Economic and social profile:
Poole, a county of itself situated on a narrow strip of land adjoining one of the world’s largest natural harbours, was an affluent sea port on England’s south coast. The export of provisions to Newfoundland, from which its mercantile elite had long prospered, continued to provide large scale employment, along with related chandlery trades, but a ‘great number of hands’ also became involved in two new iron foundries, manufacturing engines and agricultural machinery. The mining and shipping of local clays to the Staffordshire Potteries, for making porcelain, also thrived, although a venture to extract ‘china clay’ from Branksea island, in the middle of Poole harbour, was unsuccessful.Pigot’s South West and Wales Dir. (1844), 18-20; PP 1831-2 (141) xxxviii. 143-4; 1835 (116) xxiv. 659-62.
Following the opening of the Southampton and Dorchester Railway in 1847 the number of visitors, drawn by the harbour’s scenic beauty, increased steadily, prompting the construction of numerous villas and hotels. The station’s location in Hamworthy, a ferry crossing away from the town centre, however, restricted its commercial uses. Various improvements were proposed, but it was not until 1872 that the town acquired a more accessible terminus at New Poole Junction, from which a branch line to the flourishing resort of Bournemouth, under discussion since 1865, opened two years later.F. Warren, ‘Early Railway Days in Dorset’, Dorset Natural History and Archaeological Society Proceedings lv (1933), 76-85; Bradshaw’s Railway Manual (1869), 272. The town contained a ‘great number of houses belonging to opulent persons’ and the proportion of working-class electors, at 3.3% in 1865, was the second lowest of any English borough.PP 1831-2 (141) xxxviii. 143; 1866 (170) lvii. 57.
Electoral history:
It seems improbable that Poole was the purchasable ‘safe seat’ tentatively identified by Norman Gash in correspondence from 1839 between the Conservative party managers and a ‘local borough-monger’.See N. Gash, Politics in the Age of Peel (1953), 164-5. A fractious borough, in which ‘everyman is a politician’, its pre-1832 elections had been dominated by factional rivalries between its mercantile elite, who dominated the nominally Tory corporation, and William Ponsonby, the local lord of the manor of Canford, who had represented the town as a Whig from 1826-31. His ownership of land into which it was proposed to extend the electoral boundaries in 1832 threatened to upset a fragile truce with his colleague Benjamin Lester Lester, MP since 1809 and a supporter of the reform bill, who headed the Garland dynasty of leading corporators and Newfoundland merchants. Responding to local complaints about the constituency becoming a ‘closed Whig borough’ under Ponsonby’s control, the reform ministry agreed to extend the boundaries westwards, taking in the whole of Hamworthy parish across the harbour, and eastwards into the surrounding tithings of Parkstone and Longfleet.M. Flame, ‘The Politics of Poor Law Administration in the Borough of Poole 1835-c.1845’, Dorset Natural History and Archaeological Society Proceedings cviii (1986), 19-25, at 24; D. Beamish, ‘Parliamentary and Municipal History of the Borough of Poole’, Unpubl. MPhil diss. (Southampton, 1982), 234-5; HP, The Commons 1820-32. The publisher of an 1835 pollbook noted that this had ‘very considerably increased the constituency of the borough and no longer left the representation in the hands of a few individuals’, but complaints about Ponsonby’s influence, particularly by local Conservatives, continued until the sale of his Canford estates in 1846. Poole Borough Poll Book (1835), p. 6. Interestingly, the new owner, the industrialist Josiah John Guest of Dowlais, struggled to establish a similar interest, much to the frustration of his wife, who carped that ‘a great feeling seems to have sprung up against any dictation or nomineeship on the part of the Canford estate’, and after the defeat of their preferred candidate in 1847 declared, ‘These Poole people are wretched politicians, scarcely knowing their own minds, and what is worse, they are also very corrupt ... It is very provoking’.Lady Charolotte Guest. Extracts from her journal 1833-52 (1950), ed. earl of Bessborough, 192-5.
