco-editoroftheRoyalHistoricalSociety’sCamden Series.
3
Preston
17 DECEMBER 1830 RADICAL GAIN FROM WHIG
GORDON PENTLAND
Result: Henry Hunt (Radical), 3,730, 52.37 per cent; Edward George Geoffrey Smith Stanley (Whig), 3,392, 47.63 per cent
Size of majority: 338
Swing: N/A
NameofpreviousMPandparty:Edward George Geoffrey Smith Stanley (Whig)
Reason for by-election: Promotion to ministerial office
Resultatpreviousgeneralelection:Edward George Geoffrey Smith Stanley (Whig), 2,996; John Wood (Radical), 2,386, 35.67 per cent; Henry Hunt (Radical), 1,308, 19.55 per cent
Dateby-electioncalled:22 November 1830
Dateby-electiontookplace:17 December 1830
Sizeoftotalelectorate:N/A
Total number of votes cast: 7,122
Turnout: N/A
The sitting MP for Preston, the 31-year-old Edward Smith Stanley, was appointed as Chief Secretary for Ireland on 29 November 1830. Re-election to his parliamentary seat – normally a formality – must have been low down on his list of concerns. As a member of Earl Grey’s new government, which had supplanted the Duke of Wellington’s ministry, he and his colleagues faced a country in crisis. Stubborn and widespread material distress was accompanied by increasingly fraught demands for retrenchment and for parliamentary reform to end misgovernment.
15The whole European scene was once again reeling from revolution emanating from Paris. The agricultural counties of southern England were in the midst of one of the most violent periods in their history. The so-called Swing Rising was named for the mythical figure of Captain Swing, who led nocturnal bands of labourers to burn ricks, destroy machinery and threaten farmers and landowners.
The estates of Stanley’s own family, the Earls of Derby, were relatively untouched by the rising, being concentrated in the north of the country rather than the heartland of Captain Swing in the south. But the very explicit challenge to rank and to the norms of English life were certainly sufficient to worry this conscientious young aristocrat. To cap it all, Ireland, his proposed ministerial posting, seemed again to be on the brink of rising. The immense campaign for Catholic civil liberties in the 1820s, helmed by Daniel O’Connell, had given way to demands for the repeal of the union of Great Britain and Ireland. There was widespread and frequently violent opposition to the payment of tithes to uphold the established Protestant Church of Ireland in a nation whose people largely rejected its teachings.
The vast majority of ministerial by-elections were uncontroversial. They nevertheless had considerable potential to generate high-profile upsets until their final abolition in 1926. This had been demonstrated powerfully and recently in O’Connell’s victory in County Clare in the summer of 1828. And Stanley’s challenger, Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt, was cut from very similar cloth to the Great Liberator himself. Indeed, the two had become closer and closer allies over the previous year. Hunt was the archetype of the English gentlemanly radical. He came from Wiltshire gentry farming stock and experienced a personal and political midlife crisis in his thirties. His abandonment of his own wife for his friend’s earned him exclusion from polite society and the enduring hostility of the uxorious William Cobbett. His conversion from a committed loyalism in the 1800s to an equally zealous radicalism completed his transformation.
Hunt was most celebrated or notorious (depending on one’s politics) as a pioneering and flamboyant leader of popular radicalism in the years after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. In particular, he was the central protagonist in the infamous Peterloo Massacre of August 161819. Hunt was the headline speaker at the crowded meeting on St Peter’s Fields, when the Manchester magistrates had attempted to effect his arrest for holding a seditious assembly. The unarmed crowds were charged by the yeomanry, leaving the ground carpeted with the dead and horribly wounded. It was the defining event of Hunt’s life and would shape the remainder of his career.
Standing over six-feet tall, with a stentorian voice and his trademark white hat, Hunt was an imposing and formidable opponent. He had a knack for salesmanship which fitted him to compete in the political marketplace. Following his stint in ‘Ilchester Bastille’, Hunt had moved into a range of commercial endeavours, through which he still flew the flag for radical political reform. His breakfast powder, manufactured from roasted corn, provided workers with an alternative to tea and coffee that pointedly did not put tax revenues into the hands of a corrupt and illegitimate government. His ‘matchless shoe blacking’ was an endless source of satires and snooty put-downs against him during the by-election and beyond. But it was also a vehicle for his political message and bottles of it were stamped with the slogan ‘Equal Laws, Equal Rights, Annual Parliaments, Universal Suffrage, and the Ballot’. In a nutshell, this was his platform for the by-election at Preston.
