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:
“All you can be sure about in a political-minded writer is that if his work should last you will have to skip the politics when you read it. Many of the so-called politically enlisted writers change their politics frequently.... Perhaps it can be respected as a form of the pursuit of happiness.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“The Germans—once they were called the nation of thinkers: do they still think at all? Nowadays the Germans are bored with intellect, the Germans distrust intellect, politics devours all seriousness for really intellectual things—Deutschland, Deutschland Über alles was, I fear, the end of German philosophy.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“Politics is not an end, but a means. It is not a product, but a process. It is the art of government. Like other values it has its counterfeits. So much emphasis has been placed upon the false that the significance of the true has been obscured and politics has come to convey the meaning of crafty and cunning selfishness, instead of candid and sincere service.”
—Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933)