Post by andrewteale on Jan 15, 2022 16:15:04 GMT
So, where is Gedling and why is a parliamentary constituency named after it? Well, this is a bit complicated.
Gedling itself is a village on the eastern edge of the built-up area of Nottingham, just outside the town of Carlton. Carlton was an independent town until the 1974 reorganisation, which created a new local government district by merging Carlton, the northern Nottingham suburb of Arnold, and a number of villages in the general Nottingham hinterland. It seems that "Gedling" was chosen as a neutral name for the new district, presumably to avoid issues arising from whether to choose "Arnold and Carlton" or "Carlton and Arnold".
The name of Gedling also reflected the area's major economic focus at the time. Gedling Colliery was one of the largest pits in the UK, employing well over 1,000 men and extracting over a million tons of coal every year in the 1960s. Ex-pit areas these days are some of the whitest parts of the UK, but Gedling Colliery's workforce had an unusually large ethnic minority contingent: in the 1960s around 10% of the miners were immigrants from the Caribbean. The colliery eventually closed in 1991 after 92 years of operation; the pithead site has been cleared and turned into a country park.
The modern Gedling constituency doesn't cover all of the modern district. As well as Arnold and Carlton, it takes in four parishes: the large village of Burton Joyce on the railway line towards Newark, the small village of Stoke Bardolph next to the River Trent, and the recently-created parishes of Colwick and St Albans covering quite new housing developments on the edge of Nottingham.
The towns are now indistinguishable on the ground from Nottingham and form part of its urban area. However, Arnold and Carlton have never been incorporated into Nottingham. Indeed, in 1885 when single-member constituencies became the norm for UK parliamentary elections, Arnold and Carlton were very small places (although still with some industry, particularly textiles) and the urban sprawl had not yet swallowed them up.
The 1885 redistribution, which divided the city of Nottingham as it then existed into three constituencies, placed all of the city's suburbs into a new constituency called Rushcliffe. The name came from the Wapentake of Rushcliffe, which covered the southern end of Nottinghamshire (roughly the western half of the modern Rushcliffe local government district). But the constituency's character came from the Nottingham satellite towns and villages within its boundaries: West Bridgford, Beeston, Stapleford, Wollaton, Hucknall, Arnold and Carlton. A lot of these were rather industrial places.
In the period 1885-1918 Rushcliffe voted Liberal at every election, usually with large majorities. For most of this period it was represented by John Ellis, the owner of Hucknall Colliery and first president of the Hucknall school board. Ellis came from a Quaker industrial family (his grandfather had been chairman of the Midland Railway), and he was on the radical wing of the Liberals. He served in government under Campbell-Bannerman as a junior minister in the India Office, and was sworn into the Privy Council.
John Ellis passed away a few days before the December 1910 general election, aged 69. He had already indicated that he would stand down from Parliament, and the election went ahead with new Liberal candidate Leifchild Stratten "Leif" Jones holding the seat with little fuss. Jones was the president of the United Kingdom Alliance, a prominent pressure group calling for temperance and the prohibition of the alcohol trade. (The United Kingdom Alliance is still going: now called the Alliance House Foundation, it is a registered charity providing education on the effects of alcohol and other addictions.) A Lloyd's underwriter in his day job, Jones had previously served in Parliament as MP for Appleby (in what was then Westmorland) from a 1905 by-election until losing his seat in January 1910. The losing Conservative candidate for Rushcliffe in both 1910 elections was another former MP: Coningsby Disraeli, a nephew of Benjamin Disraeli who had inherited Hughenden Manor from him, had served from 1892 to 1906 as MP for Altrincham in what was then Cheshire.
Nottinghamshire gained two seats from the 1918 redistribution, going up from seven MPs to nine. One of those went to the city of Nottingham, while the other new seat was created to the north of the city. By December 1910 the Mansfield constituency (which then included much of what is now Ashfield district) had the largest electorate in the county, and Rushcliffe was not far behind. Their area was effectively reorganised into three seats, with the new constituency being based on the towns of Kirkby-in-Ashfield and Eastwood (previously in the Mansfield seat), and Hucknall and Arnold (previously in the Rushcliffe seat). This seat was called Broxtowe, after the former Wapentake of that name. As can be seen from that description, it has almost nothing in common with the modern Broxtowe constituency (which is based on Beeston and the Erewash Valley south of Eastwood).
