Newbury
2010 Results:
Conservative: 33057 (56.42%)
Labour: 2505 (4.28%)
Liberal Democrat: 20809 (35.52%)
UKIP: 1475 (2.52%)
Green: 490 (0.84%)
Independent: 158 (0.27%)
Others: 95 (0.16%)
Majority: 12248 (20.9%)
Notional 2005 Results:
Conservative: 26327 (49%)
Liberal Democrat: 22909 (42.6%)
Labour: 3185 (5.9%)
Other: 1332 (2.5%)
Majority: 3418 (6.4%)
Actual 2005 result
Conservative: 26771 (49%)
Labour: 3239 (5.9%)
Liberal Democrat: 23311 (42.6%)
UKIP: 857 (1.6%)
Other: 495 (0.9%)
Majority: 3460 (6.3%)
2001 Result
Conservative: 22092 (43.5%)
Labour: 3523 (6.9%)
Liberal Democrat: 24507 (48.2%)
UKIP: 685 (1.3%)
Majority: 2415 (4.8%)
1997 Result
Conservative: 21370 (37.8%)
Labour: 3107 (5.5%)
Liberal Democrat: 29887 (52.9%)
Referendum: 992 (1.8%)
Other: 1120 (2%)
Majority: 8517 (15.1%)
Boundary changes:
Profile:
Current MP: Richard Benyon(Conservative) (more information at They work for you)
Richard Benyon(Conservative) (more information at They work for you)Hannah Cooper (Labour) David Rendel (Liberal Democrat) Adrian Hollister (Green)David Black (UKIP) Contested Reading West 1997, 2001. Windsor 2005.David Yates (Apolitical Democrats)Brian Burgess (Independent)2001 Census Demographics
Total 2001 Population: 98474
Male: 49.6%
Female: 50.4%
Under 18: 23.4%
Over 60: 18.3%
Born outside UK: 6.4%
White: 97.9%
Black: 0.3%
Asian: 0.5%
Mixed: 0.7%
Other: 0.5%
Christian: 75.8%
Full time students: 2%
Graduates 16-74: 23%
No Qualifications 16-74: 22.5%
Owner-Occupied: 71.6%
Social Housing: 15.5% (Council: 0.9%, Housing Ass.: 14.6%)
Privately Rented: 8.2%
Homes without central heating and/or private bathroom: 4.7%
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Timac – very briefly:
CON – Richard Benyon. Local landowner. A conventional Conservative – but a “jolly nice chap” kind of guy. Pretty successful MP. Worth re-electing if you want to get Labour out, and a strong local rep.
LIB – David Rendel. By-election superhero 1993. Strong pockets of support. Close to the LD inner circle. Nice enough, but perhaps a bit too party political. Closer to Newbury than the rest of the constituency.
LAB – Londoner that moved to the area. Goes against general local opinion. Labour loyalist. Me being fairly unbiased… I would say that she was a complete waste of time
First incumbency should benefit Conservatives here.
However I feel majority only around 4000
CON HOLD
2,000 either way here?
12,000 majority for Richard Benyon… 33,000 votes.
Labour lost their deposit (with 2,500 votes).
This is one of only (I think) five seats where the Tory candidate got 33,000+ votes.
I bet David Rendel wished he could disappear into the wall at the count.
Interestingly, I read that David Rendel was the only member of the Lib Dem Federal Executive to vote against forming a coalition with the Conservatives.
It must irk him to know that his long-time adversary, Richard Benyon, serves in this coalition government – albeit at a junior level.
Without another by-election, this seat looks fairly secure now, for the Conservatives.
Will David Rendel contest it again? Will the Lib Dems lose his personal vote if he doesn’t stand? Or has that personal vote already largely dissolved? He was MP for 12 years so presumably will have bult up some sort of following.
I would be surprised if Rendel stood again – he stood here in 1987, 1992, 1994, 1997, 2001, 2005 and 2010, winning on 3 occasions and losing on 4.
Tory share restored to 1992 level.
The LibDems have lost this for at least a generation
To continue a point from The Results, on Sefton Central,
I confirm the Lib/Alliance vote fell in Newbury in 1983.
“JOE JAMES B
Here are the results for Newbury on the 1982-1995 boundaries
(i.e. 1979 is notional, 1983-92 inclusive are actual).
(It’s a pity we don’t have notional results across 1979 to 2005 so we can compare all across.)
1979 notional.
