A bridge too far? Previewing the Runcorn and Helsby by-election of 1st May 2025

"All the right votes, but not necessarily in the right order"

Runcorn and Helsby

House of Commons; caused by the resignation of Labour MP Mike Amesbury.

Now Runcorn lay over on one side of stream,
And Widnes on t'other side stood,
And, as nobody wanted to go either place,
Well, the trade wasn't any too good.

- Marriott Edgar, The Runcorn Ferry

The River Weaver is an important trade artery in north-west England. Lying entirely within the county of Cheshire, the Weaver runs in a generally northerly direction through the towns of Nantwich, Winsford and Northwich before flowing into the Manchester Ship Canal at Frodsham. Nantwich, Winsford and Northwich have always been important salt-mining centres, but historically transporting the salt out of the towns was difficult. Originally the salt had to be carried on the backs of packhorses to Pickering's Wharf, at the Weaver's tidal limit around 7 miles from the Mersey estuary, but this was inefficient and by the start of the eighteenth century it was clear that a better solution was needed.

In 1720 a better solution arrived when Parliament passed the River Weaver Navigation Act to make the river navigable. Once the work authorised by the Act was sufficiently completed, barges of up to 40 tons could reach Winsford via a series of five locks. In 1810 the Weaver Navigation was extended at its northern end to docks at Weston Point, west of Runcorn, in order to improve access to the Mersey by bypassing a river section near Frodsham which was often impassable at low tide. Under the terms of the 1720 Act, some of the profits from the canal were to be used to maintain bridges and highways in Cheshire.

The lowest crossing of the old River Weaver and the new Weston Canal is between Frodsham and Sutton Weaver, where there are three bridges. The newest of these is the Weaver Viaduct, a concrete structure 971 metres long which opened in 1971 and carries the M56 motorway. Next to this is the Frodsham railway viaduct, which was completed in 1850 and carries trains between Chester and Warrington.

Both of these structures are at a high level to provide clearance for boats; but the A56 bridge over the Weston Canal at Sutton Weaver, next to the Frodsham railway viaduct, is a swing bridge which closes to road traffic when a boat needs to pass. The current structure dates from 1926 and it has needed a lot of work doing on it in recent years. A major repair programme in 2013, which involved road traffic being diverted onto a temporary bridge, does not appear to have resolved the problems. On 21st October 2024 the Canal and River Trust, which operates the Sutton Weaver swing bridge, announced that further repairs were needed and that the bridge would be closed for a total of 33 days in January and March 2025.

This news did not go down well at all in Frodsham, because the only available diversion routes (via the M56 motorway or the next road bridge upstream at Acton Bridge) would have involved an additional road journey of around 10 miles. The BBC carried a report on 25th October 2024 (link) in which Mike Amesbury, the Labour MP for Runcorn and Helsby, called the closure "unacceptable" and said that the Canal and River Trust "need to go back to the drawing board".

That evening, Mike Amesbury MP went out drinking in Frodsham town centre. By 2am he was here outside the Golden Lion waiting for a taxi, when he was approached by a constituent who was unhappy about the proposed bridge closure. Amesbury's chosen reaction was to punch his constituent's head, knock him to the ground and then throw another five punches while his victim was lying on the ground. It's fair to say that more professional options for dealing with this situation were available.

Both Amesbury and his victim reported the incident to the police. CCTV footage confirmed that the constituent had not been threatening or aggressive towards Amesbury, and the MP was charged with one count of common assault. On 16th January 2025 Amesbury pleaded guilty to that charge before Chester magistrates, and on 24th February he was sentenced to ten weeks in prison and ordered to pay £200 compensation. The MP immediately appealed against the sentence, and three days later Chester crown court suspended the rest of his prison term for two years: instead of another 67 days in prison, Amesbury (assuming he keeps out of further trouble) will now have to complete 200 hours of unpaid work, 20 days of rehabilitation, a 12-month alcohol monitoring requirement and an anger management course. And he still had to pay the £200 compensation, plus the court costs and the victim surcharge originally imposed by the magistrates.

In the meantime, on 31st October 2024 the Canal and River Trust had backed down and announced that the works on the Sutton Weaver swing bridge would be deferred following "extensive feedback ... about the impact the scheduled closure of the bridge would have on the local community".

Mike Amesbury's ten-week prison sentence, whether suspended or not, would not have stopped him from being a local councillor. The rule in local government is a simple one: any prison sentence of three months or more, whether suspended or not, disqualifies you from being a councillor for five years. It's an automatic process, although the suspension does not kick in until all appeals have been exhausted.

The rule at Westminster is more complicated. A previous conviction does not disqualify you from being elected as an MP unless you are currently in prison (or unlawfully at large from prison) serving a sentence of one year or more: in these circumstances, the returning officer can reject your nomination. This rule was only brought in after the election of Bobby Sands in 1981, in order to stop other IRA hunger strikers standing for Parliament: before then, you could be elected to the green benches from a prison cell (and some people were) and very little could be done about it. An existing MP who is convicted of a criminal offence will only be expelled from the Commons if the prison sentence (suspended or not) is one year or more, which is considerably more generous than the three-month sentence limit in local government. However an existing MP who is sentenced to any prison term of less than one year (like Amesbury) would have a recall petition opened on them. Amesbury chose to resign from the Commons before that process started.

We have previously had cases like that of Fiona Onasanya, who was sentenced in 2018 to four months in prison for perverting the course of justice. If she had been a councillor she would have been disqualified straight away and that would be the end of the matter, but instead the returning officer and the electors of Peterborough had to expend time and money which could have better spent on a recall petition to eject her from the Commons. Amesbury's case cuts the other way: with a 10-week sentence he would have been entitled to remain as a local councillor, but as an MP he would have been subject to a recall petition had he not tendered his resignation first.