The interwar Broxtowe constituency may have taken in Arnold but it was utterly based on the Nottinghamshire coalfield, which was still expanding during this period. The 1918 election here marked a sudden change in the miners' political orientations, with a breakthrough for Labour in this area. The Miners' Federation of Great Britain, which was the strongest union here, had previously voted against affiliating with Labour; and some indication of the miners' previous politics can be gleaned from the fact that the old Mansfield constituency had been solidly Liberal since its creation in 1885. Going into the 1918 election the MP for Mansfield was Sir Charles Seely, an industrialist and major local landowner who had previously been MP for Lincoln from 1895 to 1906. (He had also been the losing Liberal Unionist candidate for Rushcliffe in 1892.) Sir Charles had defeated an independent candidate, who was backed by the patriotic fraudster Horatio Bottomley, in a wartime 1916 by-election.
Seely sought re-election in the new Broxtowe seat in 1918, but was trounced by the Labour candidate George Spencer who won a three-way contest with more than half of the votes. An official of the Nottinghamshire Miners Association, Spencer was a local man who had worked for many years in the Nottinghamshire pits.
The Broxtowe constituency was the only Nottinghamshire seat which voted Labour at every election during the inter-war period, because Mansfield returned a Liberal MP in 1922. George Spencer had a couple of close calls at the ballot box (he defeated a National Liberal candidate by 371 votes in 1922, and had a majority of 2,170 over the Liberals the following year), but what eventually did for his political career was the General Strike of 1926. Spencer, on behalf of the Nottinghamshire Miners Association, cut a deal with the local pit owners which allowed their miners to go back to work. This was against the wishes of the MFGB, which wanted the strike to continue, and Spencer was thrown out of the Labour party. He threw his lot in with the Liberals and set up a new union of coalminers based in the Dukeries, with close ties to the employers: a strange form of "company unionism", or "Spencerism".
Forced to choose a new Labour candidate after Spencer's expulsion, the Broxtowe branch of the Labour Party chose someone with no links to the mining industry. Seymour Cocks had made his name in journalism, but this didn't stop him having a long career as MP for Broxtowe. He held the seat against the tidal wave of 1931 with a majority of 1,590 votes over the Conservatives but was not remotely threatened thereafter, eventually dying in office in 1953.
The interwar Rushcliffe constituency was a very different beast, continuing to take in the rural villages south of Nottingham, the affluent town of West Bridgford and the more industrial towns of Beeston and Carlton. Both Beeston and Carlton had changed in character since 1885: there was more light industry in Beeston by this point, while Gedling Colliery was now in operation in Carlton. The creation of the Broxtowe constituency and the transfer of Arnold into it had broken Carlton's link to the rest of the Rushcliffe seat, leaving it as a detached part of the constituency on the far side of Nottingham.
Again, the politics of Rushcliffe fundamentally changed after 1918: but here there was a swing to the right. Leif Jones stood for re-election in the revised seat, but finished a poor third. (He later served two non-consecutive terms as MP for Camborne, in Cornwall.) The Conservatives' Henry Betterton, who had been endorsed by the coalition government, secured more than half of the votes to become the first Conservative MP for Rushcliffe. Betterton came from a prominent Leicestershire family and had been called to the Bar: during the war years he had been a liaison officer between a number of government departments, being appointed OBE for that service in January 1918.
Henry Betterton went on to serve as MP for Rushcliffe for 16 years, seeing off a number of prominent figures. Norman Angell, the author of The Great Illusion and a future MP (Bradford North, 1929-31) and Nobel Peace laureate (1933), was the Labour candidate here in 1922; James Wilson, the Labour MP for Dudley from a 1921 by-election to 1922 and later one of the two Labour MPs for Oldham in 1929-31, finished third here in 1923.
