The Bournemouth Affair: Britain's First Primary Election

Abstract

T HIS PAPER EXAMINES THE RELATIONS between a Member of Parliament, his constituents, and his leaders under conditions of considerable stress. Recent interpretations of the British party system have tended to emphasize the centralization of power in both major parties as a result of the constitutional principle that governments be responsible to Parliament and to the whole electorate and of the need to appeal to a wider range of views than those embodied in the formal membership of a single party, if the party in question is to enjoy success at the polls.' These interpretations, which appear to be generally well-founded, have entailed minimizing the importance both of the backbencher and the local party organizations. Only a few polemical journalists have suggested that the ordinary Member or constituency party has ceased to be a real influence in British politics, but, in large part because of the attention devoted -to the leaders, few areas of British politics remain in more obscurity than the relations of a Member to his constituents.2 The discreet veil which local British parties, particularly the Conservatives, usually succeed in drawing over their internal processes compounds the obscurity so that generalizations about the pattern of influence and dissent within the parties are frequently based on exanples which are outdated or only superficially known. It therefore should be instructive to examine rather closely the prolonged dispute which arose between Nigel Nicolson and his constituents at Bournemouth as a result of the Suez crisis of 1956. A close study of this dispute is possible because events came closer to the surface than usual and the present writer was able to discuss