Yet again, this column finds itself having to write multiple paragraphs to explain something which should be simple. There is no good reason for this double standard to exist. Nor is there much of a good reason to continue with recall petitions in the case of MPs who pick up criminal convictions, given that a few of them have now been launched and experience has shown that they all succeed, and it is noticeable that the professional body for election staff has recently called for the complete abolition of recall petitions on the basis that they're a waste of everybody's time and money. We should settle on a single disqualification level for criminal MPs and councillors, preferably a criterion which is immediately understandable and which can be applied automatically without imposing further liabilities and costs on our returning officers.

Anyway, this by-election gives us an opportunity to travel to one of the North's less-visited towns. Runcorn lies on the south side of the Mersey estuary at a point where the river suddenly narrows: the Runcorn Gap is around 350 metres wide at its narrowest point, and it is overlooked by high ground on the southern bank. The town was founded in 915 by Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians, as a fortified town in order to deter Viking invasions of Mercia: the Mersey was the northern boundary of that kingdom, and its very name comes from an Old English word meaning a boundary. Legislation setting out ward boundaries used to routinely say that the boundaries so defined were to be "mered by Ordnance Survey", and the use of "mere" here as a verb comes from the same root that gave us the Mersey.

Two survivors of mediaeval Runcorn are Halton Castle and Norton Priory, both of which lie some distance to the east of the modern town centre and - particularly in the case of Halton Castle - are now surrounded by New town development. Halton Castle was first built in 1071 as a motte-and-bailey structure by the Norman Nigel of Cotentin, the first Baron of Halton, and then rebuilt in stone in the thirteenth century; it has been owned by the Duchy of Lancaster since the fifteenth Baron of Halton, Henry Bolingbroke, succeeded to the English throne as King Henry IV. The castle was twice besieged in the English Civil War, and its surviving buildings functioned as a court into the twentieth century. Norton Priory was an Augustinian foundation of 1115, which was turned into a country house (also now gone) after the dissolution of the 1530s. The old church site has been extensively excavated, and a large statue here of St Christopher (dated on stylistic grounds to the end of the 14th century) is a rare survivor of English mediaeval art.

St Christopher is the patron saint of travellers, and the statue at Norton Priory - in common with most artistic depictions of the saint - shows him carrying the Christ-child across a river. (There's a clue in the name: "Christopher" comes from the Greek for "Christ-bearer".) In all probability there was already a ferry service across the Runcorn Gap by the time Norton Priory was founded, and for centuries afterwards that ferry was the only way across the river.

The first fixed link to the town of Widnes on the far side of the river was opened in 1868 or 1869 by the London and North Western Railway, and named as the Queen Ethelfleda Viaduct after Runcorn's founder. This bridge still carries the main railway line between London and Liverpool, and those cities' crests appear on the main bridge piers. Its clearance of 75 feet over the river, which necessitated long approach viaducts on both sides, set the maximum height for vessels on the Manchester Ship Canal which was opened under the bridge in 1894, cutting Runcorn's waterfront off from the Mersey. This also created problems for the ferry, because the ferry boat had to be lifted over the canal wall. A new solution was needed.

But road traffic had to wait until 1905 for its first crossing of the Runcorn Gap, which was a transporter bridge. This was a Victorian solution to the problem that the technology of the day could not deliver an affordable road bridge which could pass high enough to provide clearance for shipping underneath. The transporter bridge was effectively a hybrid between a bridge and a ferry: road traffic would be loaded onto a gondola suspended from the bridge deck, and the gondola would move back and forth between the two bridge ends. The world's first transporter bridge was built in Bilbao in 1893, and around twenty were erected across the world in the following two decades before the rise of the automobile led to the design falling out of favour. The Widnes-Runcorn transporter bridge, which opened in 1905, was the largest of its type ever built with a span of 1,000 feet. It could carry four cars across the river in a journey time of 2½ minutes. Nothing remains of it today except for the approaches and some ancillary buildings on the Widnes side, and Marriott Edgar's poem The Runcorn Ferry as immortalised by Stanley Holloway.

The transporter bridge was replaced by a fixed road bridge next to the railway viaduct, which was opened by Princess Alexandra in 1961 and at the time had the third-longest steel arch span in the world. Its completion, and the development of Runcorn as a New Town shortly afterwards, released massive pent-up demand for travel between Runcorn and Lancashire: this led to the bridge becoming chronically congested. In 1977 the road deck was widened from two lanes to four, with pedestrians moved onto a new footpath attached to the bridge's east side, and the approach roads were reconfigured; once this work was completed, the bridge was renamed as the Silver Jubilee Bridge. (The approach roads on the south side were rather tightly curved, and I vividly recall going too fast around one of those bends and aquaplaning off the road back in my boy racer days; luckily, I ended up in the hard shoulder and no damage was done.) This bridge's importance to Runcorn's expressway road network was such that the town's road signs would point to THE BRIDGE in capital letters, as if no further explanation were needed.

But this work did not solve the congestion problems, and the age of the Silver Jubilee Bridge creates its own maintenance burden. So the old bridge has been relieved in the last decade by the opening in 2017 of the Mersey Gateway Bridge, a cable-stayed structure which crosses the Mersey at a much wider point upstream; the Silver Jubilee bridge has now been reduced to its original two traffic lines each way plus a dedicated cycle lane. Tolls now apply to vehicular journeys on both bridges, at rather more than tuppence per (part of a) person per (part of a) trip, although residents of Halton borough get unlimited travel for an annual £10 charge.

We have already mentioned the Weaver Navigation, which linked Runcorn to the Cheshire salt towns in the eighteenth century. Within a few decades this had been joined by the Bridgewater Canal and the Trent and Mersey Canal, giving Runcorn links to Manchester and to the industrial towns of the Midlands. The Bridgewater Canal terminates here at a basin in Runcorn's old town centre.

