Matthew Bailey

Jun 25, 2024 | politicshome.com | Tom Scotson |Philip Cowley |Matthew Bailey

4 min read Ed Davey has employed some unusual methods of drawing attention to his election campaign. He has not (yet), however, decided to endorse a range of of multi-vitamin tablets. How do you keep up with the election news? In 1929, according to an advert in the Mail, what you needed was a “Radio-Receiver that gets the election campaign speeches”. “Have you a loud speaker that will announce the results perfectly on the Great Day?”, it wanted to know.

Jun 24, 2024 | politicshome.com | Sienna Rodgers |Philip Cowley |Matthew Bailey

5 min read The largely unknown constituencies of Feverford in Kent and Trough in Hertfordshire are linked by the fact that in the 1950s they were represented, simultaneously, by the same individual. At least that was the plot of the 1953 novel Gentian Violet, a commentary on the stifling atmosphere of 1950s consensus politics. It tells the story of Jim Blundel, who due to an error on his naval papers, is also given the name James Stewart-Blundel and thus two identities.

Jun 18, 2024 | politicshome.com | Tom Scotson |Philip Cowley |Matthew Bailey

4 min read If we carry on like this, single-word seat names face extinction. But at least we did away with Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East. In 1951, a leader article in The Times noted that the recently-created constituency of Merton and Morden sounded like “a pair of comedians on the Light Programme”, while “Rowley Regis and Tipton” might have been named by a novelist “in two minds as to whether to make his Barsetshire plain and straightforward or quaint and old world”.

Jun 14, 2024 | politicshome.com | Sienna Rodgers |Philip Cowley |Matthew Bailey

4 min read Millions of voters nationwide will be glued to screens over the next few weeks as Euro 2024 gets underway. It is not uncommon for political parties to panic about the threat posed to their turnout by major TV events. Sixty years ago, in the run up to the 1964 election Harold Wilson was canny (or paranoid) enough to spot that in the last hour of polling the BBC would be repeating an episode of its phenomenally popular comedy, Steptoe and Son.

Jun 13, 2024 | politicshome.com | Tom Scotson |Philip Cowley |Matthew Bailey

5 min read There will be a record number of candidates at this election. Many of them will be very serious. But not all. Long before Count Binface and before even Screaming Lord Sutch, there was the now largely forgotten figure of Lt Commander Bill Boaks. A thirty-year naval veteran, who saw action at both Dunkirk and against the Bismarck, Boaks fought his first parliamentary election in 1951 in Walthamstow East.