By the by-elections

As Bismarck never quite said, if anyone yet again describes Makerfield as “the most consequential by-election in British electoral history” I shall reach for my revolver.

You see, I am old enough to remember what was actually hailed as the most important by-election in British electoral history — the battle for Glasgow Hillhead in March 1982.

It had been occasioned by the death at New Year of Sir Tam Galbraith, the city’s last surviving Conservative MP, Scotland’s longest-serving Parliamentarian, whose career had never recovered from 1962 mortification over John Vassall.

A civil servant, his private secretary, queer as a £3 note and, most embarrassing of all, a Soviet spy — in possession of very, very friendly letters from his Minister.

Very much alive in 1982, though, was the lush Roy Jenkins, sometime Chancellor and Home Secretary, desperate to return to Parliament and bid for the leadership of the Social Democratic Party he had founded a year earlier.

The ensuing contest was one for the ages. Many seriously expected Jenkins would be the next Prime Minister. There was saturation TV coverage. Every political correspondent in the land explored Partick, Whiteinch, Scotstoun and Jordanhill. Vincent Hanna dropped by to patronise us all. Varied opinion-polls showed the SDP/Liberal Alliance in the lead. Or the Conservatives. Or Labour.

Though they dominated the street campaign, the Scottish National Party’s George Leslie, a convivial vet, would lose his deposit. The Tories, ahem, courageously fielded in Gerald Malone a Catholic candidate with an Irish surname, and his minders made Labour’s David Wiseman, a portly be-bearded Bennite, lose the earring.

All eyes this week may be on Makerfield, but this Thursday Scotland summons voters to two Westminster by-elections too — our first such double-bill since the battle for Paisley in November 1990.

Both Aberdeen South, and Arbroath and Broughty Ferry, are held by the SNP and both elections have been occasioned by new rules forbidding a “dual mandate”, for incumbents Stephen Flynn and Stephen Gethins were elected to the Scottish Parliament a few weeks ago. Both Westminster divisions, at least on paper, look decidedly marginal.

Flynn was fortunate to hold on to Aberdeen South in the July 2024 general election on what was a generally awful night for the SNP: he took but 32.8 per cent of the poll and his majority over Labour was an insecure 3,758.

Arbroath and Broughty Ferry looks stickier still, Gethins seizing the new seat at first asking with 35.3 per cent  of the vote and a majority, again over Labour, of just 859. Labour would need only a swing of 1.5 per cent  to regain it.

But it is not nearly so simple. That Westminster battle could not have been fought in worse circumstances for the Nationalists — on their third leader in scarcely a year and amidst an unfolding police investigation and a general determination to replace an exhausted, flailing Tory government with a serene, squeaky-clean Labour administration. Sanity would return, to the soft strains of, say, some soothing Bach by a string-quartet.

What we ended up with, instead, was the ongoing farce of the Starmer administration — its gaffes, blunders and scandals better soundtracked by Yakety Sax — and a point missed by most southern observers.

When the SNP has a bad night, as in 2024 or 2017, it is largely because its faithful have in large numbers refused to vote at all; a mass-abstention Nationalist veteran Jim Sillars predicted to me in May 2023.

They do not generally desert it for another shade of rosette and, in fact, few familiar with Arbroath and Broughty Ferry expect the Nationalists’ Lara Bird to lose on Thursday.

This has been firmly Nationalist country for a very long time. Broughty Ferry’s anti-Labour tactical vote sustained the late SNP leader Gordon Wilson from 1974 to 1987 as MP for Dundee East. The equally late Andrew Welsh sat for the former Angus South division from 1974 to 1979, regained the successor-seat in 1987 and retired, undefeated, as local MSP in 2011. Angus Council has almost continuously been controlled by the Nats since 1984 and Labour’s Heather Doran will be lucky, against the wider backdrop of events, to be this week’s runner-up.

There is strain between the two wings of the constituency. Broughty Ferry has come up in the world, with pleasant gardens and a thriving High Street. Arbroath, once a prosperous fishing-port — celebrated for a cured, trademarked haddock, the “Arbroath Smokie” – is down-at-heel. Vacant shop units, scruffy streets, and the air of a community helping the police with their inquiries.

 The joker in the pack is Reform. By Scottish standards, Angus is pretty Brexity: 44.7 per cent put their cross for Leave a decade ago. Reform’s Bill Reid will certainly advance its vote-share from the 8.6 per cent who backed Farage in 2024 – and scupper any chance of a Tory gain.

If there is an upset on Thursday, it is less unlikely in Aberdeen South.

It is a constituency of extraordinary volatility. Donald Dewar snatched it for Labour in 1966. Ian Sproat wrested it back for the Conservatives in 1970 — and then, in 1983, made the chicken-run to the supposedly safer new seat of Roxburgh and Berwickshire.