There used to be a series of locks going down from that basin to the riverfront, but these were filled in in the 1960s when the route was severed by the Silver Jubilee Bridge's approach roads. Those roads have now been demolished in their turn, and there are proposals to reopen the closed canal section. In the meantime, you can walk down to the riverfront Ship Canal through the old locks.

Bridgewater House, an 18th-century building at the bottom of the lock flight which was built for the eponymous Duke of Bridgewater and which has been converted into office accommodation, now stands rather incongruously within a 21st-century housing estate.

The designation of Runcorn as a New Town in 1964 led to massive and rather innovative development. The Runcorn Busway, a series of designated bus-only roads, was the world's first bus rapid transit system; most of Runcorn's residents are no more than five minutes' walk from a Busway stop. The Busway is centred on Runcorn Shopping City, an American-style shopping mall which was Europe's largest enclosed shopping centre when it was opened by Elizabeth II in 1972. It is still the largest shopping mall in Cheshire. All this has left the old town centre rather overtaken, although the competition for visitors' money remains fierce for the shops which remain. Check out the window posters here.

Shopping City was originally connected by pedestrian streets in the sky to the ill-fated Southgate estate, which was completed in 1977 as the modernist concrete dream of its architect James Stirling and demolished less than fifteen years later thanks to serious design and social problems. The Hallwood Park estate is its more conventional replacement.

The New Town development still leaves its mark on the town's demographics. In the 2021 census Halton Lea ward (which includes Shopping City and the Hallwood Park estate) made the top 100 wards in England and Wales for adults with 1-4 GCSEs or equivalent (15.0% of adults, the highest figure for any ward in the North West), adults with 5+ GCSEs but no higher qualification (17.9%), residents who are long-term sick or disabled (11.4%) and households which are socially rented (48.0%). Grange ward to the west, Halton Castle ward to the north, and Norton South and Preston Brook ward to the east also figure in the top 100 wards in England and Wales for one of those categories.

All this development didn't make it as far as Daresbury, a village which lies to the east of Runcorn on the main road from Chester to Warrington. Daresbury was the birthplace in 1832 of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a mathematician and photographer who is best known, under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll, for writing Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass. Dodgson's father was the priest at All Saints church in Daresbury, which now has a stained-glass window commemorating Carroll and his work - including a depiction of the Cheshire Cat. A museum in Carroll's memory is attached to the church.

In more recent times Daresbury has been a centre for scientific research thanks to the Daresbury Laboratory, opened in 1967 by Harold Wilson as the white heat of technology, which does research in nuclear physics, particle physics and computing. The Synchrotron Radiation Source, a high-energy particle accelerator which operated here until 2008, contributed to the Nobel prizes won by Sir John E Walker and Venki Ramakrishnan. Its successor, the Diamond Light Source, was built in Oxfordshire - a major loss for the north.

The Daresbury, Moore and Sandymoor ward of Halton (don't be confused by the name, Sandymoor is by far the largest element of this ward) is demographically completely unlike any other Runcorn ward: it makes the top 20 wards in England and Wales for households with two cars (47.7%) and for owner-occupation (91.6%), both of which are the second-highest figures for any ward in north-west England, It also ranks third in north-west England for detached housing (70.0% of households). Beechwood and Heath ward, in the south of Runcorn, also has very high owner-occupation rates (88.5%).

The underlying geology of Runcorn is sandstone, and Cheshire has a ridge of sandstone hills which run through the county from south to north. This seat includes a Sandstone electoral ward, which covers the villages to the south of Frodsham and Helsby. The hills terminate at the Mersey valley, spectacularly so in the case of Helsby Hill where sheer red cliffs overlook the town below. Some of Helsby Hill's rock has been quarried away over the years, and a lot of Helsby stone ended up in the buildings and dock walls of Liverpool.

Helsby is a railway junction, and a visit to the station harks back to an earlier era with its well-kept signalbox, flowerbeds and old-style semaphore signals. There are also some oddities here. The station and most of the trains that call here are run by Transport for Wales on their routes from Chester to Manchester or to Liverpool via Runcorn, and the electronic displays will occasionally display information in Welsh despite the fact that we are some way away from the border.

Also, the western arm of the junction sees almost no service. The Helsby to Ellesmere Port railway line has only two trains per day (except on Sundays when the line is closed), and Stanlow and Thornton railway station has been temporarily closed since February 2022 due to concerns over the state of the station footbridge.

Stanlow and Thornton station also suffers from severe access problems because it is located a long walk from the nearest public road, in the middle of the giant Stanlow oil refinery. This is the UK's second-largest refinery and a sixth of Britain's petrol comes out of here. Readers with long political memories will recall the UK fuel crisis of September 2000, which started here with a blockade of Stanlow by farmers who were angry at petrol and diesel prices of (gasp!) 80p per litre. Other industry along the coastal strip includes a glass factory and a fertiliser plant at Elton. To the south of here is some countryside in and around the Gowy valley, including the Chester commuter village of Mickle Trafford.

The inclusion of Helsby in the name of the Runcorn and Helsby constituency is clearly a reference to the four wards of Cheshire West and Chester included in the seat, but it's a bit of a mystery why Helsby was namechecked when its headcount is only around half that of Frodsham. A visit to Frodsham will reveal a bustling main street full of independent shops; while, like Helsby, the town is overlooked by high ground at the northern end of the Cheshire sandstone ridge. There is a long-distance footpath, the Sandstone Trail, which runs along this ridge from Frodsham to Whitchurch: its northern end is marked by an obelisk outside the Bears Paw pub in Frodsham, diagonally opposite the Mike Amesbury Memorial Taxi Rank.

