The 1970 Bridgwater by-election: young voters and ‘Phoney Waugh’

For a brief period in early 1970, the eyes of political Britain were focussed on Bridgwater. The 12 March parliamentary by-election was the first ever election where 18-20 year-olds could vote.

A broad package of social reform in the late 1960s included proposals to lower the general age of majority to 18. In July 1968 the Labour Government decided to lower the minimum voting age from 21 to 18 – despite a recent cross-party Speaker’s Conference recommending it only be lowered to 20 – citing the growing maturity of young people, and consistency with the proposed age of majority.

This was enacted by the Representation of the People Act 1969, and came into in force with the new electoral registers in mid-February 1970, just in time for the upcoming Bridgwater by-election, caused by the death of the Tory MP, Sir Gerald Wills. Wills had already announced that he would not stand again, and Tom King had been selected as the Tory candidate in 1968.

National and international media coverage of the campaign, focussed on the novelty of the new young voters. Locally, the Bridgwater Mercury’s main story on 24 February, “18-plus by-election will make history: eyes of the world are on Bridgwater constituency,” reported that the parties were determined to treat the new voters just like any others, quoting Tom King saying that they were “fully qualified members of the electorate”, though it added that, “as the youngest candidate in the field he is confident of appealing to youth.” Both the Labour and Liberal agents expressed similar sentiments. On 3 March, its main story reported that “Guinea-pig voters have misgivings: sizeable section undecided as to which party to support,” and included interviews with a number of the newly-enfranchised youngsters.

The poll on 12 March produced a convincing win for Tom King, who greatly increased the Conservative majority. There was much media discussion of a ‘race’ by young voters to be the first to cast their ballot, and even claims by the Labour agent that a few under-18s had been able to cast a vote illegally.

In his maiden speech on 15 April, King acknowledged the historic nature of the by-election, both because of the new voting age and the seat’s notorious history of electoral corruption:

“Against the background of the considerable publicity that my by-election, as the first vote for the 18-year-olds, attracted, particularly certain references to the history of the constituency, I should like to reassure you … that my expenses were entirely in line with the schedule laid down by Parliament and bore no comparison with those of some of my predecessors in the seat…”

An interesting postscript arose in 2015, when Tom King, by then a member of the House of Lords, opposed attempts to lower the voting age to 16 for the proposed EU referendum, highly topical because the Scottish Government lowered it to 16 for the 2014 Independence referendum. Lord King had already voted against such an amendment for English local elections in July 2015, and when the issue arose again in the EU referendum Bill later that year, he not only voted against it, but said on 14 December:

“I have a certain conceit over this matter, as I was the first Member of Parliament ever elected by 18 year-olds following the exact Act to which the noble Lord has referred. Is that not the model that we should follow? If we are going to change the voting age, it should be comprehensively considered as a separate matter.”

Perhaps a current or future Somerset MP will pilot legislation to achieve votes for 16 and 17 year-olds.

For a while in early 1970, before the campaign proper really began, it looked as if the 1970 Bridgwater by-election might be further enlivened by the addition of an independent maverick candidacy, when the journalist Auberon Waugh announced he would enter the fray to protest at the Government’s policy over the Nigeria/Biafra civil war and, citing Bridgwater’s rather colourful electoral history, to support more independent-minded MPs and voting in Parliament.

The Waughs had close local Somerset connections. His father, the famous novelist, Evelyn Waugh, lived in a splendid house at Combe Florey, which Auberon later described as “a beautiful house set in beautiful countryside”, and the younger Waugh moved there after his father’s death.

He had been enticed into this electoral foray by the Political Freedom Movement, a right-wing fringe group founded by Air Vice Marshal Donald Bennett, who had been a Liberal MP for a couple of months in 1945, before losing in the July general election. Its secretary, Anthony Kerr – a former Millfield teacher – had introduced Waugh to the PFM, and its principles of political reform such as free votes in Parliament, reduction of Prime Ministerial patronage and electoral reform, principles which Waugh was quoted as describing as “wholly innocuous and the sort of parliamentary reform that I think is needed.”

Kerr had written to Waugh about the PFM and had invited him to stand as an Independent candidate on the Biafra War issue. In his Spectator column on 31 January, Waugh explained why he had accepted: “Having bored the patient readers of Spectator on this subject for eighteen months, what else could one honourably do? But a simple meeting with Mr Kerr clinched the matter. Nobody could have resisted the moustache, even if he was prepared to harden his heart to the devil-may- care optimism.”

In his autobiography, Will This Do?, he relegates his by-election intervention to a single paragraph, describing his meetings as being “attended only by a handful of old people with nothing better to do….” Fortunately, he was more detailed about these meetings in his 31 January Spectator column:

“The first meeting of the campaign, at Bridgwater town hall, attracted an audience of fifteen. Three of these were my own retinue, four were representatives of the press, and there was one old man who fell asleep at a very early stage of the proceedings…. [W]e moved to Burnham-on-Sea, where the town hall was packed with lively, idealistic-looking young people. I counted nearly eighty. Unfortunately, they proved to be members of the Burnham-on-Sea amateur operatic society. My meeting was to be held at the Clarence Hotel, where only nine people were assembled. Two of these were from the press, three were later revealed as young Conservatives out for a lark.”

After a few meetings around the constituency, he announced his ‘withdrawal’ in a letter to the Times on 20 January, and urged his supporters to vote for the Liberal candidate. By then, he was unhappy being supported by the PFM, which he later described as “a strange group”, and he had also recognised that the imminent defeat of the Biafran rebels meant that, as the ‘Save Biafra’ candidate, he found himself “rather left without a platform.”

So Waugh was never formally a candidate at the by-election, and it is tempting to regard the episode as a media stunt by a known hubristic writer. That he repeated this election tactic during the far more notorious Jeremy Thorpe affair in the late 1970s, by standing against him in North Devon at the 1979 general election, on behalf of the Dog Lovers Party, suggests that may be the case.