Con 26,832 53.1%
Lib 18,179 36.0%
Lab 5,468 10.8%
Oth 10 0.0%
C maj 8,653 17.1%
1983 actual, change since 1979
Con 31,836 59.3% +6.2%
Lib 18,798 35.0% -1.0%
Lab 3,027 5.6% -5.2%
C maj 13,038 24.3%
Swing 3.6% from Lib to Con since 1979
1987 actual, change since 1983 & since 1979
Con 35,266 60.1% +0.8% +7.0%
Lib 18,608 31.7% -3.3% -4.3%
Lab 4,765 8.1% +2.5% -2.7%
C majority 16,658 28.4%
Swing 2.1% from Lib to Con since 1983
Swing 5.7% from Lib to Con since 1979
1992 actual, change since 1987 & 1983 & 1979
Con 37,135 55.9% -4.2% -3.4% +2.8%
Lib 24,778 37.3% +5.6% +2.3% +1.3%
Lab 3,962 6.0% -2.2% +0.4% -4.8%
Grn 539 0.8%
C majority 12,357 18.6%
Swing 4.9% from C to LD since 1987
Swing 2.9% from C to LD since 1983
Swing 0.8% from Lib/LD to Con since 1979
December 29th, 2008 at 6:14 pm “
Thanks for clarifying that Joe. In actual fact, the Liberal Democrat vote actually rose in 1992, partly due to the fact that the sitting MP Michael McNair-Wilson had retired, but probably also because David Rendel had gained some popularity locally. And I guess that technically the Lib Dem vote has only really fallen at three successive general elections here (2001-2010)- It’s just that if you compare 97 with the 93 by-election, there is a significant decrease.
Possibly yes, although the Lib Dems had gained Newbury Council in the 1991 local elections. But that doesn’t always mean anything – it didn’t in other areas.
Perhaps defence wasn’t quite such a prominent issue – it was in 1983 and favoured the Conservatives.
Labour were squeezed further in 1992 – against the trend – when nationally their vote went up and the Lib Dems down.
Part of the reason why the Lib Dems have in the past had a maximum of seven seats in South East England owes a lot to by-elections- The likes of Eastleigh, Newbury, Portsmouth South, Eastbourne and Romney may have never been won otherwise. And in the case of Winchester, the impact of course of Gerry Malone taking the 97 result to the High Court was that Oaten was able to increase his majority from 2 to well over 22,000. This effectively handed the seat on a silver platter to Oaten for 13 years, albeit with an unwinding effect similar to that of neighbouring Romsey as well as Newbury. Who knows? Maybe if Malone could have just accepted the result the Tories could have regained it in 2001. Malone of course is not the first Scotsman to make an election gaffe- Step,forward the Gary Sprake of the 1983 election, Iain Sproat, who reckoned that the new Roxburgh, Selkirk and Berwickshire was a safer bet than Aberdeen South. What happened? The Tories held Sproat’s old seat while he was beaten in the Borders by David Steel’s assistant ArchyKirkwood!
I made a mistake- Oaten’s by-election majority in 1997 was 21, 556, so it was well over 21, 000, not 22, 000.
Has anyone else made a similar howler to Sproat? Tony Crosland unsuccessfully changed constituencies after the 1955 boundary changes, losing in Southampton Test, but the seat he vacated, S Gloucestershire, was also lost to the Tories as Crosland correctly surmised it would, so he didn’t make a mistake in moving as such. Also, unlike Sproat, he never lost the seat he subsequently got, Grimsby – indeed, Labour has never lost it since that time. (Just.)
The left-wing bias from the corrupt BBC seems to have forgotten that Labour achieved a worse result than the LibDems, when the Newbury by-election saw a lot of tactical voting.
Never let truth get in the way of lefty narrative, eh, Auntie?
If you think that the BBC has a left-wing bias, surely you’re in the wrong party.
And quit being such a sore loser. It REALLY doesn’t suit you.
“The left-wing bias from the corrupt BBC seems to have forgotten that Labour achieved a worse result than the LibDems, when the Newbury by-election saw a lot of tactical voting.’
Far be it from me to defend the BBC from charges of left wing bias (which I don’t), but there is an obvious difference between Labour’s performance in the by-election here (and also in Christchucrh and Winchester) which doktorb himself identifies, namely that Labour’s support was tactically squeezed by the LDs in order to defeat the Tories – quite possibly with some encouragment from Labour themselves. No such factor applied to the LD performace in Rotherham yesterday
Indeed, during the Newbury by-election a former Labour candidate for the constituency (not the actual candidate in the election) went on public record advocating an LD vote. Labour has never amounted to much in this constituency. During the by-election, I visited a particular pub in the constituency which I particularly love (I’ve been going there for nearly 30 years now, about once every one or 2 months), and was amazed that in that village, Aldworth, there were no Conservative or LD posters up, but there was a Labour one. I was told that there was a Reading Labour county councillor (the county council still existed then) who lived in the village. Lucky lady.
Is David Rendel intending to stand here again in 2015? He was against the LibDem/Tory coalition. In his website he describes himself as a “LibDem campaigner for Newbury” and still holds constituency surgeries.
From what I gather about Judith Chaplin, she was a very able woman who was always very apt and to the point in Commons debates.
It is a tragedy that she never had the chance to achieve high office. I’ve only found one video online in which she makes the slightest appearance – a Select Commitee in October 1992 grilling Norman Lamont on ITN Source.
I sometimes wonder how she would have fared in 1997 and 2001.
