Politics
Drawn to politics, he unsuccessfully contested Willesden East for the Liberals at the general election of 1922. However the sitting Tory MP, Sir H M Mallaby-Deeley, resigned in 1923 causing a by-election which was held on 3 March 1923. Johnstone was again chosen to contest the seat for the Liberals and won by a majority of 5,176 votes over the Conservative George Frederick Stanley. Johnstone held the seat in the 1923 general election, only to lose it to Stanley at the 1924 general election. He then tried and failed to return to the House of Commons at by-elections: first at Eastbourne in 1925 and later at Westbury in 1927, where he lost by just 149 votes. He fought Westbury a second time at the 1929 general election again losing narrowly. However at the 1931 general election he got in at South Shields, before losing the seat in 1935. In May 1940, even though Johnstone was outside Parliament, Winston Churchill decided to appoint him to the government as Secretary to the Department of Overseas Trade. Two months later the Liberal constituency of Middlesbrough West became vacant when the sitting MP, Frank Kingsley Griffith, was made a county court judge and Johnstone was returned for the seat at a by-election on 7 August 1940 unopposed under the terms of the wartime electoral truce. He was made a Privy Councillor in 1943. By common consent he was an effective minister. As of 2008, he is the last MP for South Shields to have represented any party other than Labour.
Read more about this topic: Harcourt Johnstone
Famous quotes containing the word politics:
“I played by the rules of politics as I found them.”
—Richard M. Nixon (1913–1995)
“While you’re playing cards with a regular guy or having a bite to eat with him, he seems a peaceable, good-humoured and not entirely dense person. But just begin a conversation with him about something inedible, politics or science, for instance, and he ends up in a deadend or starts in on such an obtuse and base philosophy that you can only wave your hand and leave.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
“The [nineteenth-century] young men who were Puritans in politics were anti-Puritans in literature. They were willing to die for the independence of Poland or the Manchester Fenians; and they relaxed their tension by voluptuous reading in Swinburne.”
—Rebecca West (1892–1983)