1994 Barking by-election


The Barking by-election was held on 9 June 1994, following the death of Labour Party Member of Parliament for Barking Jo Richardson. Richardson had represented the seat since the February 1974 general election, following Tom Driberg.
The seat had been continuously held by Labour since it was created in 1945, and Richardson had retained her seat comfortably at the 1992 general election with an increased majority of over 6,000. Margaret Hodge, leader of Islington London Borough Council from 1982 to 1992, was selected as the Labour candidate and was the clear favourite to hold the seat at the by-election.
The Conservative Party had taken second place in 1992. John Kennedy, the candidate in 1992, was not selected to fight the 1994 by-election, the Conservative nomination going instead to Theresa May. She had been a councillor in the London Borough of Merton from 1986 to 1994, and had stood in the safe Labour seat of North West Durham in 1992. Having lost two of the three previous by-elections of the Parliament to the Liberal Democrats, and failing to challenge Labour in the third, the Conservatives were not hopeful of gaining ground.
The Liberal Democrat candidate, Steve Churchman, had taken little more than a tenth of the votes cast in 1992, continuing a downward track since 1983. A new candidate, Garry White, at 21 the youngest parliamentary by-election candidate chosen by a British political party since universal suffrage, was chosen for the by-election.
Three other candidates stood: Gary Needs of the National Front, Gerard Batten of the UK Independence Party, and HR Butensky of the Natural Law Party.

Results

As expected, Hodge won the seat easily, with the Labour majority almost doubling, despite a turnout below 40%. The Liberal Democrats share of the votes declined slightly, but they still managed to push the Conservatives into third place, as they had a month before in Rotherham. The other three candidates all lost their deposits.

Legacy

At the 1997 UK general election, Hodge retained the seat with an increased majority. May went on to be elected as MP for Maidenhead in 1997 and then became Prime Minister in 2016. Two other candidates in Barking in 1994 also stood in 1997: Needs contested Devon East for the National Democrats, and Batten contested Harlow for UKIP: both again secured only a few hundred votes. Batten was elected as a UKIP Member of the European Parliament for London in 2004. Batten and May both appeared on a ballot paper together again, 23 years later, when Batten stood against her in Maidenhead at the 2017 general election. Batten later became the Leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party in 2018.