The end of a generation

Ernest Millington who was the last survivor of the House of Commons from before the 1945 general election, has died. (BBC News, Daily Telegraph obituary) He was originally elected in a by-election in April 1945 for the Common Wealth Party, and was the only Common Wealth MP to hold his seat in the 1945 general election, but he joined the Labour Party in 1946.

In 2006 he succeeded John Profumo as what we might term the "Grandfather of the House", the surviving former MP who had entered the House of Commons the earliest. I am not sure who now holds the distinction - Michael Foot and John Freeman, both first elected in the 1945 general election, are both still alive, but I am not sure who took the oath first.

With Millington's death comes the passing of an entire political era's generation of MPs.