Former Labour MP Mike Amesbury has said he will stand down from parliament after he was sentenced for punching a constituent, which will trigger the first by-election since Sir Keir Starmer became prime minister.
The Runcorn and Helsby MP said on Monday that he would begin the process of winding up his office and resigning from the House of Commons “as soon as possible”.
He was given a 10-week prison sentence, suspended for two years, for assaulting the man. Amesbury told the BBC he regretted the attack “every moment, every day”.
The by-election will be seen as a gauge of the popularity not only of the ruling Labour administration after eight months in power but also of the populist right-wing Reform UK, which is currently slightly ahead in an aggregate of opinion polls from Politico.
Potential Labour candidates are said to include local figures such as Karen Shore, deputy leader of Cheshire West and Chester council, and Sam Corcoran, a Cheshire East councillor. Jonathan Ashworth, a former frontbencher who lost his Leicester South seat last summer, has not ruled out trying to stand.
Amesbury was first elected in 2017 and held his seat with a majority of nearly 15,000.
In the general election last July, Amesbury won 22,358 votes, the Reform candidate picked up 7,662 votes and the Conservatives got 6,756.
Since then, however, Labour’s popularity nationally has nosedived while Reform has enjoyed a surge in the opinion polls putting it around one point ahead of Labour, with the Tories lagging in third place.
Amesbury pleaded guilty in January to assaulting 45-year old Paul Fellows in a street in Cheshire, punching him and shouting “you won’t threaten your MP again will you?”. He lost the Labour whip as a result of the incident but avoided jail after successfully appealing against his 10-week prison sentence.
As part of his suspended sentence, Amesbury must undertake an anger management course, 200 hours of unpaid work, complete an alcohol monitoring programme and do 20 days of rehabilitation work.
He told the BBC that he would like to apologise in person to Fellows. He said his “anxiety levels” had been heightened in the run-up to the incident after he had had to deal with death threats.
“So, when someone approached me at ten past two in the morning it was quite natural to be on edge and anxious — and I got it wrong,” he said. “I just saw red — a moment of madness which I will regret for the rest of my life.”