Family seats

So Ms Tamsin Dunwoody, a member of the Welsh Assembly from 2003 to 2007, is to contest the Crewe and Nantwich constituency formerly represented by her mother. One may well think that the writ for this by-election was moved with unseemly haste: Mr Hoon the Labour chief whip (both he and his opposite number Mr McLoughlin have Derbyshire connections) might have waited for Ms Dunwoody to be buried.

I am reminded of a by-election in 1944 in Mr McLoughlin’s constituency of West Derbyshire. The seat had been held almost without interruption by a member of the Cavendish family since 1885. When the marriage of Major Henry Hunloke and Lady Cavendish-Bentinck ran into difficulties, he was obliged to resign the seat, although with the excuse of Army service in the Middle East. Lord Hartington was adopted as the Conservative candidate at a selection meeting chaired by his father, the Duke of Devonshire, while Lord Hartington, on leave from the army, was waiting outside the room.

He was to lose the by-election, in spite of the wartime electoral truce between the major parties, to an independent Labour candidate, Charles Frederick White, whose father of the same name had also previously been elected to the same seat.

The Crewe and Nantwich by-election will be closely watched as by-elections usually are: I suspect for what it’s worth that the family connection may not be very helpful to Ms Dunwoody on this occasion.