Spoor had planned to retire at the next general election, and the Bishop Auckland Constituency Labour Party had selected Hugh Dalton as its prospective parliamentary candidate. However, Dalton was already MP for the then-marginal Peckham constituency in South London, and had sought a safer seat. He would have had to resign his Peckham seat to stand in Bishop Auckland. To add to the complications, even if he had been minded to do that, a further complication was that the prospective Labour candidate for Peckham was John Beckett, the sitting MP for Gateshead.[2]
To avoid triggering two further by-elections, a Labour candidate was needed who would agree to stand down at the next general election. The seventy members of Bishop Auckland Constituency Labour Party's general committee unanimously chose Hugh Dalton's wife Ruth, because she could be relied on to resign in favour of her husband as soon as Parliament was dissolved; no other candidate was even considered.[2]
The Liberal Party candidate was Aaron Curry, who had contested Houghton-le-Spring at the 1923 and 1924 general elections, and who had also been unsuccessful at the Wallsend by-election in 1926. The Conservative Party, which had not contested Bishop Auckland in 1924, selected as its candidate H. Thompson, who had not previously contested a Parliamentary election.
On a slightly reduced turnout, Ruth Dalton held the seat for Labour, becoming the thirteenth woman elected to the House of Commons.[3] Her share of the vote was slightly increased over Spoor's 1924 result, but a majority greatly increased by the division of the non-Labour vote between two candidates.
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