Hunt had considerable form as a disruptor of parliamentary elections. In the 1810s, he had contested elections in Bristol, standing as an independent champion of the people and putting the feet of moderate Whig reformers to the fire. He also had form in Preston and, indeed, with the Stanleys themselves. The 13th Earl of Derby (father of Hunt’s rival at Preston) had offered a measured and unpopular defence of the Manchester authorities in the aftermath of the massacre. Before his trial at York in 1820, Hunt had unsuccessfully contested the Preston seat ‘in the people’s cause’ at the general election occasioned by the death of George III. He took another unsuccessful run at it a decade later at the general election caused by George IV’s laudanum-soaked demise. He had electrified that contest. Stanley, a noted and clever parliamentary orator, clearly lacked any kind of a popular street touch. Even Whig fixers thought that Hunt might have won in the summer, had it not been for the large quantities of ale distributed in Stanley’s interest.
A great deal had occurred since that summer contest to make the 17December by-election an altogether different prospect. Prior to the fall of Wellington’s government in November 1830, Hunt had been lecturing to large audiences at the Rotunda, the new London radical venue just south of the river. On especially packed occasions, his own nearby blacking factory could accommodate overspill meetings. Letters to the Home Office in the autumn and winter accused Hunt of, once again, heading a radical conspiracy to overthrow the government. His business trips around the inflamed counties adjacent to London raised fears of him leading gangs of agricultural labourers and joining up with the London mob.
This fraught context meant that, by the time of the by-election in December, there had been a significant uptick in both radical commitment and organisational capacity. In the general election over the summer, parliamentary reform had competed as one among a number of live issues which included colonial slavery, the pervasive material distress and the future of the East India Company. By December, reform was the issue that subsumed all others. Hunt’s supporters in Preston pushed the kind of radical version of reform championed by him at and since Peterloo in 1819. Universal manhood suffrage, annual parliaments and vote by secret ballot – three of the Chartists’ later famed ‘six points’ – were its key features. His local champions took a powerful new form in the shape of political unions, bodies created explicitly to campaign for reform.
The government of which Stanley was a part was pledged to bring in a measure of parliamentary reform. Therein lay Stanley’s confidence of renewed success at Preston. There was widespread suspicion, however, that the Grey ministry’s offering would be a meagre one, a shallow tinkering with a few seats rather than the kind of bold and sweeping change that was required. It was straightforward enough, therefore, to paint Stanley as part of a moderate and self-interested aristocratic clique. He fit the bill in many respects. The ballot, for example, was seen as the working man’s only protection against influence and intimidation from his betters. It provided a litmus test of someone’s seriousness as a reformer. Stanley was a vocal opponent.
These by-election arguments surfaced much wider issues that would come to characterise the crisis around reform and stretch into the 18following decade and beyond. One was the nature of representation itself. Stanley, in his point-blank refusal to pledge himself to measures demanded by constituents, upheld the classic position laid out by Edmund Burke in the 1770s. MPs, while bound to serve their constituents, were nevertheless members of a deliberative assembly. They went to Westminster unshackled by promises and free to debate and then to legislate in the national interest. The pledging in which Hunt and other radicals indulged enshrined a radically different principle. MPs were delegates, the embodiment of the people’s will in Parliament.
Preston itself enjoyed an unusually broad franchise for the time, vested in ‘the inhabitants at large’. In practice, this almost meant manhood suffrage, a working version of the right Hunt would ideally extend to all men. This also ensured that the MPs returned for the borough could claim a certain degree of popular legitimacy. And it brought the challenge of engaging with and mobilising a large and unruly electorate. Such an effort required candidates to observe the customary expectations of the constituency. Nightly addresses and substantial ‘treating’ – which was the unreformed system’s euphemism for the liberal distribution of free booze – were part and parcel of these. An electorate numbering in the thousands also required organisation via a series of street captains – men who would get voters to the pubs but also crucially get them out of the pubs again to vote.
After days of polling, Hunt was substantially ahead of Stanley. Unsurprisingly, accusations of corruption came thick and fast. Though he ultimately conceded, Stanley blamed his defeat on the incompetence of the mayor and returning officer, Nicholas Grimshaw, who had failed to suppress the fraudulent voting and ‘system of outrage’ which had marred the contest. These sour grapes continued, even after Stanley had secured a snug berth at the king’s discretion for the rotten borough of Windsor. One of Stanley’s allies sneeringly reported on the chairing of Hunt as the successful candidate at Preston, attended by ‘6,000 or 7,000 of the canaille’. TheTimesput Hunt’s crowd at 45,000. Hunt was jubilant and made arrangements for 3,730 commemorative medals to be minted for his electors. These bore the inscription: ‘The Time is Come. Triumph of Principle.’ The example in the British Museum’s collections has a small hole drilled in it, an almost certain sign that 19it was worn proudly by its elector-owner during subsequent meetings and marches.
