UK By-elections thread, 2021-

[YL]

Wakefield is finally officially vacant: Imran Ahmad Khan has been appointed Steward and Bailiff of the Three Hundreds of Chiltern.  The writ can't be moved until Parliament is sitting again, though.

[YL]

Wakefield is finally officially vacant: Imran Ahmad Khan has been appointed Steward and Bailiff of the Three Hundreds of Chiltern.  The writ can't be moved until Parliament is sitting again, though.

... and now "The Chancellor of the Exchequer has this day appointed Neil Quentin Gordon Parish to be Steward and Bailiff of the Manor of Northstead."  So Tiverton & Honiton is vacant too.

[YL]

The result of Claudia Webbe's appeal against her conviction is due fairly soon, so its not impossible we could have three Westminster byelections in pretty quick succession.

Four, unless Jeffrey Donaldson decides to stay at Westminster and co-opt someone into his Assembly seat.

[YL]

Worth noting that most of Labour's district councillors in the area are not young even in political terms, which usually precludes trying for a parliamentary career.

I suspect many of them didn't have many ambitions in that direction anyway.  Many councillors have essentially no interest in being MPs.

[YL]

It's being reported that the writs for both by-elections will be moved tomorrow, which means 23 June for polling day.

[YL]

It's being reported that the writs for both by-elections will be moved tomorrow, which means 23 June for polling day.

A lot sooner than I thought. Interesting.

With T & H I suspect they think their best chance is to have it ASAP so the Lib Dems have less time to develop momentum, though that might be wishful thinking, and with Wakefield there was already adverse comment about how long the seat had been left effectively vacant for.  Delaying by-elections unnecessarily seems to be out of fashion at the moment.

[YL]

With the news of a rape arrest out today, we are presumably on track for yet another by-election in a Tory seat, although we don't know where just yet.  Shame it'll be too late to schedule it for June 23rd and have three on the same day (and all for the same sleazy reason).

I wondered how rare it is to have three by-elections on the same day, but I only had to go back to November 2012 to find not one but two instances (six by-elections overall!) all in the same month.

On 9 June 1994 there were five, all rather dull except for Eastleigh.  On 23 January 1986 there were fifteen, but that was a special case.

Anyway, the justice process is slow enough that I think it's some time before we see a ******* by-election.  And of course even Tory MPs are innocent until proven guilty.

[YL]

The Lib Dems have selected Richard Foord as their candidate for Tiverton & Honiton.  He lives in Uffculme, in the constituency, has an army background and stood for the party in North Somerset in 2017.

The Tories haven't announced their candidate yet.

[YL]

Nominations close for Wakefield next Wednesday and I haven’t even seen a discussion about who the Tory candidate is.

They announced a shortlist yesterday:
- Nadeem Ahmed, councillor for Wakefield South (not in the constituency) and former leader of the Tory group on Wakefield council;
- Laura Weldon, losing candidate recently in Wakefield West and formerly associated with the Yorkshire Party
- Tanya Graham, candidate for Bradford South in the 2015 and 2017 general elections.

Speaking of the Yorkshire Party, the fairly prominent (in some circles anyway) former Tory David Herdson is standing for them.  UKIP also announced a candidate.

[YL]

Nominations close for Wakefield next Wednesday and I haven’t even seen a discussion about who the Tory candidate is.

They announced a shortlist yesterday:
- Nadeem Ahmed, councillor for Wakefield South (not in the constituency) and former leader of the Tory group on Wakefield council;
- Laura Weldon, losing candidate recently in Wakefield West and formerly associated with the Yorkshire Party
- Tanya Graham, candidate for Bradford South in the 2015 and 2017 general elections.

According to "Armchair Critic" (who will know) in another place, they've selected Nadeem Ahmed.

[YL]

More candidate news: in Tiverton & Honiton the Tories have selected Helen Hurford, deputy mayor of Honiton, and Labour have selected their 2019 candidate Liz Pole, while in Wakefield Akef Akbar, Tory-turned-independent councillor for Wakefield East, says he's standing as an Independent.

[YL]

Disappointingly for observers of bizarre by-election candidacies, Neil Parish is not going to stand as an Independent to get his old seat back.

