Brighton Pavilion (UK Parliament constituency) Labour Party began service as MP for thirteen years by winning the two subsequent elections. The Conservatives' share of the vote has declined at every election there since 1979. In July 2007, the Green Party selected Caroline Lucas to contest the seat, at which point she was neither Leader nor Principal Speaker for the party. In November 2009, Charlotte Vere was selected as the Conservative Party candidate at an open primary attended by local Conservative Party members and residents. In January 2010, the Liberal Democrats also selected a female candidate, Bernadette Millam. Labour had selected Nancy Platts, a local campaigner
Smethwick in the 1964 general election which had resulted in the party gaining a narrow five seat majority. However, in Smethwick, the Conservative candidate, Griffiths gained the seat and unseated the sitting Labour MP, Patrick Gordon Walker, who had served as Shadow Foreign Secretary for the eighteen months prior to the election. Griffiths did, however, poll 436 votes less in 1964 than when he stood unsuccessfully for the Smethwick constituency in 1959: Figures nevertheless show that votes for Labour's Patrick Gordon Walker had been in decline from the 1950 general election onwards, culminating in this 1964 defeat by Peter Griffiths. See Smethwick (UK Parliament constituency) for