At the 1832 general election Lester stood again as an ‘independent’ Liberal with the support of his cronies on the corporation. His success was never in doubt. A contest instead developed for the second seat, between the treasury-backed Whig sinecurist Sir John Byng, who had replaced Ponsonby following his move to the county in 1831, and his erstwhile rival Charles Tulk, who again came forward with cross-party support. As well as being endorsed by ‘several respectable, consistent reformers’, Tulk enjoyed the backing of disaffected Tory elements on the corporation, including the mayor Robert Slade, who had masterminded Tulk’s vexatious opposition to Byng in 1831. As a contemporary noted,
There was the same strange anomaly as on the former occasion; a gentleman claiming the suffrages of the electors as a decided reformer of municipal corporations, of church and state abuses, whose cause was nevertheless espoused by those who were avowedly hostile to these alterations.
Tulk’s prospects, under these circumstances, were considered poor by those ‘well versed in election matters’.Poole Borough Poll Book (1835), p. 3; Beamish, 243-6. Nevertheless a ‘severe contest’ ensued, in which he was defeated by just 18 votes, amidst allegations of a ‘tyrannical abuse of power’ by Ponsonby’s steward, who apparently instructed his tenants to support Byng or ‘take the consequence’, and claims that in order to ‘secure votes, means were resorted to, which every sober, reflecting mind could not but condemn’. (An analysis by the Morning Chronicle, later used to support a call for the secret ballot by The Examiner, pointed to the ‘striking discrepancy’ between the votes cast within the old boundaries, which gave Tulk 149 votes and Byng 141, and the new areas of the constituency, which gave them 19 and 44 respectively.)Dorset County Chronicle, 6, 13, 20, 27 Dec.; Morning Chron., 19 Dec. 1832; Examiner, 23 Dec. 1832. Commenting on a ‘splendid dinner’ subsequently held for Tulk in the town hall, a local reporter contended that many of his supporters were ‘Tories disguised, fighting under the banner of reform for no other purpose than to possess the power of returning the members’, and predicted that ‘at no very distant day ... his partisans would be exposed, and every man shewn up in his true colours’.Poole Borough Poll Book (1835), p. 4
A reckoning came sooner than expected, when the mayor and his successor George Welch Ledgard, following the king’s dismissal of the Melbourne ministry in November 1834, pressed Tulk to declare his support for the Tory duke of Wellington’s caretaker administration.Unless otherwise indicated, this account of the 1835 election is based on Poole Borough Poll Book (1835), passim. Tulk’s reply, that ‘it was somewhat strange to ask him to shift round and change his sentiments in favour of a man whom every true reformer must look upon as an enemy’, led to what Tulk called a ‘civil kind of dismissal’ by the corporation, who deemed any further connection ‘impossible’, as ‘your former supporters, being principally churchmen, will naturally expect that you should support the ascendancy of the church’. Rumours of a dissolution prompted a public meeting to rally support for Tulk, 2 Dec., and on its confirmation the following week, Lester announced his retirement on the grounds of ill health. Byng immediately offered again and the reformers ‘naturally looked’ to Tulk to contest the second seat, to which, after assurances about being returned ‘free of expense’, he agreed. Two ‘church and king’ Conservatives, John Irving, who had sat for the pocket borough of Bramber as the nominee of the duke of Rutland, 1806-32, and James Bonar, a London merchant, also announced their candidature, stressing the danger posed by Dissenters to the established church. The discovery that Irving’s agents had offered one elector ‘a sum of money’ was milked for all it was worth by local reformers, and at the London Tavern, 26 Dec. 1834, a committee was established to assist voters ‘who might become the victims of oppression in the exercise of their constitutional rights’. An assertion in the Tory Standard that Tulk was ‘supported only by the low tradesmen and mechanics’ was later said to have been ‘so contrary to fact, that it raised in the town a feeling of indignation’ and ‘led the tradesmen ... to assert their independence more decidedly than they otherwise might have done’.
At a crowded but orderly nomination in the town hall, 6 Jan. 1835, Byng explained that he was both a reformer and ‘a decided churchman’, who was convinced that relieving Dissenters from the payment of church rates would strengthen the established church. Irving rejected claims that he sought to exploit religious differences, declared his support for a ‘liberal system’ of free trade, and insisted that he had represented Bramber as an ‘independent man’, adding, ‘Who was my colleague? ... Are there none amongst you, especially the Dissenters, who recollect and venerate the name of Wilberforce?’ Tulk, in response, observed that Irving had conveniently ‘forgot[ten] to say whether he had voted with that venerable man for all his measures’ including ‘the abolition of slavery [hear, hear and much laughter.]’. To ‘great uproar’, he then denounced the ‘desertion’ of his former supporters, insisting that he had always made it clear that he was a ‘thorough reformer’, and charged them with attempting to bribe voters and have him arrested for unpaid election expenses incurred without his consent in 1832. Bonar was proposed in absentia, owing to the death of a brother in Scotland.