[YL]

15 candidates for Wakefield:

Nadeem Ahmed (Conservative)
Akef Akbar (Ind) [1]
Paul Bickerdike (Christian People's Alliance)
Mick Dodgson (Freedom Alliance)
Sir Archibald Stanton Earl 'Eaton (Official Monster Raving Loony)
Jayda Fransen (Ind) [2]
Jordan Gaskell (UKIP)
David Herdson (Yorkshire Party)
Therese Hirst (English Democrats)
Christopher Jones (Northern Independence Party)
Simon Lightwood (Labour)
Jamie Needle (Lib Dem)
Ashley Routh (Green)
Ashlea Simon (Britain First)
Chris Walsh (Reform UK)

[1] Councillor for Wakefield East.  Elected as a Conservative but left the party in January calling Boris Johnson an "idiot".
[2] Formerly associated with Britain First, now associated with the un-registered British Freedom Party

[YL]

... and 8 candidates for Tiverton & Honiton

Jordan Donaghue-Morgan (Heritage Party)
Andy Foan (Reform UK)
Richard Foord (Lib Dem)
Helen Hurford (Conservative)
Liz Pole (Labour)
Frankie Rufolo (For Britain)
Ben Walker (UKIP) [1]
Gill Westcott (Green)

[1] Their chairman, not to be confused with the New Statesman/Britain Elects journalist of the same name

[YL]

I need someone to confirm it but it seems her sentence has been reduced so she can’t be recalled…

You may be right…

Apparently it’s now a suspended jail sentence, and the recall petition specifically requires detention (under 12 months, as any more than that automatically triggers expulsion).

However, an MP who has been suspended from the Commons for more than 10 sitting days, or 14 days total, is also liable to being recalled. So if Parliament sanctions her (possibly with a by-election in mind), she could still be recalled.

Edit: I doubt she will resign on her own merit - given how she’s acted so far. Webbe is still posting on social media like a normal politician, even today, no mention of her case. But on all new posts, as of this afternoon, she’s disabled comments. She seems to be following the PM’s lead, and expecting to brazenly carry onI think it would take a credible threat of expulsion from Parliament to get her to resign at this point.

Suspended sentences (which is what it was before) do trigger recall petitions; it's now just a community service order, which doesn't.

I don't know whether there's any reason for a Standards Committee or Independent Expert Panel report which would trigger a suspension.  But if the Commons really wants rid of her it could just vote to expel.

[YL]

I don't believe there was ever any serious possibility of Galloway standing in Wakefield.

[YL]

I never did the census ranks for Tiverton & Honiton, so here they are, together with those for North Shropshire:

	Tiv & Hon	N Shrops
Managers, directors and senior officials	196	174
Professional	485	441
Associate professional and technical	549	388
Administrative and secretarial	537	566
Skilled trades	24	61
Caring, leisure and other service	163	183
Sales and customer service	377	541
Process plant and machine operatives	306	179
Elementary occupations	253	273
No qualifications	305	297
Level 4 qualifications	331	346
Full time students	645	428
Deprivation	470	378

(Except for the last row, this is from the 2011 census; the deprivation is from the data used by Alasdair Rae.  All ranks are UK-wide, so out of 650.)

[YL]

Regarding Tiverton & Honiton, the only non-Conservative representation any of it has had since 1885 was between a 1923 by-election in the then Tiverton constituency which was won by a Liberal and the 1924 General Election.  In the 1923 General Election the by-election winner held Tiverton by 3 votes.  In particular, those parts which were in Honiton then have been continuously blue for nearly 140 years, as has most of the current East Devon constituency, which is actually the main successor to the pre-1997 Honiton.

If you want to know ridiculous levels of detail of the history of constituency boundaries since 1885, then see the UK Parliamentary Constituencies project.  (The link is to the Devon page, but quite a large part of England is covered).

[YL]

The Green and Lib Dem vote looks surprisingly high (they won’t have 15% between them by election day), but mainly LOL at the Reform vote. It really should be expected given their national polling includes 1/2 the country where they didn’t stand in 2019 and they’re more overtly ‘Tory right’ now, but 3% is reaching ‘prompted name on a survey’ territory.

I don't know why they prompted for Reform UK.  They didn't prompt for the Yorkshire Party, who many expect to come third.

[YL]

The Wakefield poll makes me want a Tiverton & Honiton poll. It's an even safer Tory seat than Chesham & Amersham, but if the swing is even just the same as it was there, it'll go Lib Dem. Given BoJo's unpopularity rn, I wanna see its numbers.

North Shropshire is a better comparison than Chesham & Amersham, I think: T & H and N Shrops have a fair amount in common demographically and had similar results in 2019.  I did actually see some numbers for T & H in a tweet, but I suspect they're unweighted canvass returns and furthermore they are ridiculous.  However, I do think the Lib Dems are going to win it.

[YL]

The question was "How positively or negatively do you feel about the following political figures or institutions?"

