I Was a By-Election No-Hoper. At least I beat Screaming Lord Sutch
Daily Telegraph Article by Robert Buckland
With just a few days to go before one of the most potentially consequential by-elections in British political history, spare a thought for Michael Winstanley, the Conservative Candidate. He is, to put it diplomatically, not the frontrunner in this campaign, but as the Telegraph reported this week, has excellent local credentials and is making a sustained effort to persuade the voters of Makerfield to ignore the polls and the media and to vote Conservative.
I know all too well how he must be feeling. Just over thirty years ago, at the tender age of twenty-six, I was the Conservative candidate in another by-election, this time in the Gwent valleys of Islwyn, the seat that had in greater part been held by Labour and Neil Kinnock for a quarter of a century and by his predecessors for decades before that. Unlike Makerfield, the outcome of my by-election was never in doubt. Tony Blair was leading the Labour Party, and their approval ratings were off the scale. My Party, soon to be embroiled in a leadership election, was busy tearing itself apart in public over Europe and had endured several years of catastrophic local and by-election defeats after Black Wednesday. The backdrop for my campaign could not have been worse.
The local Tories were looking for a candidate who was energetic or dumb enough to take the fight to Labour. Having won a County Council seat from Labour in Llanelli in 1993, they alighted to my surprise upon me. Kinnock’s departure to the marble halls of Brussels had been announced in the autumn of 1994, so there were a good few months between my selection and the campaign proper. By the time the starting gun on the campaign was fired, in was early 1995, which meant that I faced a daily slog against both the weather and the voters. Islwyn is not a geographically flat constituency, so opportunities for hillwalking and even mountaineering were plenty. I also learned that, although the Kinnocks had a house in the constituency, this did not mean that they actually lived in it.
By-elections are not for the faint-hearted. As candidate, the support of Conservative Central Office was guaranteed, but in the eyes of local members, this was not an unalloyed benefit. The tendency of the centre to know best soon took over. My agent, the late and much-lamented Henry Purcell, was himself a by-election veteran and he was well-used to losing. He spent much of his time making sure that I didn’t quietly lose my marbles by telling me stories about Tory by-election candidates who crashed and burned during campaigns past. Encouraging stuff.
In those days, the daily press conference was a by-election ritual. Whilst my skirmish was not deemed important enough for the likes of Vincent Hanna , I was often joined in the ballroom of a local hotel which doubled as the press room by, amongst others, the great George Jones, then of this newspaper, grizzled lobby correspondent Paul Routledge, who spent an entire day with me, and even a young and thrusting Guto Harri, then of BBC Wales, who I remember crouching in front of me with a tape recorder as a gave yet another rousing speech to local worthies from a front hall staircase in a semi-detached in Blackwood. This was a gruelling campaign.
I was often accompanied by visiting Ministers and even the Party Chairman in the welcome form of Jeremy Hanley, but by the week of the election, I was handling the media alone and with plenty of coverage in the nationals of my quixotic campaign. I decided to view that as a vote of confidence in my abilities, rather than complete abandonment, but I may well be wrong.
The things I chiefly recall are: the constant deluge of rain that necessitated a daily change of rosette; being called a casuist by the as-yet-undisgraced Ron Davies in a café in Blackwood; being offered a singing spot by Screaming Lord Sutch in one of his local election fundraising gigs; having to hold canvassing up as we waited for John Redwood to get off the phone to Norman Blackwell, then head of the Downing Street Policy Unit, about pro-Euro comments made by Ken Clarke to which he took objection; being called a “class enemy” by a voter in Pontllanfraith; receiving campaigning aid from friends including a youthful Steve Hilton, whose California Primary skills were no doubt honed on the trail with me; having a daily dance with the media about whether or not I would lose my deposit (I did, of course); having to pulp the entire first run of election addresses because of a massive misprint on the front panel (not my fault).
Then came election day itself. The rain continued, accompanied by gales and even thunder and lightning. The turnout at 44% was, in those circumstances, a minor miracle. With the cameras trained upon me at the count from arrival to departure, as the theoretical representative of the governing Party, I had to maintain a rictus grin whilst the inevitable happened. After the Declaration, where my Labour opponent (now a good friend) delivered his Blairite lines with aplomb, I was accosted by a barrage of microphones and notebooks in an impromptu press conference, managing to make the somewhat weak claim that the bad weather had been the winner of this contest. The most memorable line of the night belonged to Screaming Lord Sutch, who I had managed to beat into fifth place, however. He said that the reason for my triumph over him was that some people had, by mistake, voted for the wrong Loony Party. Such, such were the joys.
Revenge for my defeat, in my case, was a dish served extremely cold. When I finally entered the Commons for Swindon South some fifteen years later, I encountered by victorious Labour opponent, Don Touhig, in Members Lobby. He hadn’t bothered to wait for me as by that time, he had been elevated to the Lords.
Raise a glass, then, to Mr Winstanley and thank him for being prepared to put service before self-preservation as he enters that most exclusive club: that of Tory by-election candidates who fought the good fight but who didn’t quite make it this time.
Rt Hon Sir Robert Buckland KBE KC was Conservative MP for Swindon South from 2010-2024. He is a former Solicitor General, Lord Chancellor & Secretary of State for Justice and Secretary of State for Wales.
