Throughout the political changes which swept the country in 1997, and the boundary changes which shook up Staffordshire in 1995, some things remained constant, of which the Staffordshire South constituency is a prime example.
The local member, Sir Patrick Cormack, has represented the seat since its creation (as Staffordshire South West) in 1974, and has become something of a Westminster institution in the process. The boundary changes transferred some 13,000 voters to Stafford constituency but even so the Conservative majority in 1997 was more than 7,000, confirming it as the Tories’ safest seat in Staffordshire.
It is not hard to see why the seat should have proved so loyal to the party; it is something of a hybrid without a clear centre of gravity to provide a Labour-friendly urban core. Instead, it combines tracts of agricultural land with the fringes of commuter-filled dormitory suburbs of the West Midlands, such as Wombourne and Perton.
The workers in the indigenous aggregates industry, mainly serving Birmingham, are thus heavily outnumbered by an unusually high proportion of people in managerial or technical employment.