Betterton's closest call came in 1929 when the seat was contested for the first time by Labour's Florence Widdowson; the Conservative majority was 3,076, with the Liberals polling nearly 11,000 votes. After that he was made a baronet, and a rematch between Sir Henry Betterton and Florence Paton (as she was by now) in the changed political conditions of 1931 resulted in a Conservative majority of more than 22,000. Sir Henry entered Cabinet after the election, serving as Minister of Labour in Ramsay MacDonald's National Government.
Sir Henry Betterton left the Commons in 1934 to become chairman of the Unemployment Assistance Board. The resulting Rushcliffe by-election of 26 July 1934 took place in a seat which by now was starting to change significantly. In the previous year the city of Nottingham expanded to its west by annexing Wollaton and Bilborough, areas which were part of the Rushcliffe constituency (and would remain so until 1950). Nottingham Corporation went on to fill this area with council houses. The electorate of the Rushcliffe seat increased by 59% between the 1931 and 1945 elections, and its political complexion turned sharply to the left.
Most of these changes had yet to work themselves out by July 1934, and the new Conservative candidate Ralph Assheton won the by-election easily although there was a sharp swing to Labour. Assheton was from an aristocratic Lancashire family. He had a variety of posts in the wartime coalition government, and going into the 1945 election he was chairman of the Conservative Party.
Ralph Assheton was defeated in the 1945 election, which returned Florence Paton as the first Labour MP for Rushcliffe by 43,303 votes to 36,544, a majority of 6,759 votes. The electorate was by now over 103,000, accounting for the large vote totals. That wasn't the end of Assheton's political career: he returned to the green benches shortly afterwards by winning a by-election for the City of London, and he was later the only MP for the short-lived Blackburn West constituency of 1950-55. Assheton, by now on the red benches as the first Lord Clitheroe, ended up as Lord-Lieutenant of Lancashire from 1971 to 1976. (Two of his children have royal links: his son Nicholas Assheton was the Queen Mother's treasurer at the time of her death, while his daughter Bridget, Lady Worsley, was a sister-in-law of the Duchess of Kent.)
Florence Paton had been elected to the Commons at her fourth attempt: 1945 was her third go at Rushcliffe, and she had also fought the 1928 Cheltenham by-election. Her husband John Paton had also been elected as a Labour MP in 1945, for Norwich. Florence Paton has the distinction of becoming the first woman to preside over the House of Commons, chairing a debate on Scottish civil aviation estimates on 31 May 1948. This was done from the table, rather than the Speaker's Chair, as is customary when the House is in committee.
Sir Kenneth Pickthorn retired in 1966, and the new Conservative candidate Philip Holland weathered the Wilson landslide to hold the Carlton seat with a majority of 4,046 over Labour. Again, Holland had previous experience in the Commons: he had served in the 1959 parliament as the Conservative MP for Acton in what was then Middlesex, but had lost his seat there in 1964. He had also been a Kensington councillor in the late 1950s, and before that had served for ten years in the RAF.
Carlton proved to be a safe berth for Sir Philip Holland's backbench Parliamentary career. 1966 was his closest contest, and in only one further election (October 1974) did his majority fall below 10 points. He also saw the seat redrawn and renamed as Gedling for the 1983 election, reflecting the local government changes of the previous decade.
Sir Philip Holland retired in 1987 after six terms of office and passed the seat on to Andrew Mitchell. Aged 31 at the time, Mitchell was a former president of the Cambridge Union, had briefly served in Cyprus as a UN peacekeeper, and at the time of his election he was working for the investment bank Lazards. His father David Mitchell was at the time the MP for North West Hampshire and a junior transport minister, and Andrew followed in his father's footsteps by quickly joining the lower rungs of government. However, he had not attained Cabinet rank by the time the Major government fell in 1997.
