The Liberal History Group’s committee had an extended debate via email a few months ago over the number of days for which Lloyd George was an MP. We’d set this as a quiz question before discovering that we didn’t all agree on the answer. Leap years weren’t the problem. It was the question of when do you start becoming an MP: on declaration of the result or on taking your seat?
But here’s a tougher one. For how many days was Joseph Ormond Andrews (1872-1909) an MP? Andrews won a by-election at Barkston Ash in October 1905, gaining the seat from the Tories. Parliament was not sitting at the time and he never got round to taking his seat in Parliament. At the 1906 general election, the Conservatives regained Barkston Ash from Andrews, one of the few Unionist gains at that Liberal landslide election. Is the answer to this one “zero”?
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5 Comments
The tragedy of Joseph Ormond Andrews Liberal M.P. Barston Ash, from October 1905, was not that he was unable to take his Seat but that he tragically died at 36 years.
He lost his Seat due to the Tories winning this back, as one of only a handful,in the `Liberal Landslide’ in 1906 ( 407 Liberal M.P.s).
Mr Andrews died so prematurely, from a appendicitis operation, at the age of 36 years, leaving a widow and two children.
Mr Andrews was unable to live to see the great reforming years of `New Liberalism’ and Lloyd-George and the `Constitutional Reforms’ of 1910, over the `Peoples Budget’.
Surely the date to go on is the completion date on the purchase of his second home 🙂
You are not an MP until you take the oath in the Commons. Bernadette Devlin is a case to look at. She won her seat at the tender age of 21, but didn’t actually swear in until she was 22. I believe she is still the youngest ever female MP at 22. The youngest male being William Wilberforce at 21 (and 4 months younger than Pitt the younger when he took his seat).
Anseo: it’s the question of whether the oath that’s the right dividing line that’s at the heart of the matter.
In terms of age, candidates who were technically too young used to be elected relatively frequently. In 1802-31 there were thirteen occasions when someone under twenty-one was elected.
Earlier than that, Charles James Fox made his name with a speech in Parliament about Wilkes when he would also not yet have reached his 21st birthday.
I think Anseo is onto something in this sense: taking the oath is the standard by which the title of Father of the House (the longest serving MP) is awarded. So if Sir Bufton-Tufton MP and Albert Unionist MP were both elected in, say, the 1960 general election and no other MPs have sat continuously in the House for longer they would not jointly be Father of the House. Rather, the one who had sworn the oath first after the 1960 election would be Father of the House.