Rules cannot be bent to help you, Mr Chalk

ALEX Chalk MP says he finds the decision of the Boundary Commission to transfer Springbank ward out of the Cheltenham parliamentary constituency ‘baffling.’

It’s rather worrying that our MP

- a man who went to a public school, Oxford University and is a qualified barrister - should find the decision so difficult to understand. So might I be permitted to help him out?

Mr Chalk will remember the Parliamentary Constituencies Bill, introduced by his friend Boris Johnson back in 2020, which said that the legal maximum number of voters in a constituency should be 77,062.

He voted for this to become law, and voted against proposals from Labour (and others) to raise that maximum to a higher figure.

If he is in any doubt, I suggest he checks his Parliamentary voting record.

I know Mr Chalk’s expertise is in the law, but it’s not a difficult mathematical problem to work out that since Cheltenham

has 79,980 voters, which is above the legal maximum, so at least one ward has to be transferred out. And since this is the law, it’s not possible to bend the rules to allow Cheltenham to stay as it is.

As a lawyer I would have expected Mr Chalk to know that his proposal of a ‘modest surplus’ of voters in Cheltenham (by retaining Springbank) is not legally possible. You can’t have your cake and eat it, Mr Chalk. Perhaps it has also slipped Mr Chalk’s mind that earlier this year he accepted that at least one ward has to go and suggested that St Paul’s should be transferred out, instead of Springbank. Now the Boundary Commission has rejected his suggestion, it’s more than surprising that Mr Chalk says he’s baffled. Or is it that he simply thinks that everyone should always agree with him, whatever he says?