2021 North Shropshire by-election
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North Shropshire constituency | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Turnout | 46.2% ( 21.7 pp) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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A by-election for the United Kingdom parliamentary constituency of North Shropshire was held on 16 December 2021. It was triggered by the resignation of the Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) Owen Paterson on 5 November 2021. The by-election was won by Helen Morgan, with a 34% swing from the Conservatives to the Liberal Democrats.
It was the party's second gain from the Conservatives since the 2019 general election following their victory at Chesham and Amersham in June 2021.[1] The party gained a third seat from the Conservatives at Tiverton and Honiton, in June 2022.[2]
Background
Constituency
North Shropshire is the third-largest constituency by area in the West Midlands region.[3] It contains five small towns (in size order): Oswestry, Market Drayton, Whitchurch, Wem and Ellesmere. Sixty per cent of constituents who turned out voted to leave the European Union in the 2016 EU referendum.[4]
The by-election was the sixth of the 2019 Parliament.[5] The last time a seat changed hands at a by-election in the area was at the 1904 Oswestry by-election, in which there was a Liberal gain from Conservative.[6]
Trigger
On 5 November 2021, Owen Paterson resigned as MP for the constituency. In October, the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards found that he had breached paid advocacy rules in relation to two companies which employed him as a paid consultant.[7][8] The Commons Standards Committee considered the commissioners' findings and recommended that Paterson be suspended from parliament for 30 days.[9] In line with the established process, on 3 November a motion was proposed in the Commons inviting MPs to approve the punishment.[10][8] If the suspension had been approved, a recall petition would have been triggered in the constituency.[11]
Paterson denied any wrongdoing.[12] An amendment to the motion was put forward by Conservative backbencher Andrea Leadsom to postpone consideration of Paterson's suspension and to set up a new committee to investigate the disciplinary process for MPs.[13][14] The government of Boris Johnson supported the amendment and issued a three-line whip. The amendment was passed. The outcome caused outrage among opposition MPs, and an angry public reaction to press reports.[13] As a result, on 4 November, the government reversed its position and announced that a vote would still take place on whether Paterson should be suspended.[15] Following that decision, Paterson announced his intention to resign his seat on 4 November.[16][17]
Paterson was appointed as
Candidates
There were 14 candidates in the by-election.[21]
On 4 November, Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Green Party had discussions about possibly standing aside in the by-election and backing a joint independent "anti-sleaze" candidate.[22] This had previously happened in the seat of Tatton at the 1997 general election where independent candidate Martin Bell beat Neil Hamilton. Bell was approached by the Liberal Democrats ahead of the by-election in North Shropshire, but declined to stand.[23] Labour, and subsequently the Liberal Democrats, announced that they would be standing their own candidates.[24]
On 6 November, Reform UK announced their candidate as Kirsty Walmsley, who was previously a councillor on Shropshire Council for the Conservative Party, which her father Keith Barrow led on the Council. Walmsley said, "I would never had [sic] stood against Owen Paterson. He is a man of integrity who had worked hard for North Shropshire."[25]
On 13 November, the Conservatives picked their candidate, Neil Shastri-Hurst, from a three-person shortlist. Shastri-Hurst is a
The
The Shropshire Star reported on 11 November that the Liberal Democrats had approached
The Green candidate was Duncan Kerr, who stood in the constituency for the party in the 2015 and 2017 general elections, but not in 2019.[32]
Yolande Kenward stood on an anti-corruption platform as an independent,[33] although she was shown on the ballot paper with no label. The other independent, Suzie Akers-Smith, is an independent councillor on Cheshire East Council and the local authority's Cycling and Walking Champion.[21]
Drew Galdron, under the name Boris Been-Bunged, a Boris Johnson impersonator, stood for the Rejoin EU Party.[34]
Monaco-based Russell Dean, a consultant for a yacht broker who grew up in Shropshire, stood for The Party Party.[35]
The
The anti-lockdown Freedom Alliance fielded Earl Jesse as its candidate.[21]
Endorsements
An editorial in
Sarah Biffen, the widow of John Biffen, the former Conservative MP for the area, endorsed the Conservative candidate, Shastri-Hurst, comparing his background in the NHS and the Army with that of her late husband, a former cabinet minister who represented the area now covered by the North Shropshire constituency from 1961 until 1997.[39]