Andrew Mitchell's subsequent career in the Coalition Cabinet came as MP for Sutton Coldfield. He was swept away in the Blair landslide of 1997 by Labour candidate Vernon Coaker, a teacher who was leader of the Labour group on Rushcliffe council and was fighting the seat for the second time. Coaker enjoyed a majority of 3,802 votes over Mitchell, becoming the first Labour MP for the area since Florence Paton's defeat in 1950.
Vernon Coaker is, to date, the only Labour MP for Gedling, but he served the constituency for 22 years on a series of marginal results. His strongest result came in 2001, with a majority of 5,598 over the Conservatives' Jonathan Bullock (who, many years later, was a UKIP and Brexit Party MEP from 2017 to 2020). Four years later the Conservative candidate here was Anna Soubry (later MP for Broxtowe 2010-19), who lost here by 3,811 votes. Coaker's ministerial career never took off in the same way as Andrew Mitchell's: when Labour left office in 2010 he was a junior education minister. He served in the Shadow Cabinet under Miliband and Corbyn, with the Northern Ireland (twice) and defence portfolios.
Vernon Coaker's luck finally ran out in December 2019, when he was defeated by the Conservatives' Tom Randall by 22,718 votes to 22,039, a majority of 679 votes. Randall is a local man, from Arnold, who had left the area to read law at Oxford: he briefly practised as a solicitor, and at the time of his election he was working for a professional membership body.
Labour will need to find a new parliamentary candidate here in future: Vernon Coaker has now been translated to the Lords, where he is a frontbench Labour spokesman on home affairs. The Labour Party still remain strong here at other levels of government: they have controlled Gedling council since 2011, and despite a poor performance generally in the 2021 Nottinghamshire county elections Labour still hold six of the seven county councillors for Arnold and Carlton. Tom Randall's small majority ensures that this seat will be closely fought at the next general election,
Gedling itself is a village on the eastern edge of the built-up area of Nottingham, just outside the town of Carlton. Carlton was an independent town until the 1974 reorganisation, which created a new local government district by merging Carlton, the northern Nottingham suburb of Arnold, and a number of villages in the general Nottingham hinterland. It seems that "Gedling" was chosen as a neutral name for the new district, presumably to avoid issues arising from whether to choose "Arnold and Carlton" or "Carlton and Arnold".
The name of Gedling also reflected the area's major economic focus at the time. Gedling Colliery was one of the largest pits in the UK, employing well over 1,000 men and extracting over a million tons of coal every year in the 1960s. Ex-pit areas these days are some of the whitest parts of the UK, but Gedling Colliery's workforce had an unusually large ethnic minority contingent: in the 1960s around 10% of the miners were immigrants from the Caribbean. The colliery eventually closed in 1991 after 92 years of operation; the pithead site has been cleared and turned into a country park.
The modern Gedling constituency doesn't cover all of the modern district. As well as Arnold and Carlton, it takes in four parishes: the large village of Burton Joyce on the railway line towards Newark, the small village of Stoke Bardolph next to the River Trent, and the recently-created parishes of Colwick and St Albans covering quite new housing developments on the edge of Nottingham.
The towns are now indistinguishable on the ground from Nottingham and form part of its urban area. However, Arnold and Carlton have never been incorporated into Nottingham. Indeed, in 1885 when single-member constituencies became the norm for UK parliamentary elections, Arnold and Carlton were very small places (although still with some industry, particularly textiles) and the urban sprawl had not yet swallowed them up.
The 1885 redistribution, which divided the city of Nottingham as it then existed into three constituencies, placed all of the city's suburbs into a new constituency called Rushcliffe. The name came from the Wapentake of Rushcliffe, which covered the southern end of Nottinghamshire (roughly the western half of the modern Rushcliffe local government district). But the constituency's character came from the Nottingham satellite towns and villages within its boundaries: West Bridgford, Beeston, Stapleford, Wollaton, Hucknall, Arnold and Carlton. A lot of these were rather industrial places.