By the end of the first day’s poll, which ‘proceeded quietly and orderly’, Byng had secured 330 votes, Tulk 181, Irving 119 and Bonar 46. Half an hour before its resumption next day, Irving’s carriage was spotted ‘driving up rapidly through the High Street, out of the town’, and a few minutes later an official letter arrived at the town hall announcing his ‘unexpected’ withdrawal. Confirmation of Bonar’s retirement followed and Byng and Tulk were duly returned, amidst Tory allegations of intimidation by Dissenting ministers and Ponsonby’s steward, which were firmly rejected by the reformers. A public dinner for the new Members in the town hall was refused by the Tory mayor Slade. ‘It is well for the electors of Poole that municipal reform is near at hand!’, remarked the publisher of one pollbook.Byng received 11 single votes, Tulk nine, Irving 21 and Bonar one. 178 double votes were cast for Byng and Tulk, 41 for Byng and Irving, 12 for Tulk and Irving, and 45 for Irving and Bonar: Poole Borough Poll Book (1835), passim.
Byng’s elevation to the peerage in May 1835 created a vacancy, for which it was rumoured that the new home secretary Lord John Russell, seatless after a ministerial by-election, would offer. Following his accommodation elsewhere, however, Byng’s eldest son George Stevens Byng, a minor Whig officeholder who had been ousted from the treasury borough of Chatham at the general election, came forward, stating his support for municipal reform and the appropriation of surplus Irish church revenues. The reformers hoped that he might be returned unopposed, but Sir Colquhoun Grant of Frampton, near Dorchester, Tory Member for Queenborough 1831-2, agreed to stand at the behest of Slade, allegedly on ‘Liberal-Conservative principles’. The elopement of his only surviving child Marcia Maria with Richard Brinsley Sheridan, later a Liberal Member, however, forced his absence from the election, at which a kinsman James Grant deputised. After a two-day poll, in which there was ‘every reason to believe money has been flying pretty smartly’, Byng was returned 25 votes ahead of Grant, who accused Sheridan and his ‘clan’ of deliberately conspiring against him.Morning Chron., 11, 15, 21, 23 May 1835; Examiner, 24 May 1835; HP Commons, 1820-32.
At the 1837 general election Byng quit Poole and headed back to Chatham, a much safer berth since the resumption of the Melbourne ministry. Tulk also retired, apparently without explanation, but possibly in order to assist the candidature of Ponsonby’s eldest son Charles Frederick Ashley Cooper Ponsonby, who had come of age the previous year. George Richard Philips, a veteran wealthy Whig who had abandoned Kidderminster, also entered the field and was joined by two Conservative baronets, Sir John Benn Walsh, late Member for Sudbury, 1830-5, and Sir Henry Pollard Willoughby, Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme, 1832-5. It was widely reported that the Conservatives would decline a poll, but in the event a tight contest ensued, in which the reformers allegedly resorted to ‘intimidation of every kind’ in order to secure their return. The Tory press protested that ‘the friends of the Conservative cause, who were trying to protect their friends, were hunted like wild beasts into their houses; and some electors by force, some by drink, and finally by large offers of money, were induced to break their promises’. Those who refused, they asserted, ‘were carried away 30 miles into the country’ by hired mobs.Manchester Times, 1 July 1837; Jackson’s Oxford Jnl., 29 July 1837. A petition in these terms prepared by Slade, charging the Liberals with ‘scandalous acts of bribery’ and the ‘most flagrant and notorious acts of intimidation’, including the wholesale kidnapping of Tory voters, was presented to the Commons, 1 Dec. 1837, but allowed to lapse, 22 Mar. 1838.CJ, xciii. 85-7; 382.