When we look at the parliamentary history of Runcorn and Helsby, we see that Amesbury's predecessors as MPs for this corner of Cheshire are generally worthy but rather obscure figures. There are a couple of Cabinet members here, but they didn't serve on the top table for long. Of course, Parliamentary boundaries here have changed a lot over the 140 years since the Third Reform Act, and one of the reasons for this is population growth. Pre-New Town Runcorn was a lot smaller when the modern system of single-member Parliamentary seats became the norm in 1885.

Cheshire was a net loser from that year's redistribution, largely as a result of Parliament's decision to disenfranchise Macclesfield following a series of corrupt elections there, and the county went down from 14 MPs to 13 (elected from 12 constituencies, because Stockport was a two-seat borough). From 1885 eight of Cheshire's MPs were elected from county constituencies, and the two which concern us here were called Northwich and Eddisbury.

The Northwich constituency of 1885 was based on the Weaver valley and the industrial towns therein, including Middlewich, Winsford and Runcorn. It was dominated by the salt-mining industry, which literally changed the landscape during this period: Northwich has been so thoroughly undermined by brine pumping to extract salt from the ground that the town suffered massively from subsidence in the 19th and 20th centuries. This problem remains so acute that there is still a quango in existence, the Cheshire Brine Subsidence Compensation Board, which assesses damages and pays compensation for subsidence damage caused by brine pumping. Much of the extracted salt was transported down the Weaver Navigation to Runcorn, from where it was either exported or consumed by the chemicals industry. To this day Runcorn's entire western shore is occupied by a massive ex-ICI chemical works.

Which makes it appropriate that Northwich's first MP was a chemical entrepreneur. John Brunner - who became Sir John Brunner, 1st Baronet in 1895 - was the Brunner in Brunner Mond and Company, which had made its fortune on exclusive UK and US rights to the Solvay process for making soda ash. Invented in 1861 by the Belgian chemist Ernest Solvay, this process uses salt brine, limestone and heat to create bicarbonate of soda via a complex series of chemical reactions: its only waste product is calcium chloride, a relatively harmless chemical which has a number of industrial and other uses. Brunner and Mond were able to make the Solvay process a commercial success from their large factory at Winnington near Northwich, which started production in 1874, and by the end of the century the previous Leblanc process for making soda ash (whose byproducts were the far more environmentally-damaging hydrochloric acid and calcium sulphate) had been more or less abandoned on financial grounds. In 1900 Brunner Mond was the UK's wealthiest chemical company, and when it merged with three other companies to form ICI in 1926 its market capitalisation was equivalent to well over £1 billion in today's money.

John Brunner was the subject of a biography in 1970 by Stephen Koss, which was titled Radical Plutocrat. These days those words might conjure up an image of a right-wing tech bro, but Brunner was a very different type of person. He was a Unitarian with a local reputation as a paternalistic employer, and he ploughed a lot of his wealth back into the community in Northwich, Runcorn and his native Liverpool (a number of chairs at Liverpool University were endowed by him). For example, Brunner put £68,000 of his own money into the building of the Runcorn and Widnes Transporter Bridge, he opened the bridge himself in 1905 when Edward VII (who had been booked to do the honours) pulled out at the lost moment, and then he gave his interest in the bridge away to Widnes Corporation once it became apparent a few years later that the bridge was never going to make a profit.

All this made Brunner a natural fit for the Liberal Party in the late Victorian era, and he won all but one election in Northwich between 1885 and 1910. The exception was 1886, when the Liberal Party had split over the issue of Irish home rule and Brunner was challenged in the general election by Robert Verdin, standing as a Liberal Unionist candidate. Verdin and his brothers (his brother William Verdin had stood against Brunner on the Conservative ticket in 1885) were even more heavily involved in the Cheshire salt industry: the family firm Joseph Verdin and Sons was the UK's largest salt manufacturer in the 1880s, and the Verdin family also did its fair share of philanthropy in the Cheshire salt towns. To this day one of the electoral wards for Winsford is called Over and Verdin. Robert Verdin unseated John Brunner in 1886 by 458, but he died the following year and the resulting Northwich by-election of 13th August 1887 brought John Brunner back to Parliament with a large majority over the new Liberal Unionist candidate, Lord Henry Grosvenor. Only in 1900 did his majority subsequently fall below 10 points.

Sir John Brunner, 1st Baronet, retired in January 1910 on health grounds, although he didn't leave politics entirely and he was subsequently elected to Surrey county council. His son and the heir to the baronetcy, also called John Brunner, was by this point already in the Commons as Liberal MP for Leigh, and he moved to Cheshire to take over his father's seat. In his younger days Brunner junior had nearly died in 1890 while swimming in Lake Como in Italy, and unfortunately his brother Sidney drowned in the process of rescuing him. These days John Brunner II is probably best known for his famous descendant: he was the maternal grandfather of the Duchess of Kent, although he died in 1929 before she was born.

Boundary changes for the 1918 general election added Sandbach to the Northwich constituency, but a far more consequential change was that John Brunner II did not get the Coalition government's coupon. This instead went to Conservative candidate Harry Dewhurst, a businessman who owned four cotton mills in the Preston area and was a member of the Cheshire Hunt. In the First World War Dewhurst had served in England and France as a remount officer with the Army rank of major, and then as a King's Messenger for the Admiralty with the naval rank of lieutenant-commander. He went on to defeat John Brunner in 1918 by the very comfortable margin of 61-39. Sir John Brunner, 2nd Baronet, turned up later in the 1923-24 Parliament as Liberal MP for Southport, but that was the end of his time in Northwich.

