This Once Great Movement Of Ours

[IceAgeComing]

I do wonder if there's a pattern as to what intakes of MPs are 'better' than others.  Might be worth looking into: there are assumptions I can make (landslide defeats not being great since you'll have less new blood and those conditions might not encourage people to stand even in safe seats; I suspect late in long terms is probably less likely to be good since that's when party membership starts getting thin and a lot of your ambitious younger people probably got in in earlier elections) but I don't know if they are grounded in fact.

[IceAgeComing]

I watched the 1964 election night recently; and I remember them stressing that Wilson had promised to not have a Foreign Secretary (might have been any major Cabinet ministers) from the Lords; probably not expecting that anyone would lose their seat.

I believe that this is the only example of that scenario (prominent member of the government loses seat, by-election is forced to get them back in) happening in modern British political history: but in Canada there's much more history of it happening.  Happened twice to McKenzie King actually: in 1925 he lost York North (in Ontario) in a complicated election when the Liberals lost their majority but the third parties in Parliament were Liberal leaning and they forced a by-election in Prince Albert (in Saskatchewan) in order to get him back in to Parliament and then gets very complicated (scandal, King asks Governor General for a fresh election; he declines and instead appoints the Conservative leader as Prime Minister who instantly loses a vote of confidence in the Commons and then they call an election and that's a highly simplified explanation); and then in 1945 when the Liberals just lost their majority he lost Prince Albert and then they forced a vacancy in Glengarry to get him back in then: and that was a lot less complicated. Those aren't the only two examples: seems to pop up fairly often and is a normalised thing there while I suspect if that happened in the UK the expectation would be that there'd be a resignation.

[IceAgeComing]

Do you think a Tory activist would say to a Labour voter 'you have the wrong values?'

they seem perfectly willing to say it to SNP voters locally here so yes, I do

[IceAgeComing]

Junior Minister roles get fiddled with all the time and they’ll reshuffle them all when they win the election in any case so I don’t think it’s a big issue.

I think there’s an argument that losing a prominent right winger on this is weirdly beneficial: because they can credibly argue that it isn’t about a left vs right thing and it means that someone I suspect they want to bring back is one of the main people in the media on this. Not ideal obviously but better than a factional civil war.