Thanks to a reader for pointing out that the current Mid Bedfordshire by-election is not the first in the constituency. One was held there in 1960.
The Conservative Alan Lennox-Boyd, who had sat for Mid Bedfordshire since 1931, held the seat at the 1959 general election. But there was no place for him in the new cabinet and he accepted a hereditary peerage.
His Labour opponent at the general election had been this blog's hero Bryan Magee, while the Liberal candidate had been Wilfred Matthews.
The result in 1959 (with percentages of the vote in brackets) was:
Conservative 21,301 (46.79)
Labour 16,127 (35.42)
Liberal 8,099 (17.79)
The by-election was held on 16 November 1960. The new Conservative candidate was Stephen Hastings, while Magee and Matthews again stood for their parties. There was a fourth candidate, C.F.H. Gilliard, who stood for the New Conservative Party, which had a British nationalist platform.
And the result in the by-election was not so different from that at the general election the year before. This time the votes were:
Conservative 17,503 (45.38)
Labour 11,281 (29.25)
Liberal 9,550 (24.76)
New Conservative 235 (0.61)
That's just the sort of result people are afraid of this time, but the past is a foreign country.
In 1960 the Conservatives were still in the ascendancy and Harold Macmillan was SuperMac. If there had been no Liberal candidate, it's likely that the majority of the party's voters who still turned out would have opted for the Conservative.
And I imagine that Alan Lennox-Boyd had a higher reputation in Mid Bedfordshire than the one Nadine Dorries enjoys today.
Stephen Hastings was to represent Mid Bedfordshire until 1983, but his right-wing views kept him on the backbenches throughout his career.
Bryan Magee was elected MP for Leyton at the February 1974 election. He became one of the last Labour MPs to jump ship to the SDP, and lost there under as an SDP Alliance candidate in 1983.
Wilfred Matthew, who had first stood for parliament in Luton in 1950, fought Mid Bedfordshire for the last time at the 1964 general election.
The New Conservative Party renamed itself the True Conservative Party, but did not survive to see the end of 1962. It's founder John Dayton was a Labour candidate at the 1966 general election.
Labour look determined to throw any advantage away by accusing Liberal Democrats of preparing a homophobic campaign. Helen Morgan reports "Peter Kyle MP, who is running Labour’s campaign in Mid Bedfordshire, claimed that if Labour’s by-election candidate were gay, the Liberal Democrats would run a “family values” campaign against him."
ReplyDeleteThank you for the reminder of dear Wilf Matthews, who I remember from long ago as a long-standing councillor for the Sharnbrook division in the north of Bedfordshire. Wilf generally stood as an independent, but his electors knew which side of the fence he was on (Bedford politics was straightforward in those days - you had the Conservatives on the right, the Liberals on the left, and Labour somewhere in the middle). Wilf’s electors also knew that he was almost certainly gay, and to their immense credit (given what attitudes were in those days) couldn’t have cared less.
ReplyDeleteHere’s hoping that somewhere Wilf will be allowing himself a gentle chuckle in a little while.
Thanks for this, Neil, I couldn't find much about him online.
ReplyDeleteI’m dredging up memories of being in Bedford Liberals 1973 to the time of the merger.
ReplyDeleteI didn’t know Wilf well, as will be obvious he was a lot older than me; but I remember him as a gentle soul whose heart was in the right place.