He lost, while Gerald Malone — yes, him again — held Aberdeen South easily. Only in 1987 to lose it to Labour’s Frank Doran. Another Tory, Raymond Robertson, recovered it in 1992, until Labour’s esteemed Dame Anne Begg won in 1997 and somehow hung onto it till the SNP tsunami of 2015.

The Tories regained it in 2017 with Ross Thomson, and had he not in 2019 just been accused of groping one Paul Sweeney, a Glasgow MP, he would have been that year’s “Christmas Election” candidate and might have survived. Flynn wrested the seat for the Nationalists: Thomson was subsequently cleared of all wrongdoing.

Anne Begg’s grip on Aberdeen South was actually long threatened by the Liberal Democrats, from 1997 to 2010 — she never looked entirely safe and, indeed, the Holyrood iteration of the seat was comfortably held by the Lib Dems from 1999 to 2011.

Aberdeen South, self-evidently, is a jumpy constituency with a capricious electorate — long and cynically practiced in tactical voting — and, broadly, of three halves. Much outlying countryside, much of the Granite City’s comfortable commuter-belt — the likes of Peterculter, Milltimber and Bieldside; and the grittier streets by Aberdeen harbour.

Particularly cross, in the last category, are the voters of Torry, where many residents have been forced from their homes when it emerged they had been built with reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete — brittle, dodgy and dangerous.

Richard Thomson — MP for Gordon till the division was abolished for the last general election, a sometime leader of Aberdeenshire Council — hopes to keep Aberdeen South for the SNP. But Douglas Lumsden is chasing him hard for the Scottish Tories and banging the drum for renewed, vigorous extraction of North Sea oil and gas.

The discovery of those vast undersea reserves quite reinvented Aberdeen fifty years ago, from a sleepy port and market-town that kept winning Britain in Bloom to one awash with jobs, money and flash cars. So many Big Oil types fetched up from the States that, in 1972, the American School was especially established for their children.

The glory has long since departed. The Granite City has been stripped of high-end shops, many residents are stuck in negative equity amidst a stagnant property market and, of course, a vocal environmental lobby — which, in Nicola Sturgeon, captured the SNP — is opposed to further North Sea development.

 Peter Murrell’s disgrace may not be so much a factor in the Nationalists’ Thursday performance as you might think. The scandal was already priced in by voters for Holyrood on 8 May and, indeed, at the 2024 election, and most can draw a distinction between a man making off with public money and one who was merely looting his party.

But it has already made John Swinney look irresolute. We cannot discount the human angle — he and Murrell were long close friends; the First Minister’s bewilderment is unfeigned — but a wiser leader, before Murrell had even fetched up in HMP Edinburgh, would have appointed a KC frae awa’ o’er the Border to conduct a robust inquiry.

Swinney’s position on offshore industry is weaker still. “Ask him, ‘Do you favour new licenses for Rosebank, Cambo, Jackdaw and other fields?’” commentator Alex Bell thought aloud last week, “and so on yet to be discovered, and John Swinney can neither say ‘Yes, he does,’ nor ‘No, he doesn’t.’”

Little infuriates voters more than a professional politician so firmly nailing his colours to the fence — in Swinney’s case, of course, because as the leader of a minority administration he may yet need Scottish Green support in a tight spot.

We might make passing Aberdeen South reference to Jo Hart, the Reform candidate. She has variously slammed the Royal Family as “benefit scroungers,” described Hollywood actors as “satanic worshipping trash”, and suggested that 5G masts threaten your health — but she may nevertheless muck things up for Douglas Lumsden.

In the big picture, by-elections are usually inconsequential. Yes, Tory victory at Newport, in 1922, brought down the Lloyd George coalition (the “Welsh Wizard” never held office again). True, Winnie Ewing’s 1967 Hamilton success for the SNP launched what has since been their permanent presence at Westminster. But these are rare cases. Seldom, in fact, does the winner of some shock by-election hang onto the seat for long. At the 1992 general election, the Tories recovered all the seats they had lost during the Parliament preceding. 

If there is a puncher’s chance anywhere on Thursday, it will be in Aberdeen South in what would be the first Scottish Tory upset, in a Scottish Westminster by-election, since Esmond Wright snatched Glasgow Pollok from Labour in 1967. Which but underlines how unlikely it is — and how little it would matter.

A week after Roy Jenkins won Glasgow Hillhead, Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands. He would somehow cling on as local MP in the next general election and, by the time the ghastly George Galloway dethroned him in 1987, was so fond of the division he became Lord Jenkins of Hillhead upon ennoblement.

 Glasgow never again returned a Tory MP: but Jenkins would never be Prime Minister. Winning Hillhead only ensured he, not Dr David Owen, became leader of the SDP that summer. This, in turn, under the ponderous old owl, meant that the SDP went into the 1983 election with twenty-nine MPs — and emerged with only six.