In the period 1885-1918 Rushcliffe voted Liberal at every election, usually with large majorities. For most of this period it was represented by John Ellis, the owner of Hucknall Colliery and first president of the Hucknall school board. Ellis came from a Quaker industrial family (his grandfather had been chairman of the Midland Railway), and he was on the radical wing of the Liberals. He served in government under Campbell-Bannerman as a junior minister in the India Office, and was sworn into the Privy Council.
John Ellis passed away a few days before the December 1910 general election, aged 69. He had already indicated that he would stand down from Parliament, and the election went ahead with new Liberal candidate Leifchild Stratten "Leif" Jones holding the seat with little fuss. Jones was the president of the United Kingdom Alliance, a prominent pressure group calling for temperance and the prohibition of the alcohol trade. (The United Kingdom Alliance is still going: now called the Alliance House Foundation, it is a registered charity providing education on the effects of alcohol and other addictions.) A Lloyd's underwriter in his day job, Jones had previously served in Parliament as MP for Appleby (in what was then Westmorland) from a 1905 by-election until losing his seat in January 1910. The losing Conservative candidate for Rushcliffe in both 1910 elections was another former MP: Coningsby Disraeli, a nephew of Benjamin Disraeli who had inherited Hughenden Manor from him, had served from 1892 to 1906 as MP for Altrincham in what was then Cheshire.
Nottinghamshire gained two seats from the 1918 redistribution, going up from seven MPs to nine. One of those went to the city of Nottingham, while the other new seat was created to the north of the city. By December 1910 the Mansfield constituency (which then included much of what is now Ashfield district) had the largest electorate in the county, and Rushcliffe was not far behind. Their area was effectively reorganised into three seats, with the new constituency being based on the towns of Kirkby-in-Ashfield and Eastwood (previously in the Mansfield seat), and Hucknall and Arnold (previously in the Rushcliffe seat). This seat was called Broxtowe, after the former Wapentake of that name. As can be seen from that description, it has almost nothing in common with the modern Broxtowe constituency (which is based on Beeston and the Erewash Valley south of Eastwood).
The interwar Broxtowe constituency may have taken in Arnold but it was utterly based on the Nottinghamshire coalfield, which was still expanding during this period. The 1918 election here marked a sudden change in the miners' political orientations, with a breakthrough for Labour in this area. The Miners' Federation of Great Britain, which was the strongest union here, had previously voted against affiliating with Labour; and some indication of the miners' previous politics can be gleaned from the fact that the old Mansfield constituency had been solidly Liberal since its creation in 1885. Going into the 1918 election the MP for Mansfield was Sir Charles Seely, an industrialist and major local landowner who had previously been MP for Lincoln from 1895 to 1906. (He had also been the losing Liberal Unionist candidate for Rushcliffe in 1892.) Sir Charles had defeated an independent candidate, who was backed by the patriotic fraudster Horatio Bottomley, in a wartime 1916 by-election.
Seely sought re-election in the new Broxtowe seat in 1918, but was trounced by the Labour candidate George Spencer who won a three-way contest with more than half of the votes. An official of the Nottinghamshire Miners Association, Spencer was a local man who had worked for many years in the Nottinghamshire pits.
The Broxtowe constituency was the only Nottinghamshire seat which voted Labour at every election during the inter-war period, because Mansfield returned a Liberal MP in 1922. George Spencer had a couple of close calls at the ballot box (he defeated a National Liberal candidate by 371 votes in 1922, and had a majority of 2,170 over the Liberals the following year), but what eventually did for his political career was the General Strike of 1926. Spencer, on behalf of the Nottinghamshire Miners Association, cut a deal with the local pit owners which allowed their miners to go back to work. This was against the wishes of the MFGB, which wanted the strike to continue, and Spencer was thrown out of the Labour party. He threw his lot in with the Liberals and set up a new union of coalminers based in the Dukeries, with close ties to the employers: a strange form of "company unionism", or "Spencerism".
Forced to choose a new Labour candidate after Spencer's expulsion, the Broxtowe branch of the Labour Party chose someone with no links to the mining industry. Seymour Cocks had made his name in journalism, but this didn't stop him having a long career as MP for Broxtowe. He held the seat against the tidal wave of 1931 with a majority of 1,590 votes over the Conservatives but was not remotely threatened thereafter, eventually dying in office in 1953.
