Mark Pack

The Liberal History Group’s committee had an extended debate via email a few months ago over the number of days for which Lloyd George was an MP. We’d set this as a quiz question before discovering that we didn’t all agree on the answer. Leap years weren’t the problem. It was the question of when do you start becoming an MP: on declaration of the result or on taking your seat?

But here’s a tougher one. For how many days was Joseph Ormond Andrews (1872-1909) an MP? Andrews won a by-election at Barkston Ash in October 1905, gaining the seat from the Tories. Parliament was not sitting at the time and he never got round to taking his seat in Parliament. At the 1906 general election, the Conservatives regained Barkston Ash from Andrews, one of the few Unionist gains at that Liberal landslide election. Is the answer to this one “zero”?