The Devon elections that were too close to call

Imagine a general election seat being won and lost by a single vote.

After all those weeks of campaigning, among all the thousands of votes cast and counted, after all the time it takes to sort out the ballot papers and count them under the eagle eyes of observers from every party, two candidates are separated by a single vote.

But it has happened – and it was here in Devon.

Apart from the election of 1886 in Ashton-under-Lyne in Lancashire, when the Conservative and Liberal candidates polled precisely the same number of votes and were separated by the mayor’s casting vote, it is the closest UK election result of them all.

There were two general elections in 1910, the first in January and the second in December.

The first was called by the Liberal government in the midst of a constitutional crisis sparked when the Conservative-led House of Lords rejected the government’s budget. It resulted in a hung parliament, and the subsequent instability led to another general election over moves to limit the power of the Lords.

The Exeter seat had been won in January by Conservative Henry Duke, a former Western Morning News journalist, who held off a challenge from Liberal hopeful Harold St Maur.

In December the two went head to head again, and in the original poll St Maur (pronounced ‘Seemer’) won by four votes.

But there had been some spoiled papers, and a week-long hearing at Exeter Guildhall followed in April 1911 after Duke’s team challenged the result. On the seventh day, after discounting a number of votes for both candidates, the judges heard that the Liberals had paid a local man called Pannell to act as a tally clerk, rendering his vote void.

That was the vote that swung it, and Duke emerged victorious by a margin of one.

Some years later, another general election produced more nail-biting Devon drama.

Liberal cabinet minister Francis Dyke-Acland, who had previously represented Camborne, had won the Tiverton seat in a by-election in June 2023 caused by the death of sitting Unionist MP Herbert Sparkes. In the general election in December the same year he found himself up against local landowner, old Etonian and decorated war veteran Sir Gilbert John Acland-Troyte, standing for the Unionists – who would be termed Conservatives these days.

Despite the similarity of their surnames, there is nothing to suggest that the two men were directly related.

The Tory candidate polled 12,300 votes, but the Liberal amassed 12,303 to give him victory by just three. The two men faced off again in the general election of October 1924, and this time Sir Gilbert triumphed by 1,659 votes.

As a footnote, Dyke-Acland’s great grandson Chris was the drummer with nineties’ indie-rock band Lush which had two top-10 albums.

Devon’s next down-to-the-wire election night came in 1997 in the Torbay constituency.

Rupert Allason had first been elected as the bay’s MP in 1987, with a majority of nearly 9,000 over Liberal candidate Nick Bye, who is now a long-serving Conservative member of Torbay Council.

Allason, a writer of spy novels under the pen name of Nigel West, proved a controversial figure, earning the tag ‘maverick’ during a career in which he defied and lost the Conservative whip on a point of principle.

A Porsche-driving playboy who became an international expert in espionage and intelligence, he held on to his seat in 1992, although Liberal Democrat candidate Adrian Sanders slashed the Tory majority down to less than 6,000.

The general election of 1997 saw another showdown between Allason and Sanders, an old boy of Torquay Boys Grammar School who had worked for the Liberal Democrats for years and had served on the borough council.

This was the election that saw Labour leader Tony Blair triumph in a landslide, and supposedly safe Tory seats up and down the country were in play for the first time in years.

It took three recounts before the final result was announced at 2am on 2 May 1997, with Sanders awarded 21,094 votes and Allason 21,082, a majority of just 12.

It had been 73 years since the bay had seen anything other than a Conservative MP.

There is a story which may well be an apocryphal urban legend that Allason had failed to tip a local pub waitress a week before polling day, leading her and a bunch of her colleagues to swap sides and vote for Sanders, thereby sealing the result.

Sanders held the seat through three more general elections, becoming the Liberal Democrats’ deputy chief whip and principal spokesman on tourism.

He was defeated in the 2015 election by Conservative Kevin Foster, who was the bay’s MP until parliament was dissolved in May.