No direct evidence has been discovered to support the petition’s claims, but it is suggestive that in the borough’s new local elections - to the poor law board of guardians and reformed municipal council - the Conservatives consistently outpolled the Liberals. Control of these institutions could confer significant political dividends - not least in terms of administering the rate payments required for the parliamentary franchiseFor further details see P. Salmon, Electoral Reform at Work: Local politics and national parties, 1832-41 (2002), 185-209. - and the Liberals lost no time in trying to frustrate their opponents with legal challenges. Their campaigns met with mixed success. Protests about Tory overseers refusing to give the Liberals ‘a copy of the rate in time for the purpose of registration’, along with other ‘roguery’, eventually resulted in a ‘celebrated court case’ and the imposition of a ‘Liberal’ rate-collector by the poor law commission in 1838. Allegations that he, in turn, repeatedly ‘delayed collecting the rate at the instigation of his friends for political purposes’ and misappropriated union funds to assist Liberal voters in arrears, however, led to his dismissal in February 1841. Meanwhile, a bill annulling the results of the 1835 council election, which was said to have produced ‘a state of party hostility unparalleled in its rancour’, after a petition and parliamentary inquiry into allegations of election fraud, foundered in the Tory-dominated Lords, 3 Aug. 1836, and was followed by further Conservative municipal successes.Flame, 20-24; J. Sydenham, History of the town and county of Poole (1839), 233-4; CJ, xci. 48. For details of the inquiry, which includes an 1835 municipal poll book, see PP 1836 (128) xxi. 307-563.
At the 1841 general election the sitting Members offered again. Challenged by George Pitt Rose, the son of a wealthy Tory sinecurist who had sat on the family interest for Christchurch, 1826-32, another close contest ensued, which this time the Conservatives lost by a mere ten votes.Ponsonby received five single votes, Philips two and Rose 165. 204 double votes were cast for Ponsonby and Philips, 23 for Ponsonby and Rose and four for Philips and Rose: Poole Borough Poll Book (1841), passim. Advising Peel, the new premier, of the ‘great expense’ of his defeat, Rose indicated his willingness to ‘incur a further outlay by petitioning against the return of Mr. Philips’. A petition in similar terms to that of 1837 was evidently prepared, but following advice from Lord Lyndhurst, Peel’s new lord chancellor, abandoned before presentation to the Commons, presumably because neither side had run an entirely blameless campaign.Add. 40486, f. 190; 40487, f. 130.
The Conservative breakthrough finally occurred at the 1847 general election, when Ponsonby, whose father (by now Lord de Mauley) had sold the Canford estates for £335,000 the previous year, quit Poole to contest Youghal. Philips offered again and was joined by two other Liberals. Edward John Hutchins of Dowlais came forward as the nominee of his uncle Josiah John Guest, the new owner of Canford manor, whilst the barrister Marcus Merryweather Turner of Woodcote Lodge, Surrey, started as an ‘independent’ Liberal and opponent of the system of ‘nomineeship’, against which Lady Charlotte Guest reported ‘a great cry has been raised’. Sensing an opportunity, the Peelite Conservative and former MP for Worcester George Richard Robinson, who was closely connected with the Garlands through marriage and business partnerships, also declared. The expected three-way split of the Liberal vote, however, was not as decisive as predicted in the ensuing contest, in which just over a quarter (110) of the 420 participants gave Robinson plumpers. Along with the votes he shared with Philips (50), Hutchins (37) and Turner (43), this placed him at the head of the poll. Philips, who secured only eight plumpers but shared 159 votes with Hutchins and three with Turner, was returned in second place. Reporting how the ‘Conservatives have obtained a footing for the first time since the reform bill’, the Liberal press blamed corrupt practices. Rumours of a petition by Lady Charlotte, who was advised that there had been ‘bribery both on the part of Robinson and of Philips’, however, came to nothing.Lady Charlotte Guest, 188, 192, 195, 289; Examiner, 17 July 1847; Morning Chron. 3 Aug. 1847; Hants. Telegraph, 4 Mar. 1848; Poole pollbook (1847), passim.