Will Hutton, former editor of The Observer, endorsed the Liberal Democrats and called on Labour and Green Party supporters to "put aside their prime party affiliation and back the Lib Dem candidate".[40] Martin Fletcher, former associate editor and foreign editor of The Times, endorsed the Liberal Democrats, specifically calling on Conservative voters to back Morgan with the aim of ending Boris Johnson's leadership of the Conservative Party.[41]
Campaign
Several[
The Financial Times reported that Labour strategists regarded North Shropshire as inhospitable for their party and not worth spending resources on. One Labour strategist suggested the Liberal Democrats stood a better chance in the seat, saying: "the Lib Dems have focused on Shropshire North and they'll probably end up a good second there. They came second in the recent local elections — from their perspective it makes sense for them to concentrate their resources there."[45] Labour finished second in the constituency at the 2019 general election. Ian Dunt, writing in the i, suggested that despite standing a candidate "[Labour] seems to be standing aside for Davey so the Lib Dems can monopolise the anti-government vote" as part of an informal Labour-Lib Dem pact, where one party stands aside to give the other a higher chance of beating the Conservative candidate.[46] The Guardian reported that Labour's Shadow Minister for International Development Yasmin Qureshi "effectively acknowledged the party had deliberately left the field clear for the Lib Dems", after she said that "Labour are never going to win North Shropshire. The Lib Dems do have an opportunity to do so."[47]
A poll of
In response to comments by the Conservative Home Secretary, Priti Patel, about the expulsion of migrants crossing the English Channel in small boats, the Liberal Democrat candidate, Helen Morgan, compared Patel with Hitler's propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels. Morgan later apologised for the "insensitive tweet which I have taken down".[50] According to local newspaper the Shropshire Star, Morgan had already apologised a few days earlier for comments from 2020 in which she "appeared to liken Channel migrants to Jews held at Auschwitz".[51]
During the campaign, a sitting Conservative councillor in the constituency, Anthony Allen, announced that he was defecting from the Conservative Party, saying they "were not Conservative enough", and joined the Reclaim Party.[52] A second sitting Conservative councillor defected to Reform UK.[53]
In the wake of
On 13 December it was reported that Reform UK candidate Kirsty Walmsley had tested positive for COVID-19, and would therefore miss out on the last few days of the campaign as well as the vote count.[58]
Results
The Liberal Democrats candidate Helen Morgan won the election with a majority of 5,925, indicating a swing of 34.2 percentage points. The swing was the seventh largest in United Kingdom by-election history, and the second largest swing from the Conservative Party to the Liberal Democrats or its predecessors (the Liberal Party and SDP–Liberal Alliance) at a by-election since 1945,[59] behind only the 1993 Christchurch by-election.[60] It was also the first time a non-Conservative won the seat since Liberal candidate Allan Heywood Bright in 1904, when the constituency was named Oswestry.
Party | Candidate | Votes | % | ±% | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Liberal Democrats | Helen Morgan | 17,957 | 47.2 | +37.2 | |
Conservative | Neil Shastri-Hurst | 12,032 | 31.6 | –31.1 | |
Labour | Ben Wood | 3,686 | 9.7 | –12.4 | |
Green | Duncan Kerr | 1,738 | 4.6 | +1.4 | |
Reform UK | Kirsty Walmsley | 1,427 | 3.8 | New | |
UKIP | Andrea Allen | 378 | 1.0 | New | |
Reclaim Party | Martin Daubney | 375 | 1.0 | New | |
Monster Raving Loony | Alan "Howling Laud" Hope | 118 | 0.3 | New | |
Independent | Suzie Akers-Smith | 95 | 0.2 | New | |
Heritage | James Elliot | 79 | 0.2 | New | |
Rejoin EU
|
Boris Been Bunged | 58 | 0.2 | New | |
Freedom Alliance | Earl Jesse | 57 | 0.1 | New | |
Party Party | Russell Dean | 19 | 0.1 | New | |
No description | Yolande Kenward | 3 | 0.0 | New | |
Majority | 5,925 | 15.6 | N/A | ||
Turnout | 38,022 | 46.3 | –21.6 | ||
Rejected ballots | 74 | 0.2 | |||
Registered electors | 82,314 | ||||
Total ballots | 38,110 | 46.3 | |||
Liberal Democrats gain from Conservative | Swing | +34.2 |
Previous election
Party | Candidate | Votes | % | ±% | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Conservative | Owen Paterson | 35,444 | 62.7 | +2.2 | |
Labour | Graeme Currie | 12,495 | 22.1 | –9.0 | |
Liberal Democrats | Helen Morgan | 5,643 | 10.0 | +4.7 | |
Green | John Adams | 1,790 | 3.2 | +0.1 | |
Shropshire Party | Robert Jones | 1,141 | 2.0 | New | |
Majority | 22,949 | 40.6 | +11.2 | ||
Turnout | 56,513 | 67.9 | –1.1 | ||
Conservative hold | Swing |
See also
- List of United Kingdom by-elections
Notes
- Resignation from the British House of Commons
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