The first number is "positive" (combining "Quite" and "Very"); the second is "Neither positive nor negative" and the third is "negative" (again combining "Quite" and "Very").  "Don't know" was also an option.
Sunak 17-22-52
Johnson 23-12-60
Truss 12-26-39
Javid 14-33-39
Starmer 21-23-49
Rayner 17-25-34
Gove 10-19-55
Patel 12-18-60 (LOL)
Tice 4-24-16 (i.e., "who?")
Conservative Party 22-15-56
Labour Party 27-22-44
Wakefield Council 27-35-33

Interesting that the council scores so relatively well.

[YL]

Here's a list of by-elections since 1970 which meet the following conditions:

- Conservatives in government and the Lib Dems not
- Conservative held seat hopeless for Labour (this is of course a subjective judgement, but I don't think the edge cases change the picture much)
- Evidence of a genuine campaign from the Lib Dems or their predecessors (taken as a vote share of at least 20%)

Tiverton & Honiton 2022 - ?
North Shropshire 2021 - Lib Dem gain
Chesham & Amersham 2021 - Lib Dem gain
Brecon & Radnorshire 2019 - Lib Dem gain
Richmond Park 2016 - Lib Dem gain [1]
Witney 2016 - Con hold
Littleborough & Saddleworth 1995 - Lib Dem gain [2]
Eastleigh 1994 - Lib Dem gain
Christchurch 1993 - Lib Dem gain
Newbury 1993 - Lib Dem gain
Kincardine & Deeside 1991 - Lib Dem gain
Ribble Valley 1991 - Lib Dem gain
Eastbourne 1990 - Lib Dem gain
Richmond (Yorks) 1989 - Con hold [3]
Epping Forest 1988 - Con hold [4]
Ryedale 1986 - Liberal gain
West Derbyshire 1986 - Con hold (majority 100)
South West Surrey 1984 - Con hold
Penrith & the Border 1983 - Con hold (majority 552)
Beaconsfield 1982 - Con hold [5]
Crosby 1981 - SDP gain [6]
South West Hertfordshire 1979 - Con hold [7]
Berwick upon Tweed 1973 - Liberal gain
Ripon 1973 - Liberal gain
Isle of Ely 1973 - Liberal gain
Sutton & Cheam 1973 - Liberal gain

[1] An odd by-election; technically the Tories did not contest it, but the local party supported Zac Goldsmith who had resigned his seat over Heathrow expansion and was standing as an Independent.
[2] Arguably this wasn't hopeless for Labour, and they came quite close to winning, with the Tories third.
[3] Centre vote split between separate SDP and SLD (proto Lib Dem) candidates, who got more than half the vote between them.  William Hague was the Tory winner.
[4] Like Richmond, this had both SDP and SLD candidates, but unlike Richmond they didn't have enough between them to beat the Tory winner.
[5] A real outlier, with a huge Tory majority, presumably because of the Falklands War.  Of course, the Labour candidate was one Anthony Charles Lynton Blair.
[6] Another debatable one as to whether it was hopeless for Labour, especially as they won it in 1997 and have held it or its successor ever since.  But I think in the context of the time it counts.
[7] Another outlier: the Liberals didn't even overtake Labour.  I don't know whether they really tried.

[YL]

According to "Armchair Critic" (who will know) in another place, they've selected Nadeem Ahmed.

What is his religious background? This is important.

Muslim I believe, but I don't know beyond that.  The previous MP is from an Ahmadiyya background.

[YL]

Usual caveats but there is genuine talk of people switching to Labour with some enthusiasm and also of the Conservative villages basically going on strike.

The interesting thing is that the norm for the last what 15 years has been for Labour to struggle in these sort of by-elections e.g Oldham, Rotherham.

I'm not sure which Oldham by-election you're referring to.  Oldham West & Royton 2015 was widely trailed as a bad performance (which is perhaps what you're remembering) but was actually a pretty respectable result, and Oldham East & Saddleworth 2011 wasn't that bad either (especially considering the circumstances).  The real near disaster in a Greater Manchester by-election was Heywood & Middleton 2014, which perhaps was a warning that the seat, which was lost in 2019, could be vulnerable.

I wouldn't consider Tory-held Wakefield to be very comparable to these, anyway.

[YL]

Likelihood of a T&H poll?  It's nice to see not one but two (so far) confirming what we already suspected about Wakefield, but let's see where the real fun is getting started…

I think it's at least moderately likely that we get one from Survation.

Interestingly the Lib Dems haven't leaked anything yet (unless the tweet I mentioned in a previous post counts).