Robinson’s death in 1850 created an unexpected vacancy, for which ‘no less than five candidates’ declared, much ‘to the astonishment of the inhabitants’.Morning Chron. 14 Sept. 1850. First in the field was Henry Danby Seymour of Knoyle House, near Shaftesbury, who offered as a free trader and ‘supporter of reform principles’ with the tacit blessing of the Guests, who now adopted a low profile. (Lady Charolotte noted privately that it was ‘better my husband should not go to the hustings, both as being more dignified for himself and also because his presence might have provoked some cry of nomineeship’.)Lady Charlotte Guest, 246. John Savage of St. Leonards, West Malling, Kent also started with the backing of Slade, Ledgard and other local Tories, citing his support for the Conservatives’ attempts to revive agricultural Protection. He was joined by Montague Turner, a local Liberal convert to Protectionism, James Adam Gordon of Huntly, Aberdeenshire, who had ‘lately fallen into possession of very large pecuniary resources’, and Captain Childers of St. Saviour’s, Jersey, an Indian army officer and opponent of reform and free trade, who was derided as ‘an out-and-out advocate of antiquated doctrines’ by the Liberal press. A number of ‘other gentlemen’, including Sir Charles Napier, late Member for Marylebone, were also spoken of, but on finding the field so ‘occupied’ did not stand. In the event, however, the latter three candidates withdrew - Gordon just two days before the nomination - leaving the contest between Seymour and Savage.Hants. Telegraph, 7, 14 Sept. 1850; Morning Chron. 21 Sept. 1850.
The ‘disgraceful’ scenes that occurred at the hustings, 23 Sept., have become something of a staple caricature of Victorian electioneering.See, for example, Gash, 141-2. Alongside free trade banners showing families starving under Protection and thriving on a free trade ‘big loaf’, the Liberals hoisted another when Savage was proposed, depicting a painted savage ‘with a club in his hand, bestriding a big loaf and driving away from it some starving labourers and mechanics’. This was seized and ‘torn to ribands’ by Savage’s ‘furious’ supporters, whereupon a series of violent exchanges ensued in which ‘several individuals received personal injury’ and
the black loaves exhibited by the Blues were broken to pieces and flung at the speakers and those on the platform. Then followed rotten eggs, stones, potatoes and carrots, in sufficient quantity to keep a poor family a week; and lastly, after the ... leaders ... had been thoroughly smeared with eggs, someone let loose a great quantity of flour, and gave the attired gentlemen the appearance of a family of millers ... the flour sticking where the eggs had already taken effect.Morning Chronicle, 24 Sept. 1850. For a similar account see Lady Charlotte Guest, 247.
The ensuing speeches, according to the press, were ‘all but inaudible’ and the ‘show of hands was taken amidst the widest confusion’.Morning Chron., 24 Sept. 1850. At the poll next day Seymour, who repeatedly ‘denied the insinuation that he was a nominee’, obtained a narrow victory of 20 votes over his opponent, amidst allegations of ‘undue influence’ by the Canford estate. (A surviving pollbook shows that in the outer districts of the borough, Seymour secured 95 votes to Savage’s 56, whilst within the old boundaries they polled 92 and 111 respectively). His proposer, however, insisted that the issue of ‘bread at a cheap rate’ had been decisive, and confidently asserted ‘that from that day forward the Tories would never again return a Member for Poole’.Hants. Telegraph, 28 Sept. 1850; Poole pollbook (1850), passim.
His optimism was misplaced. By 1851 Seymour’s pro-Catholic stance on the Papal question had begun to raise eyebrows locally, leaving the Guests ‘quite exasperated’, and it had become clear that Philips was determined to quit at the next opportunity. Lady Charlotte’s cousin Henry Layard was evidently considered as a suitable candidate, but in the event looked elsewhere, and at the 1852 election the Guests reluctantly rallied behind Seymour, after Savage offered again as a ‘Derbyite’. The additional candidature of two merchants, Kirkham Daniel Hodgson of Ashgrove, Sevenoaks, Kent, a Liberal free trader, and George Woodroffe Franklyn of Bristol and Lovel Hill, Windsor, a Conservative, threatened a four-man contest, for which preparations were duly made. In the event, however, first Savage and then Hodgson withdrew, the latter just before the start of polling, explaining that he ‘could not succeed in defeating Franklyn’ and wished to prevent ‘the spectacle of two Liberals competing with one another’. For the first (and as it turned out only) time since 1831, Poole’s Members were therefore elected unopposed.Lady Charlotte Guest, 262-3, 272, 289; Morning Chron. 2, 3 July 1852; Hants. Telegraph, 10 July 1852.
