[5] The South Leeds Liberals held a selection meeting on 26 August 1892 and, having considered a number of possible candidates, they decided to invite John Lawson Walton to defend the seat.
At the 1892 general election, just a few weeks earlier, he had been the Liberal candidate for Leeds Central when he lost narrowly to the sitting Conservative MP G W Balfour.
[10] But Solly’s acceptance may have been premature because Leeds Trade Council were unable to approve him until the Railway Labourers’ Union agreed to contribute a substantial sum towards election expenses.
[11] Neither of these potential candidacies came to anything however as the Leeds Trades Council decided it would be counter-productive to stand a labour candidate and risk splitting the anti-Tory vote.
At a more peaceful meeting the next night in Leeds, Mahon accused Lawson Walton of stirring up and inciting the attackers on the assumption they were supporters of the Liberal cause of Home Rule.
[13] Champion wrote an angry letter to The Times complaining that Walton had held a meeting on 16 September in which he had done his best to ‘inflame the minds of his partisans against the labour candidate and his supporters’.
[14] Another Labour meeting on 19 September, addressed by Keir Hardie pressed the issue of the representation of the working classes and whether this could ever adequately be done by the middle-class capitalists and professional men who dominated Liberal politics.
It was said, admittedly by his opponents, that there had been ample time between the pointing out of the defect and the deadline for nomination to get a qualified supporter to sign the paper and so make it legal.
[17] The failure of Mahon to get himself on the ballot paper, real or manufactured, solved the problem for the traditional working class voters of South Leeds of deciding which non-Conservative candidate to support.
It is difficult from the results of by-elections in the early part of the 1892-95 Parliament to see a swing in public opinion away from the minority Liberal government of W E Gladstone and towards the Unionist parties.