I get the feeling that had she not died Chaplin probably would have held this for as long as she would have wanted to.
It probably would have been held by the Tories in 1997 by a few thousand votes and again at the following election- But by 2005 the majority probably would have been back in five figures five years earlier than actually happened.
The circumstances surrounding the 1993 by-election- Major’s government was of course rapidly losing popularity at the time, Rendel was an assiduous campaigner who had got a good result for his party in 1992 and in a constituency where it was the Lib Dems as the main challengers to the Tories and with Labour nowhere it was inevitable that given the circumstances a 9.3% swing to win Newbury was not that difficult- In fact, they got a swing of 28.4%- Only beaten in the Christchurch by-election that followed two months later. Unlike here, the Lib Dems didn’t hold on- Largely because it had never been a target seat for them- Which Newbury had been in the 70′s.
I agree that Mrs Chaplin would’ve held on in 1997 and 2001. She will have probably retired by now.
The Labour vote here is possibly the lowest of any constituency, so the LibDems have been unable to benefit tactically in that sense – they would need their support directly from the Conservatives to win.
Judith Chaplin’s death is possibly one of the saddest events in British politics I can recall. A very good-natured, energetic and likeable person – and we could do with more like her.
It is amazing how the Lib Dems were able to capitalise in Eastleigh long-term but not here- Would I be right in assuming that their local government base in Eastleigh was stronger which allowed Chris Huhne to continue to hold this at the last election?
Eastleigh does seem to be one heck of a hard nut to crack. Unlike Newbury and Christchurch, however, there is a substantial Labour vote to squeeze. If the LibDems can hold on to the council in this parliament, it is looking harder to imagine how they could ever lose.
Similarly to Judith Chaplin, Stephen Milligan could still have been MP had he not died so young.
Stephen Milligan was a very sad case.
He was a very good MP who had the potential (Just like Chaplin) to go far in the Conservative Party. The fact that he died in the circumstances he did is heartbreaking
But all the same, even with a by-election as things are in Eastleigh at present I would have to say the Lib Dems would still hold on- Particularly if the Tory vote fell by more than their own vote.
In fact if there was a by-election in Eastleigh should Huhne be found guilty it would if anything probably favour the Lib Dems-
Lib Dem- 39.4% (-7.1%)
Tory- 30.2% (-9.1%)
Labour- 22.1%
UKIP- 6.6%
Others- 1.7%
Prediction for 2015-
Benyon (Tory)- 33, 325 (57.2%, +0.78%)
Rendel (Lib Dem)- 18, 322 (31.4%, -4.12%)
Labour- 3, 145 (5.4%, +1.12%)
UKIP- 2, 563 (4.4%, +1.88%)
Others- 885 (1.5%, +0.23%)
Con hold.
Turnout- 58, 240.
Majority- 15, 003 (25.7%)
Swing- +2.45% From Lib Dem to Con.
I think the LD vote will go down a lot more than that. At least 10%, as much of it will be tactical. Cant see Labour getting as low as 5.4% anywhere in the country.
At this early stage
Tory 58
LD 21
Lab 11
UKIP 6
Green 3
BNP 1
A few things to point out-
Firstly, there were a solid Liberal vote here in the 70′s and 80s that was 30%+. Therefore I would expect the Lib Dems to stay above 30% here, with or without Rendel.
The Tory vote will remain pretty static- We both seem to agree on that front.
But Labour getting 11% here would be a very good result for them indeed. I expect them to hold their deposit come 2015, but I don’t think they’ll quite manage 6% of the vote- Their vote began to disappear in 2005 and was nearly made extinct in 2010- Therefore it will be an increase, but not an impressive one on the scale you forecast I would suspect.
Tend to agree with TheResults somewhat. Labour is very weak in this constituency, and has been for years, despite my frequent visits to it.
Judith Bunting selected as PPC for the Lib Dems.
I get the feeling that now Rendel has seemingly gone for good that the Lib Dems may possibly end up finding themselves on the wrong end of a Tory majority near to their 1983-87 level- Which strictly speaking without the by-election, is where they could already have ended up.
In 1974, Newbury nearly went Liberal, so they do have a tradition here. Labour are unlikely to ever do much. The most likely places for Labour support in the West Berkshire district are already in Reading West constituency.
As in much of the South, East and West of the country Labour ceases to have much relevance outside the largest urban centres.
This seat will still have enough Lib Dem votes to keep the Conservatives campaigning
All of what you say is indeed true.
The last line sums up how crucial the increase in the Labour vote will be here for the Lib Dems- Provided the Labour vote doesn’t go up to or higher than their 2001 level, then the Lib Dems’ numerical vote might still hold up relatively well as I have forecast. It is perhaps as you correctly say that because of Labour’s seemingly eternally low vote here the only real way the Lib Dems could lose any more votes than they already have done would be for Benyon to pick up more, which is not impossible- I still believe this seat could yet get safer for the Tories but it will always be the Lib Dems second here- Distant or close.