It has been suggested that this bi-partisan return reflected a mid-century compromise between the Canford interest, headed since November 1852 by Sir Ivor Bertie Guest, and the local Conservatives, which amounted to a ‘Whig-Tory compact’.T. McDonald, ‘A political man: the political aspirations of William Taylor Haly’, Journal of Liberal Democrat History (2001), xxxi. 12-15. If so its effects were limited, for at the elections of 1857 and 1859 the sitting Members were challenged by an ‘advanced Liberal’, William Taylor Haly, a native of Poole who had made a name for himself as a parliamentary lawyer. (In 1857 it was also widely reported that Colonel William Petrie Waugh, who had purchased Branksea island in the hope of making a fortune from its clay, would start as a ‘Liberal-Conservative’ in the room of Franklyn, whose ‘lack of service’ was said to have made the idea of his offering again ‘impossible’. In the event, however, Franklyn stood his ground.)Daily News, 16 Mar. 1857; Morning Chron. 16 Mar. 1857. For the failure of the business and Waugh’s bankruptcy and flight to the continent the following month see The Times, 3 Apr. 1857. In addition, the surviving pollbooks reveal that ‘Whig-Tory’ supporters were thin on the ground on both occasions, with double votes cast for Seymour and Franklyn accounting for just 16 and 18 per cent of their respective totals in 1857, and 20 and 18 per cent in 1859. By contrast their tallies from single party votes (plumpers) were 60 and 73 per cent in 1857, and 69 and 57 per cent in 1859, whilst votes shared with the unsuccessful challenger Haly made up 24 and 9 per cent of their respective results in 1857, and 11 and 25 per cent in 1859.Poole pollbook (1857), (1859), passim. Both elections were again marked by mob violence, particularly against Seymour, who had to be repeatedly ‘rescued’ from harm during campaigns in which the proposed abolition of one of Poole’s seats, as first mooted in Lord John Russell’s abortive reform bill of 1854, featured prominently. With the alleged assistance of the central Tory election fund, Franklyn, hitherto always second on the poll, narrowly secured first place in 1859.McDonald, 14; Daily News, 25 Apr. 1859; Ipswich Jnl. 30 Apr. 1859.
By the time of the 1865 general election, Sir Ivor Guest had clearly abandoned any ‘compact’ and decided to back a second Liberal, Charles Waring of 29 Norfolk Street, London.Unless otherwise indicated, the following section is based on McDonald, 14-15. Waring, a public works contractor, was heavily involved with the ‘much needed railway line’ being planned between Poole and Bournemouth by the Dorset Central Railway Company, of which both Guest and Seymour were directors, and his candidature probably played a part in Franklyn’s decision to retire. ‘Several candidates’ reportedly considered opposing Seymour and Waring, including the Conservatives Samuel Robert Graves of Liverpool and Captain Bashford of Spring Gardens, London, neither of whom in the end persevered, despite promises of ‘independent’ support from opponents of the Canford interest. Haly also courted Poole’s Tories as an ‘independent’ man, evidently with their encouragement, but at a Conservative meeting at the Antelope Hotel three days before the nomination they formally adopted Stephen Lewin of Boston, Lincolnshire, an engineer who had recently acquired one of the town’s iron foundries.The Examiner, 1, 8 July 1865; The Times, 5 July 1865; Reynold’s Newspaper, 9 July 1865. Attempts to persuade Haly, who promptly ‘left the borough in disgust’, to consider running as their second candidate came to nothing. High levels of partisan voting behaviour were again evident at the ensuing contest, with double votes cast for Seymour and Waring accounting for 86 and 90 per cent of their respective totals, and single votes for Lewin making up 72 per cent of his final tally, which left him at the bottom of the poll.Poole Pollbook (1865), passim.
This capture of both seats by the Liberals - the first time at a general election since 1841 - proved shortlived. The long-rumoured abolition of one of the borough’s seats occurred in 1868, under the terms of the 1867 Reform Act, and thereafter the Conservatives, to whom the Guests increasingly gravitated, steadily gained the upper hand prior to the borough’s total disfranchisement and assimilation into the eastern division of the county in 1885. After half a century of flirting with the Liberals, who throughout this period benefited from the confusions of party allegiance surrounding reform and a carefully managed proprietorial interest, Poole eventually reverted to its quintessential Toryism. It is perhaps no coincidence that since the borough’s reinstatement as a single-member constituency in 1950, under the terms of the 1948 Representation of the People Act, it has remained solidly Conservative.
