Cardiff East by-election, 1942

The Cardiff East by-election, 1942 was a parliamentary by-election held for the British House of Commons constituency of Cardiff East on 13 April 1942.

The by-election was caused by the appointment of the sitting National Conservative MP, Owen Temple-Morris, as a County Court judge.

The by-election took place during the Second World War. Under an agreement between the Conservative, Labour and Liberal parties, who were participating in a wartime coalition, the party holding a seat would not be opposed by the other two at a by-election. Accordingly, it fell to the Cardiff East Conservatives to choose the successor to Temple-Morris and they unanimously selected Sir James Grigg at the request of Conservative Central Office.

Grigg had been a career civil servant, had served at the Treasury and in India and had risen to become Permanent Under-Secretary of State at the War Office. In this role he worked closely and effectively with Sir Alan Brooke the Chief of the Imperial General Staff and in 1942, in an unorthodox move, the Prime Minister Winston Churchill appointed Grigg Secretary of State for War as a replacement for David Margesson whom he dismissed after the fall of Singapore to the Japanese. The timing of Temple-Morris’ appointment as a judge, albeit to replace one who had died, thus creating a vacancy in Cardiff East, the appointment of Grigg as War Secretary necessitating his finding a seat in the House of Commons and the ease with which the Cardiff Tories selected Grigg as their candidate at the behest of party headquarters even though, as he admitted himself, he had no previous connection with the constituency or the Conservative Party strongly suggests that the whole process was engineered by the government.

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