Lt-Cdr Dewhurst retired from the Commons in 1922 after one term and successfully passed his seat on to the new Conservative candidate. Lord Colum Crichton-Stuart was a younger son of the 3rd Marquess of Bute, and his previous career had been in the diplomatic service with overseas postings to Cairo and Christiania (the city now known as Oslo). He had been unsuccessful in his first parliamentary campaign, in Cardiff East in 1918.

Crichton-Stuart went on to serve as MP for Northwich for 23 years, but only in 1931 could his seat be counted as safe. In his first election in 1922 he was challenged by John Williams, a Labour Party organiser associated with the National Union of General Workers; this job was based out of Manchester, and Williams subsequently served as a Manchester city councillor. He lost to Crichton-Stuart in 1922 by 2,388 votes, and then finished third behind the Liberals in a close three-way result the following year.

In 1924 Labour changed their candidate for Northwich to Barbara Ayrton-Gould, a former suffragist who had been arrested in 1912 as part of the WSPU's window-breaking campaign. (Her mother, Hertha Ayrton, was a noted physicist who had designed a fan to blow poison gas out of the First World War trenches.) At her first attempt she finished 2,915 votes behind Crichton-Stuart. Her second attempt in 1929 resulted in one of the closest Parliamentary election results of all time, as Lord Colum Crichton-Stuart won his fourth term of office with 15,477 votes to Ayrton-Gould's 15,473, a majority of just four votes. A further 14,163 votes had been cast for the Liberal candidate John Barlow, of whom more later, meaning that the Conservative winning share of the vote was just 34.3%. Barbara Ayrton-Gould tried again in 1931, but this was the year of the National Government and round 3 of Crichton-Stuart v Ayrton-Gould finished with a Conservative majority of over 14,000. Ayrton-Guild did eventually make it to Parliament elsewhere, serving from 1945 to 1950 as the Labour MP for Hendon North.

Lord Colum Crichton-Stuart stood down at the 1945 election, which resulted in another photofinish in Northwich. On this occasion the Liberal candidate was John Brunner II's son Sir Felix Brunner, 3rd Baronet, who saved his deposit but didn't poll much better than that. That left a faceoff between two lawyers for the Northwich seat. On the Labour side was Robert Chorley, who was the Sir Ernest Cassel professor of commercial and industrial law at the University of London and had served in a number of civil service and civil defence rules during the Second World War. On the Conservative side was international law specialist John Foster, the Recorder of Oxford, who had spent the war as a legal advisor to the British Embassy in Washington DC and later to General Dwight Eisenhower, for which he received the military rank of brigadier. In the election, Foster defeated Chorley by 20,198 votes to 20.183, holding the Northwich seat with a majority of just fifteen votes. Before the year was out Chorley was in Parliament anyway as the first Lord Chorley, working as a government whip in the House of Lords, while Foster was in Germany working on the Nuremberg trials. Foster went on to have a long Parliamentary career, much of which was spent advocating for Holocaust survivors and other victims of persecution, but he leaves our story after 1950 when boundary changes took Runcorn out of his Northwich constituency.

Meanwhile the towns of Frodsham and Helsby were included within the Eddisbury constituency on its first creation in 1885. Named after an ancient Hundred of Cheshire, this was a very rural and agricultural seat covering the countryside to the east of Chester. While the Eddisbury seat of 1885-1950 was certainly Tory-inclined, it wasn't overly safe and the 1885 election resulted in a majority of just 121 votes for the Conservative candidate Henry Tollemache. He was a major landowner in the seat who had been one of the outgoing MPs for the predecessor seat of West Cheshire, and during his time in the Commons he co-founded a local newspaper firm in Chester. Most of his rare interventions in the chamber were on agricultural issues. At his final election in 1900 nobody could be found who was prepared to take Tollemache on, and he was re-elected unopposed.

Henry Tollemache retired in 1906, at which point Eddisbury fell in the Liberal landslide of that year. The Conservative candidate Edward Cotton-Jodrell (seeking to return after standing down as MP for the Wirral six years previously) lost by 1,123 votes to the Liberal candidate Arthur Stanley. He was a barrister and London county councillor who had served in the Boer War and was the heir to three separate peerages (the titles of Lord Stanley of Alderley, Lord Sheffield and Lord Eddisbury).

Stanley served one term before losing both 1910 elections in Eddisbury to the Conservatives' Harry Barnston, who had majorities of 688 votes in January and 289 votes in December. He did not return to Parliament until 1925, when he succeeded to his father's titles and entered the Lords as the fifth Lord Stanley of Alderley (and the fifth Lord Sheffield, and the fourth Lord Eddisbury). In between Stanley spent the First World War in Australia, where he served from 1914 to 1920 as Governor of Victoria.

Harry Barnston, who had unsuccessfully stood in Stockport in 1906 before being elected for Eddisbury in January 1910, was the lord of the manor of Farndon near Crewe, and he was a captain in the Cheshire Imperial Yeomanry. He served in France in that capacity during his time in Parliament, and enjoyed no fewer than three uncontested elections in Eddisbury after the First World War: Barnston was elected unopposed first in the 1918 general election with the coupon, then in a ministerial by-election on 19th April 1921 after he had joined the government as Comptroller of the Household, and then again in the 1922 general election. As such the 1923 general election was the first contested poll in Eddisbury for 13 years, and it turned out to be a close contest between Harry Barnston and the Liberal candidate R J Russell: Barnston won by 8,716 votes to 8,520, a majority of 196. A rematch between Barnston (who by now had been made a baronet) and Russell in 1924 saw a larger Conservative majority, but the Eddisbury seat was not safe. The 1924 election returned the Conservatives to power, and Barnston resumed his previous post as Comptroller of the Household - this time with no by-election required.

