1992: Bristol North West

Why Bristol North West?

Having come to the conclusion (in the previous article) that Jennifer could not have been successful in Athershaw North at either the 1987 or 1992 elections, it was decided, for her second attempt, to have her contest a constituency --- and this time a real constituency --- where she would have a far more realistic chance of winning. This time, working retrospectively with actual election data, the process for deciding which constituency that would be and what Jennifer’s result would be were set thus:

From the full set of actual election results, select the constituency, wherever that might be, where an incumbent Conservative held on to their seat, against a Labour challenger who came second, by the smallest majority of any of their colleagues.

Having identified that constituency, the result of the election would be changed by increasing the Labour vote by an arbitrary amount and decreasing the Conservative vote by the same number (thus preserving the total number of votes cast) such that Jennifer would win by a small majority.

The constituency thrown up was Bristol North West where the sitting Conservative MP, Michael Stern, held onto his seat by just forty-five votes. These being the circumstances it was not a difficult decision to simply switch the votes cast for the two main parties and have Jennifer win by forty-five.

Unintended Coincidences

Whilst the selection parameters were set with no (conscious) precognition of the outcome, it did throw up some interesting but unintended coincidences.

Jennifer’s backstory had already firmly established her as originating in the West Country and living in (or near) Bristol.

In addition, both Jennifer and Doug Naysmith, the Labour Party candidate for Bristol North West in the real timeline:

have a PhD (in maths/science), both studied at their home town university (Bristol and Edinburgh respectively) and both went to posh, independent schools;

work as researchers/lecturers at the University of Bristol;

are elected members of Bristol City Council, though this fact is probably not such a coincidence given that becoming a local government councillor is part of the well trodden career path for many aspiring to a role in national politics.

Of course it could be that there was some subconscious memory of events or personalities which skewed the criteria that picked out Bristol North West but, in the absence of any evidence to back this up, these coincidences should be seen as exactly that: coincidence.

Greenwood vs Naysmith

Apart from the facts stated above, there are no other known similarities between Jennifer Greenwood and Doug Naysmith. The one is in no way intended as a fictional representation of the other. Within this alternate history they both exist as distinct individuals.

As such, Naysmith becomes one of the first real people whose timeline is disrupted by Jennifer’s existence. Our assumption is that until Jennifer decided to put her hat in the ring for selection as the Labour candidate for Bristol North West, Naysmith’s life in both timelines will have been identical in all but trivial details; in our timeline he will have known Jennifer, probably for many years, and have had frequent interactions with her but none of sufficient significance for his timelines to diverge. It seems, therefore, unlikely that Naysmith would not have contested the selection with Jennifer, alongside the other hapless individuals who also contested it in real life, none of whom we know anything about.

And therein lies the rub of including real people in the fictional narrative, especially those less well known and about whom, therefore, there is less information available in the public domain. In this case, we simply do not know enough about Naysmith to hazard any sort of guess as to how he might have reacted to this change of fate. What, for example, were his motivations and ambitions in wanting to become an MP? How badly did he want it? Was Bristol North West his last, best hope, or might he have sought (and perhaps won) selection elsewhere? How seriously did he take Jennifer as a contender and how did he react afterwards? We just don’t know.

Greenwood vs Stern

For someone who (in real life) served as a Member of Parliament for fourteen years, Michael Stern left an incredibly faint footprint on the political landscape of the United Kingdom. After an unsuccessful candidacy in Derby South at the 1979 General Election, Stern won Bristol North West in 1983 and successfully defended the seat at the 1987 election. In the real timeline, he defended it again in 1992 by that narrow margin of forty-five votes. His luck ran out in 1997 when he was decisively ousted (by Doug Naysmith) after which he vanished into well deserved obscurity.

In our timeline, Jennifer cut short his tenure, defeating him by forty-five votes at the 1992 election.

Jennifer, rightly or wrongly, regarded Stern as a political lightweight, a no-mark, a vapid non-entity. History retains little evidence (in either timeline) of his achievements, failures or notoriety to suggest that her assessment might have been incorrect. Not that Jennifer would have underestimated her opponent. Cardboard cut-out of a middle-class, middle-aged, cis-het, white male he may have been but a cardboard cut-out who didn’t frighten too many horses and, with a blue rosette, one Jennifer knew was quite capable of garnering sufficient votes to dash her hopes of success.

That Jennifer did not harbour the same visceral hatred of Stern that she did for others of his ilk was, perhaps, the deciding factor in the election, allowing her to commit that emotional energy to her own campaign rather than letting it go to waste fretting about her opponent.

The Real Candidates' Legacies

Naysmith and Stern, good as they may have been as constituency MPs (and we shall assume that they were), seem never to have been more than “red shirts” at Westminster and, so far as I can tell, neither of them made any contributions to real life political history sufficiently momentous that their absence might have left an obvious gap in our fictional timeline.