The interwar Rushcliffe constituency was a very different beast, continuing to take in the rural villages south of Nottingham, the affluent town of West Bridgford and the more industrial towns of Beeston and Carlton. Both Beeston and Carlton had changed in character since 1885: there was more light industry in Beeston by this point, while Gedling Colliery was now in operation in Carlton. The creation of the Broxtowe constituency and the transfer of Arnold into it had broken Carlton's link to the rest of the Rushcliffe seat, leaving it as a detached part of the constituency on the far side of Nottingham.
Again, the politics of Rushcliffe fundamentally changed after 1918: but here there was a swing to the right. Leif Jones stood for re-election in the revised seat, but finished a poor third. (He later served two non-consecutive terms as MP for Camborne, in Cornwall.) The Conservatives' Henry Betterton, who had been endorsed by the coalition government, secured more than half of the votes to become the first Conservative MP for Rushcliffe. Betterton came from a prominent Leicestershire family and had been called to the Bar: during the war years he had been a liaison officer between a number of government departments, being appointed OBE for that service in January 1918.
Henry Betterton went on to serve as MP for Rushcliffe for 16 years, seeing off a number of prominent figures. Norman Angell, the author of The Great Illusion and a future MP (Bradford North, 1929-31) and Nobel Peace laureate (1933), was the Labour candidate here in 1922; James Wilson, the Labour MP for Dudley from a 1921 by-election to 1922 and later one of the two Labour MPs for Oldham in 1929-31, finished third here in 1923.
Betterton's closest call came in 1929 when the seat was contested for the first time by Labour's Florence Widdowson; the Conservative majority was 3,076, with the Liberals polling nearly 11,000 votes. After that he was made a baronet, and a rematch between Sir Henry Betterton and Florence Paton (as she was by now) in the changed political conditions of 1931 resulted in a Conservative majority of more than 22,000. Sir Henry entered Cabinet after the election, serving as Minister of Labour in Ramsay MacDonald's National Government.
Sir Henry Betterton left the Commons in 1934 to become chairman of the Unemployment Assistance Board. The resulting Rushcliffe by-election of 26 July 1934 took place in a seat which by now was starting to change significantly. In the previous year the city of Nottingham expanded to its west by annexing Wollaton and Bilborough, areas which were part of the Rushcliffe constituency (and would remain so until 1950). Nottingham Corporation went on to fill this area with council houses. The electorate of the Rushcliffe seat increased by 59% between the 1931 and 1945 elections, and its political complexion turned sharply to the left.
Most of these changes had yet to work themselves out by July 1934, and the new Conservative candidate Ralph Assheton won the by-election easily although there was a sharp swing to Labour. Assheton was from an aristocratic Lancashire family. He had a variety of posts in the wartime coalition government, and going into the 1945 election he was chairman of the Conservative Party.
Ralph Assheton was defeated in the 1945 election, which returned Florence Paton as the first Labour MP for Rushcliffe by 43,303 votes to 36,544, a majority of 6,759 votes. The electorate was by now over 103,000, accounting for the large vote totals. That wasn't the end of Assheton's political career: he returned to the green benches shortly afterwards by winning a by-election for the City of London, and he was later the only MP for the short-lived Blackburn West constituency of 1950-55. Assheton, by now on the red benches as the first Lord Clitheroe, ended up as Lord-Lieutenant of Lancashire from 1971 to 1976. (Two of his children have royal links: his son Nicholas Assheton was the Queen Mother's treasurer at the time of her death, while his daughter Bridget, Lady Worsley, was a sister-in-law of the Duchess of Kent.)
Florence Paton had been elected to the Commons at her fourth attempt: 1945 was her third go at Rushcliffe, and she had also fought the 1928 Cheltenham by-election. Her husband John Paton had also been elected as a Labour MP in 1945, for Norwich. Florence Paton has the distinction of becoming the first woman to preside over the House of Commons, chairing a debate on Scottish civil aviation estimates on 31 May 1948. This was done from the table, rather than the Speaker's Chair, as is customary when the House is in committee.