Sir Harry Barnston died in February 1929 at the age of 58, leaving no heir to his baronetcy and a tricky succession problem for the Conservatives. The resulting second Eddisbury by-election was held on 20th March 1929 and was widely seen as a warmup for the upcoming general election. The Conservatives selected Roderick Fenwick-Palmer, who was well-known in Cheshire hunting circles and was chairman of the party's Wrexham branch; the Liberals readopted R(ichard) J(ohn) Russell, an alderman of Birkenhead and dental surgeon who had continued to nurse the seat through the previous Parliament. The by-election was a straight fight between them, and R J Russell emerged victorious by 10,223 votes to 8,931, gaining the seat for the Liberals with a majority of 1,292. A rematch between Russell and Fenwick-Palmer at the 1929 general election two months later resulted in a win for Russell by 825 votes.

That proved to the last contested election in Eddisbury for 14 years, because Russell was on the Simonite wing of the Liberal Party which supported the National Government in 1931. He was therefore re-elected unopposed as the Liberal National MP for Eddisbury in both 1931 and 1935. The official Liberals had intended to stand against him at the general election in 1939 or 1940, but the outbreak of the Second World War meant that that election never took place.

R J Russell died in February 1943 at the age of 70. The resulting third Eddisbury by-election of 7th April 1943 did not have an official Liberal candidate owing to the wartime political truce, but it was contested nonetheless. In fact the candidate list was a bit of a mess, characterised as between "a Conservative who called himself a 'Liberal National', a Liberal who wanted to call himself 'the Liberal' but couldn't and the son of a Liberal". The first of these was the defending Liberal National candidate Thomas Peacock CBE, a farmer who was a Cheshire county councillor and a former president of the National Farmers Union. Peacock was known to be a Conservative, and his selection irritated the local Liberal party so much that they nominated their own Independent Liberal candidate: Harold Heathcote-Williams, the father of the poet and actor Heathcote Williams, was a barrister who had already stood for Parliament four times without success (three times in Poplar South, once in Knutsford). Finally the "son of a Liberal" was Warrant Officer John Loverseed, an RAF fighter pilot who had served on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War and then in the Battle of Britain, winning the Air Force Cross; his father, also called John Loverseed, had been the Liberal MP for Sudbury in the 1923-24 Parliament. Loverseed was standing for Common Wealth, a new left-wing party co-founded by the former Liberal MP Sir Richard Acland and the independent MP Vernon Bartlett. In an upset result, Loverseed won the 1943 Eddisbury by-election with a majority of 486 votes over Peacock, becoming Common Wealth's third MP; Eddisbury marked the party's first by-election win. Two others followed, Skipton in 1944 and Chelmsford in 1945.

By 1945 John Loverseed had left Common Wealth and he stood for re-election as a Labour candidate. This was the first time that Labour had stood in Eddisbury, but they were unable to capitalise on Loverseed's popularity. On this occasion the Liberal Nationals selected Sir John Barlow, 2nd Barnonet, who as a Liberal candidate had previously finished third in the three-way photofinish result in Northwich 16 years earlier. The official Liberals did stand against Barlow: they selected Commander Dunstan Curtis DSC, a solicitor who had had an eventful war in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve (including accepting the surrender of Kiel). Curtis had been involved in many of Ian Fleming's more hairbrained schemes during the war, and he is sometimes cited as an inspiration for the character of James Bond. He only narrowly saved his deposit, and Sir John Barlow regained the Eddisbury seat very easily for the Liberal Nationals with a majority of 7,902 votes over Loverseed.

The 1950 boundary changes radically redrew this corner of Cheshire, creating a Runcorn parliamentary seat for the first time. This was before Runcorn was designated as a New Town, and the population of this area was a lot smaller then: the new Runcorn constituency contained not only Runcorn, Frodsham and Helsby but also the part of what is now the borough of Warrington south of the Manchester Ship Canal, including some affluent southern Warrington suburbs and the even more affluent town of Lymm. It proved to be a true blue seat, but not for Sir John Barlow who saw his Eddisbury seat disappear: Barlow tried to seek re-election in Walsall, without success, before resurfacing as the Conservative MP for Middleton and Prestwich.

The Runcorn constituency of 1950-83 was a safe Conservative seat which had just two MPs during its existence. Elected here in 1950 was Dennis Vosper, who served in the Commons for 14 years and was on the Conservative frontbench for nearly all of that time, mostly in junior ministerial roles but with a brief period in Cabinet in 1957: Vosper was appointed as Harold Macmillan's first Minister of Health, but he was forced to resign that role within a year due to illness.

Dennis Vosper retired to the Lords in 1964, taking the title of Lord Runcorn, and he passed his seat on to Mark Carlisle, a barrister who had previously had two unsuccessful Parliamentary campaigns in St Helens. Runcorn proved to be a much safer berth for one of the most high-profile Tory "wets". Carlisle's political career peaked in 1979 when he joined the first Thatcher cabinet as secretary of state for education and science, a role in which he served for two years before being dismissed in 1981. His main political legacy was the Assisted Places Scheme, which aimed to give bright working-class children free or subsidised places at public schools.

Further major Parliamentary boundary changes came in 1983, reflecting three major changes since 1950. Nine years previously, local government reorganisation had transferred Widnes and Warrington into Cheshire; transport links between Widnes and Runcorn had been seriously improved with the opening of the Silver Jubilee Bridge in the 1960s; and the designation of Runcorn as a New Town had led to major population growth. The reorganisation left Widnes somewhat out on a limb, with not enough electors for a parliamentary seat of its own and only two options for getting it up to the right size within the constraint of the new county boundary: either add bits of Warrington to the east, or add bits of Runcorn to the south. Since Widnes and Runcorn were now covered by the same borough (Halton), the latter option was chosen even though this left Runcorn town split between constituencies. The town centre and western Runcorn were placed in the new Halton constituency, while the east of the town was placed in a seat clearly descended from the old Runcorn constituency but with the new name of Warrington South. Meanwhile Frodsham and Helsby were transferred back to a recreated Eddisbury seat.

