Thomas Otte and Paul Readman commented in the introduction to their collection By-Elections in British Politics, 1832–1914 (2013), that by-elections “have rarely left their mark on the scholarly literature”. Since then, however, a number of scholars have taken the midterm single-constituency electoral contest far more seriously. Matthew Roberts, Katrina Navickas and James Thompson have encouraged us to consider material culture, space and place, and the visual image in the outcomes of political contests, and academic journals have been bursting at the seams with studies of how these cultural forces interacted with social pressures and political developments in British electoral results across the past two centuries.
Unlike the previous book in Biteback’s series, British General Election Campaigns, 1830–2019, which included an essay on every single general election (and to which I contributed a chapter on the 1868 contest), the present volume cannot claim to be comprehensive – there were 2,750 by-elections in the period from 1832 to 1918, but British By-Elections, 1769–2025 covers only fifteen of these. The result is a lopsided text that concentrates on the inter- and postwar periods, and rather ignores how the by-election became such a staple of modern political culture in Britain. There are excellent essays on the by-elections of the twentieth century, but it is a missed opportunity not to explain (for example) how the Conservatives’ tactic of “villa Toryism” (and its alliance with the City of London) in the Greenwich by-election in 1873 helped to convert the metropolis; how William Gladstone managed to maintain Liberal control of Wales (and start the career of David Lloyd George) in Caernarfon in 1890; and how the success of James Wood in East Down in 1902 convinced the Unionist chief secretary for Ireland, George Wyndham, that the moderate tenant farmers whom Wood represented could be placated by a land purchase scheme, which transformed ownership in Ireland.
The focus on more recent contests (eighteen of the essays cover by-elections since 2000) means that there is a tendency for journalistic commentary to dominate in the bulk of the essays, in the place of academic assessment of the impact of significant by-elections on electoral choices, party strategies and the wider political culture. In addition, it is surely premature to claim that by-elections in the past fifteen years have “shaped” our politics, which has remained in a state of flux in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008. And to include elections such as the by-election in Southend West in 2022, held after the appalling murder of David Amess, is surely ill advised, as the consequent enormous Conservative majority was due to local loyalty to the former MP, disdain for violence in political life and the absence of the other two main parties on the ballot. The result had no impact on the precipitous decline in popularity of the Conservative party, in the year of Boris Johnson’s squalid resignation and Liz Truss’s unspeakable premiership.
It must be noted that the editor, Iain Dale, has tried hard to overcome a habitual problem with British political history, which also bedevilled Otte and Readman’s collection – the singular maleness of the discipline – as he has eleven female contributors in the collection, though it would have been even better to have sought contributions from scholars such as Emily Hamer or Pippa Norris, whose book British By-elections: The volatile electorate (1990) contained the valuable warning that “mid-term by-elections, like mid-term polls, are a highly unreliable guide to long-term party fortunes”. Dale, who some will know from his radio show on LBC, has been less successful in avoiding that other tradition of the small world of political scholarship – nepotism. There are essays by his producer, colleagues at LBC and friends across the world of British political journalism.
Iain Dale’s energy and ambition are admirable, but this collection reminds one why history takes time to become apparent and almost as much time to write.
Ian Cawood is the editor, with Tom Crook, of The Many Lives of Corruption: The reform of public life in modern Britain, c.1750–1950, 2022.
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