The Chesterton by-election, 1917 was a parliamentary by-election held on 27 July 1917 for the House of Commons constituency of Chesterton also known as the Western Division of Cambridgeshire.
By-elections, also spelled bye-elections, are used to fill elected offices that have become vacant between general elections.
The House of Commons is the lower house of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Like the upper house, the House of Lords, it meets in the Palace of Westminster. Officially, the full name of the house is the Honourable the Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in Parliament assembled. Owing to shortage of space, its office accommodation extends into Portcullis House.
Chesterton is a former United Kingdom Parliamentary constituency. It was created upon the splitting up of the three member Cambridgeshire constituency into three single member divisions in 1885. The seat was abolished in 1918 when Cambridgeshire was recreated as a single-member constituency.
The by-election was caused by the appointment of the sitting Liberal MP, the Rt. Hon. Edwin Montagu as Secretary of State for India. [1] Under the Parliamentary rules of the day had to resign and fight a by-election.
The Liberal Party was one of the two major parties in the United Kingdom with the opposing Conservative Party in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The party arose from an alliance of Whigs and free trade Peelites and Radicals favourable to the ideals of the American and French Revolutions in the 1850s. By the end of the 19th century, it had formed four governments under William Gladstone. Despite being divided over the issue of Irish Home Rule, the party returned to government in 1905 and then won a landslide victory in the following year's general election.
His Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for India, known for short as the India Secretary or the Indian Secretary, was the British Cabinet minister and the political head of the India Office responsible for the governance of the British Indian Empire, Aden, and Burma. The post was created in 1858 when the East India Company's rule in Bengal ended and India, except for the Princely States, was brought under the direct administration of the government in Whitehall in London, beginning the official colonial period under the British Empire.
Montagu was re-selected to fight the seat by his local Liberal Association and as the wartime truce between the political parties was in operation no opposing candidate was nominated against him.
There being no other candidates putting themselves forward Montagu was returned unopposed. [2]
Party | Candidate | Votes | % | ± | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Liberal | Edwin Samuel Montagu | Unopposed | N/A | N/A | |
Liberal hold | Swing | N/A | |||
Edwin Samuel Montagu PC was a British Liberal politician who served as Secretary of State for India between 1917 and 1922. Montagu was a "radical" Liberal and the third practising Jew to serve in the British cabinet.
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UK by-election records is an annotated list of notable records from UK Parliamentary by-elections. A by-election occurs when a Member of Parliament resigns, dies, or is disqualified or expelled, and an election is held to fill the vacant seat. A constituency is the seat or division that member represented.