The new Warrington South was the main successor to the old Runcorn constituency and it was projected to be Conservative-voting, and Mark Carlisle was successfully re-elected there. In 1987 he retired to the Lords (taking the title Lord Carlisle of Bucklow) and passed the seat on to new Conservative candidate Chris Butler, who had lost the Brecon and Radnor by-election to the Liberal Democrats two years previously. On that occasion Bell's majority fell to 3,609 votes over Labour candidate Albert Booth, who had served as employment secretary in the Callaghan government and had lost his seat in Barrow and Furness in 1983. In 1992 Butler in turn lost his seat to Labour candidate Mike Hall, the leader of Warrington council, who won Warrington South by just 191 votes. (Sarah Hall, who now represents the seat of the same name, is Mike's daughter-in-law.)

Meanwhile the recreated Eddisbury seat was held with large majorities throughout the period 1983-97 by the long-serving Conservative MP Alastair Goodlad, who transferred here from the abolished Northwich seat. For nearly all of this period Goodlad was either on the Conservative frontbench or in the Whips office, with his career peaking as Government Chief Whip from 1995 to 1997 - a thankless task at the best of times, but particularly so at the tailend of the Major government as by-election losses whittled its majority down to nothing. Goodlad leaves our story following the 1997 boundary changes, and he left these shores two years after that to become the UK's high commissioner to Australia; he now sits in the Lords as Lord Goodlad.

By contrast, the Halton constituency of 1983-2024 was a very safe Labour seat throughout its existence. Runcorn's first Labour MP was Gordon Oakes, a solicitor who had represented the predecessor Widnes seat since a 1971 by-election; Widnes and then Halton proved to be a much safer berth than Bolton West, which Oakes had previously represented in the 1966-70 Parliament.

Oakes retired in 1997 and passed the Halton seat on to Labour MP Derek Twigg, who had started his political career by being elected to Cheshire county council in 1981 at the age of 21; he came to Parliament from a long career in the civil service. Twigg won seven terms of office as MP for Halton, and he is still in Parliament today as the Labour MP for Widnes and Halewood: he is one of 13 remaining MPs from the large Labour 1997 intake.

The Halton seat was left more or less intact by the 1997 boundary changes, but further population growth in Warrington had forced the creation of a new constituency in Cheshire for the 1997 general election. This seat took in the eastern part of Runcorn New Town in the north, Frodsham and Helsby to the west, and Northwich to the east. It was called Weaver Vale, and at its first election in 1997 it returned the outgoing Warrington South Labour MP Mike Hall with a large majority of 13,448 votes.

Hall won two more terms of office here before retiring in 2010, at which point Weaver Vale was gained by the Conservatives. The new Conservative MP Graham Evans, who had been selected by an open primary, had previously served for ten years on Macclesfield council and he came to politics from a career in manufacturing. He is now in the Lords as Lord Evans of Rainow, having received a life peerage in Boris Johnson's 2022 resignation honours, and he was a Lords whip until the Conservatives lost power last year. Evans' two terms in the Commons both came from close election results, with a Conservative majority of 991 votes in 2010 falling to 806 votes in 2015.

In 2017, Graham Evans was one of the Conservatives who unexpectedly lost their seats as Theresa May's election campaign imploded. The beneficiary of this was Labour candidate Mike Amesbury, a former careers advisor and Labour Party adviser who had previously served on Manchester city council for eleven years, including four years in the council's cabinet with the culture and leisure portfolio. He defeated Evans by 3,928 votes in 2017, and was re-elected for a second term in 2019 with a majority of 562 votes.

The modern Runcorn and Helsby constituency was created in 2024 after a number of false starts for the Boundary Commission's sixth periodic review. Their first attempt at this review, which was kaiboshed by bickering within the Coalition government, attempted to get around issues caused by new rules on electorate tolerance and an extremely unhelpful ward map in Cheshire by creating a constituency which contained Frodsham, Helsby, Ellesmere Port, Bromborough, Bebington - and Hale and Ditton on the north side of the Mersey estuary, with no way of reaching the rest of the seat that didn't involve a long detour via the Silver Jubilee Bridge.

This abomination (number 42 on the map) was given the name "Mersey Banks", and I still remember attending the public hearing in Manchester where representatives of all parties and none queued up to tell the Assistant Commissioner in no uncertain terms that this was a batshit crazy idea. It took some time for the Parliamentary Boundary Commission for England to regain its reputation for basic competence after this episode.

Anyway, the Runcorn and Helsby constituency we have ended up is a fairly coherent unit. It's the main successor to the old Weaver Vale seat represented by Mike Amesbury, it was projected to be safe Labour in 2019, and Amesbury got the Labour selection for the new seat. He was elected in July 2024 for his third term of office with 53% of the vote in the new seat, against 18% for Reform UK and 16% for the Conservatives. In integer terms, that's a majority of 14,696 votes.

For once, we have a parliamentary seat which matches up with ward boundaries, which makes reading across from local elections fairly easy. The whole seat last had local elections in May 2023 (above), when Labour polled 47% against 25% for the Conservatives (who narrowly carried the Cheshire West and Chester section of the seat) and 14% for the Greens. The four CWAC wards returned 3 Conservative councillors, 2 Labour (in Frodsham) and 1 Green (in Helsby); of the Runcorn wards, Beechwood and Heath votes Lib Dem in local elections and Labour won everything else in 2023 and 2024 very easily, with only Daresbury, Moore and Sandymoor ward (which has returned Conservative and Green councillors in recent years) having a Labour vote below 50%. In May 2024 only Runcorn was up for election, and its wards voted 60% for Labour and 19% for the Lib Dems.

