Reporting on the news that Nigel Farage is planning to resign his seat to force a by-election, Le Monde described the stunt as a ‘highly unusual move’, the Wall Street Journal called it ‘unconventional’ and the Australian Special Broadcasting Service called it ‘unusual’. 

Now, few of us would call what happened yesterday ‘conventional’. Nonetheless, it may be of help to some parts of the foreign press if we provide a bit of extra context on Farage’s dramatic byelection resignation. While events like this are infrequent, taking the Chiltern Hundreds to make a point still has well-established precedent in British political history.

‘Before the war, the first women to be elected as an MP in Scotland, Katherine Stewart-Murray, resigned her Unionist seat in 1938 in protest of the Conservative government’s appeasement policy towards Nazi Germany.’

‘Before the war, the first women to be elected as an MP in Scotland, Katherine Stewart-Murray, resigned her Unionist seat in 1938 in protest of the Conservative government’s appeasement policy towards Nazi Germany.’

Just ten years ago, in 2016, the Conservative MP Zac Goldsmith resigned his seat in Richmond Park over his government’s proposal for a third runway at Heathrow airport, fulfilling a pledge he made when he had won the seat in 2010 to oppose the extension at any cost. Goldsmith then stood as an independent candidate. The Tories decided not to run a candidate in the election, giving Goldsmith a clear run. He was narrowly beaten by Sarah Olney, the Liberal Democrat candidate, who won a majority of 1,872. Goldsmith was able to take the seat back at the 2017 election with a tiny majority of 45, but Olney retook it in 2019 and has held it ever since. Her majority at the last election was a whopping 17,155, a strong example of how much ground the Tories have lost in pleasant West London suburbs over the past ten years.

The most famous recent example of an MP forcing a by-election to make a point is David Davis. In 2008 he resigned his seat in Haltemprice and Howden and his position in Cameron’s shadow cabinet. He did so following a vote on the Counter-Terrorism........

© The Spectator