ABSTRACT
On the day of the Monmouth by-election in May 1991 a Times leader began:
Today’s by-election in Monmouth is unimportant. A new member of Parliament will be returned to Westminster. That is all. The voters will have experienced a deluge of campaigning. The evidence of by-elections past is that they will react in a way wholly unrepresentative of the national electorate in a general election. Nobody should deduce any wider conclusions, except that wider conclusions should not be deduced from by-elections. 1