With Mike Amesbury resigning from the Commons to spend more time with his parole officer, we have the first Parliamentary by-election of this Labour government. It is defended for Labour by Karen Shore, who is the deputy leader of Cheshire West and Chester council: she represents Central and Grange ward in Ellesmere Port.

Reform UK were second here in 2024, and they have selected Sarah Pochin who has previous local government experience. Pochin was elected to Cheshire East council in 2019 as a Conservative councillor for the rural Bunbury ward in the south of the county; her eventful four years on the council saw her first being thrown out of the Conservative group in 2020 following a falling-out, and then being thrown out of the council's independent group for rejoining the Conservative Party to vote in the 2022 leadership election. Previously Pochin had been the Conservatives' parliamentary candidate for your columnist's then seat of Bolton South East in the 2017 general election, but I must confess that I remember nothing about her from that campaign.

Standing for the Conservatives is Sean Houlston, who stood in July 2024 as their parliamentary candidate for Widnes and Halewood on the far side of the river. He is described as a senior executive from the National Federation of Builders.

Two other parties saved their deposit in Runcorn and Helsby in 2024. Chris Copeman of the Greens had 6.4% here last time and he is back for another go: he is the Greens' local councillor in the seat, representing Helsby ward on Cheshire West and Chester council since 2023. Defending fifth place on 5.1% are the Liberal Democrats, whose candidate Paul Duffy stood last year for Cheshire police and crime commissioner. There were two other candidates in 2024 who lost their respective deposits, and both of them are trying again: they are Dan Clarke of the continuing Liberal Party and Paul Murphy for the continuing SDP.

Parliamentary by-elections often attract a large field and this ballot paper has a total of fifteen candidates on it. Catherine Blaiklock, a former UKIP figure who was the first leader of the Brexit Party, now has the nomination of the English Democrats. The Gallowayite Workers Party of Britain have selected Peter Ford, a former diplomat who served as the UK ambassador to Bahrain and then Syria between 1999 and 2006. Howling Laud Hope, the leader of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, is back for his umpteenth by-election. The highly pro-EU group Volt UK have nominated Jason Hughes, a barrister specialising in family law who previously stood for Parliament in 2010 as the Labour candidate for North Wiltshire. Independent candidate Alan McKie is a long-serving former Conservative councillor, who has represented Helsby on both Cheshire West and Chester council and its predecessor Vale Royal council. Graham Moore is the leader of the English Constitution Party and he has stood for Parliament a few times before, most recently taking on the Speaker in Chorley last year. John Stevens, who many years ago was a Conservative MEP in the south of England, is standing for Rejoin EU whose policy platform is left as an exercise for the reader; he is unlikely to be helped by having "(address in Belgium)" next to his name on the ballot paper. And last alphabetically is independent candidate Michael Williams, a financial manager who lives in the Helsby area.

Two opinion polls of this by-election campaign have been attempted. Constituency polling in the UK has a poor record, and these polls would appear to show some good reasons why this has been the case. Lord Ashcroft was in the field in early March with topline figures of 40% for Reform UK's Sarah Pochin and 35% for Labour's Karen Shore. This poll has been heavily criticised by Britain Elects' Ben Walker for severely undersampling the Cheshire West and Chester wards in the constituency, where Walker's Britain Predicts model has Reform UK doing less well. Walker has attempted to reweight the Ashcroft poll and found a Reform UK lead of two points across the constituency, but in truth the number of respondents from Frodsham, Helsby and the other two CWAC wards was so low that the Ashcroft poll is probably best treated as a poll of Runcorn only rather than the constituency as a whole. A second poll from FindOutNow with fieldwork from 12th to 14th March had Reform UK leading Labour 36-33, but with only 147 respondents the error bars on those figures are large. And there has been plenty of time since the first half of March for the final result to change from those figures in any direction.

Now, it's not necessarily true that the first by-election of a Parliament sets the tone for the rest of the term. In 2021 the Conservative government gained Hartlepool from Labour, and they went on to get thumped in the general election three years later. But, as this column has spent a decade and a half proving, there is no such thing as an uninteresting by-election: and the Runcorn and Helsby result promises to be of much interest when the declaration comes in the early hours of Friday morning. Helsby has already seen the first by-election win for a new insurgent political party, with Common Wealth's win in the 1943 Eddisbury by-election, and if the polling turns out to be predictive history could well repeat itself here. So settle down to follow the count in Runcorn with two pints of lager and a packet of crisps, and see if you can guess which candidate on the podium will end up grinning like the Cheshire Cat.

All pictures in this Preview by the author except the Daresbury village sign, which is by Elliott Brown on Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0

Halton wards: Beechwood and Heath; Bridgewater; Daresbury, Moore and Sandymoor; Grange; Halton Castle; Halton Lea; Mersey and Weston; Norton North; Norton South and Preston Brook
Cheshire West and Chester wards: Frodsham, Gowy Rural, Helsby, Sandstone
ONS Travel to Work Area: Warrington and Wigan (most), Chester (Gowy Rural and Sandstone wards)
Postcode districts: CH1, CH2, CH3, CH65, CH66, CW6, WA4, WA6, WA7

Catherine Blaiklock (EDP)
Dan Clarke (Lib)
Chris Copeman (Grn)
Paul Duffy (LD)
Peter Ford (Workers)
Howling Laud Hope (Loony)
Sean Houlston (C)
Jason Hughes (Volt UK)
Alan McKie (Ind)
Graham Moore (English Constitution Party)
Paul Murphy (SDP)
Sarah Pochin (RUK)
Karen Shore (Lab)
John Stevens (Rejoin EU)
Michael Williams (Ind)

July 2024 result Lab 22358 RUK 7662 C 6756 Grn 2715 LD 2149 Lib 479 SDP 116

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Andrew Teale