The Gedling seat as we know it was broadly created for the general election of 1950, taking in Carlton from the former Rushcliffe seat and Arnold from the former Broxtowe seat. It wasn't called Gedling then: until 1983 it was known as the Carlton constituency, and until 1974 it included a significant rural area around Bingham. In 1950, that made all the difference. Florence Paton sought re-election to the Commons here, but was defeated by just 395 votes by Kenneth Pickthorn of the Conservatives.
Pickthorn was an academic who had served from 1937 to 1944 as president of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He had previously served in the Commons since winning a by-election in 1935 for the Cambridge University constituency, which was abolished from the 1950 election. Pickthorn went on to win two more elections against Paton, increasing his majority in 1951 and making the seat safe in 1955.
Sir Kenneth Pickthorn retired in 1966, and the new Conservative candidate Philip Holland weathered the Wilson landslide to hold the Carlton seat with a majority of 4,046 over Labour. Again, Holland had previous experience in the Commons: he had served in the 1959 parliament as the Conservative MP for Acton in what was then Middlesex, but had lost his seat there in 1964. He had also been a Kensington councillor in the late 1950s, and before that had served for ten years in the RAF.
Carlton proved to be a safe berth for Sir Philip Holland's backbench Parliamentary career. 1966 was his closest contest, and in only one further election (October 1974) did his majority fall below 10 points. He also saw the seat redrawn and renamed as Gedling for the 1983 election, reflecting the local government changes of the previous decade.
Sir Philip Holland retired in 1987 after six terms of office and passed the seat on to Andrew Mitchell. Aged 31 at the time, Mitchell was a former president of the Cambridge Union, had briefly served in Cyprus as a UN peacekeeper, and at the time of his election he was working for the investment bank Lazards. His father David Mitchell was at the time the MP for North West Hampshire and a junior transport minister, and Andrew followed in his father's footsteps by quickly joining the lower rungs of government. However, he had not attained Cabinet rank by the time the Major government fell in 1997.
Andrew Mitchell's subsequent career in the Coalition Cabinet came as MP for Sutton Coldfield. He was swept away in the Blair landslide of 1997 by Labour candidate Vernon Coaker, a teacher who was leader of the Labour group on Rushcliffe council and was fighting the seat for the second time. Coaker enjoyed a majority of 3,802 votes over Mitchell, becoming the first Labour MP for the area since Florence Paton's defeat in 1950.
Vernon Coaker is, to date, the only Labour MP for Gedling, but he served the constituency for 22 years on a series of marginal results. His strongest result came in 2001, with a majority of 5,598 over the Conservatives' Jonathan Bullock (who, many years later, was a UKIP and Brexit Party MEP from 2017 to 2020). Four years later the Conservative candidate here was Anna Soubry (later MP for Broxtowe 2010-19), who lost here by 3,811 votes. Coaker's ministerial career never took off in the same way as Andrew Mitchell's: when Labour left office in 2010 he was a junior education minister. He served in the Shadow Cabinet under Miliband and Corbyn, with the Northern Ireland (twice) and defence portfolios.
Vernon Coaker's luck finally ran out in December 2019, when he was defeated by the Conservatives' Tom Randall by 22,718 votes to 22,039, a majority of 679 votes. Randall is a local man, from Arnold, who had left the area to read law at Oxford: he briefly practised as a solicitor, and at the time of his election he was working for a professional membership body.
Labour will need to find a new parliamentary candidate here in future: Vernon Coaker has now been translated to the Lords, where he is a frontbench Labour spokesman on home affairs. The Labour Party still remain strong here at other levels of government: they have controlled Gedling council since 2011, and despite a poor performance generally in the 2021 Nottinghamshire county elections Labour still hold six of the seven county councillors for Arnold and Carlton. Tom Randall's small majority ensures that this seat will be closely fought at the next general election,
