Previewing the Haverfordwest: Prendergast, Pembrokeshire by-election of Tuesday 11th February 2025
"All the right votes, but not necessarily in the right order"
One by-election on Tuesday 11th February 2025:
Haverfordwest: Prendergast
Pembrokeshire council, West Wales; caused by the resignation of Conservative councillor Andrew Edwards.
Yes, it's a Tuesday. So why not have a by-election? The convention is that by-elections in the UK are held on Thursdays, but any day that's not a Saturday, Sunday or public holiday will do. And the returning officer for Pembrokeshire, who organised a Tuesday by-election last year, is well aware of this.
Naturally enough, the returning officer is based out of Pembrokeshire's county town. Lying at the traditional lowest crossing-point of the Western Cleddau, Haverfordwest is still Pembrokeshire's largest town and it is the effective capital of the Little England Beyond Wales. The town returns five Pembrokeshire county councillors, and Prendergast ward covers its north-eastern suburbs on the east side of the Western Cleddau along the main roads towards Fishguard and Cardigan. Those roads were once turnpiked, and the tollgate on the Fishguard road was destroyed in 1844 during the Rebecca riots. Within this ward can be found the Withybush Hospital, which is the main general hospital for Pembrokeshire; the Pembrokeshire Archives; and the Bridge Meadow Stadium, home of Haverfordwest County AFC who are currently lying third in the Cymru Premier. Haverfordwest County played in qualifying for the UEFA Conference League in 2023-24, being knocked out in the second qualifying round by the Faroese side B36 Tórshavn. Haverfordwest hosted the National Eisteddfod in 1972, and the Gorsedd stone circle within this ward was erected for that occasion.
The Withybush Hospital will be Prendergast ward's largest employer, and its influence can be seen in the fact that the 2021 census placed Prendergast within the top 30 wards in England and Wales for residents employed in health and social care (26.2%). Prendergast also just made the top 100 for part-time employment (16.7%).
Haverfordwest was an ancient borough which returned one MP to Parliament from the 1540s, when Henry VIII gave Wales the right to elect MPs. For centuries it was a pocket borough controlled by the Philipps family of Picton Castle, and the list of MPs for Haverfordwest tends to feature alternating Philippses and Edwardeses even after the 1832 Reform Act had expanded its electorate by turning the seat into the Haverfordwest District of Boroughs, which also took in the disconnected towns of Fishguard and Narberth together with part of the modern Prendergast ward. The Edwardeses ended up with the title of Lord Kensington in the peerage of Ireland, and William Edwardes, the 4th Lord Kensington, was the last MP for the Haverfordwest Boroughs from 1868 to 1885.
That Lord Kensington was a Liberal who served as chief whip in the 1880-85 Gladstone government, but his time in the Commons was interrupted by legal action arising out of the 1874 general election. In that election Kensington had been returned unopposed after the returning officer for the Haverfordwest Boroughs, William Harding, refused to accept Thomas Davies as a second candidate in the election when Davies declined to pay a £40 deposit toward the cost of a poll. Candidates were expected to pay the expenses of polling in those days. Davies petitioned to the Election Court, which referred the matter up to the Court of Common Pleas for a decision on the law: Lord Coleridge, the last Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, ruled that Harding had acted unlawfully in rejecting Davies' nomination and that Kensington's election was void. Ironically, Davies did not stand in the resulting 1874 Haverfordwest Boroughs by-election and Lord Kensington was again returned to the Commons unopposed - legally, this time.
The 1885 redistribution merged the Haverfordwest Boroughs into an even more disconnected constituency called the Pembroke and Haverfordwest District of Boroughs, which brought together seven towns in Pembrokeshire. Here we see another member of the Philipps family, Owen Philipps, serving as a Liberal MP from 1906 to December 1910. Owen Philipps previously appeared in this column in the Parliamentary Special for the City of Chester by-election in 2021 (Andrew's Previews 2021, page 545), as he went on to be a Conservative MP for that seat from 1916 to 1922 and ended up in the Lords as the first Lord Kylsant. He was a businessman who controlled the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, which went on an aggressive growth spurt in the 1920s and became the world's largest shipping line when it took over White Star in 1927.
But this business empire was built on sand. The Royal Mail line had been loss-making since 1926, and it had covered this up by opaque accounting while continuing to pay dividends. The word for this is, of course, fraud. Matters eventually came to a head in 1929, when the company's reserves were exhausted and its directors were forced to ask for repayments on a government loan to be renegotiated. A Treasury-ordered audit revealed the truth, the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company went into liquidation owing £10 million to its creditors (at 1929 prices), and Lord Kylsant ended up spending ten months in Wormwood Scrubs.
Haverfordwest was finally disenfranchised in 1918 when Pembrokeshire was reduced to one MP. Since 1983 the county's population has been in the annoying range of too big for one MP but not big enough for two, which has led to bits of the county being chopped off and combined with either Carmarthenshire or Ceredigion to form other constituencies. At both Westminster and Senedd levels Haverfordwest is within the constituency wholly based on Pembrokeshire, but those seats are rather different. The Westminster seat, newly drawn for last year's general election, is Mid and South Pembrokeshire where the former Welsh secretary Stephen Crabb went down to defeat in 2024, Labour MP Henry Tufnell, a barrister from a Gloucestershire landowning family, won the seat by a majority of 1,878 votes.
The Senedd still uses the previous constituency map which placed Haverfordwest within the Preseli Pembrokeshire constituency based on the north of the county: this has been represented in Cardiff Bay since 2007 by Conservative MS Paul Davies, who served as leader of the Welsh Conservatives from 2018 to 2021 when he resigned over a possible COVID rules breach. Davies is currently the chief whip for the Conservative group in the Senedd. Electoral reform is coming to the Welsh Parliament for its next election in 2026, and the draft map for the new arrangements combines Pembrokeshire with Ceredigion into a single constituency which would return six MSs by proportional representation.
The last Senedd also legislated for local councils to change their electoral arrangements to proportional representation if they so wished, and three rural county councils seriously considered doing that. In all three cases the balance of the public consultation was in favour, but Ceredigion and Powys councils ended up rejecting the proposal; in Gwynedd most of the councillors voted in favour of electoral reform, but the change to PR was one vote short of the two-thirds majority required to agree it.
Scotland went over to PR in local government in 2007, and the Scottish experience shows that this change would be a major improvement to local democracy in places like Pembrokeshire by effectively getting rid of uncontested elections. Party politics is just background noise when it comes to Pembrokeshire county council, which is in the hands of rural independent councillors and where contested elections can be seen as bad form. In the 2022 Pembrokeshire elections 25 out of the 60 county councillors were elected unopposed, meaning that nearly half of the county's electorate had no say at all in their local representation. Perhaps the local politicians need reminding that this isn't 1874, that the present returning officer for Pembrokeshire is a professional who knows who to run an election properly, and that candidates don't have to pay for the cost of a poll out of their own pocket any longer.
Haverfordwest: Prendergast ward used to be like that, with an independent councillor returned here unopposed in 2008 and 2012. He retired in 2017 when the ward was gained by Labour, before voting Conservative in 2022: Andrew Edwards defeated Labour that year in a straight fight by 59-41. Edwards, who works as a hairdresser and is the licensee for a pub and restaurant in Swansea, went on to hit the headlines in 2023 for all the wrong reasons after an audio recording was published of him saying that white men should have black slaves. He quit the Conservative group and sat as an independent councillor, before eventually submitting his resignation from Pembrokeshire council at the end of 2024.
The Conservatives will want their seat back in the resulting by-election, which is being defended by Mike Mathias. He is up against Labour candidate Alison Tudor, who previously represented this ward on the county council from 2017 to 2022 when she stood down; her husband Thomas is a long-serving councillor for Haverfordwest: Castle ward. (Pembrokeshire is of only two UK councils - the other being Flintshire - which use colons in their ward names.) We will not have a straight fight this time, as also on the ballot are Kaleb Jenkins for the Lib Dems, James Purchase for the Greens, Scott Thorley for Reform UK and independent candidate Alun Wills.
Westminster constituency: Mid and South Pembrokeshire
Senedd constituency: Preseli Pembrokeshire
ONS Travel to Work Area: Haverfordwest and Milford Haven
Postcode districts: SA61, SA62
Kaleb Jenkins (LD)
Mike Mathias (C)
James Purchase (Grn)
Scott Thorley (RUK)
Alison Tudor (Lab)
Alun Wills (Ind)
May 2022 result C 391 Lab 276
Previous results in detail
If you enjoyed these previews, there are many more like them - going back to 2016 - in the Andrew's Previews books, which are available to buy now (link). You can also support future previews by donating to the Local Elections Archive Project (link).
Andrew Teale