Winner in 2016: Alex Cole-Hamilton (Liberal Democrats) EDINBURGH Western is another part of the capital where the Conservatives should be in the mix, but where they’ve instead been left stranded by anti-SNP tactical voting. The equivalent Westminster constituency of Edinburgh West was continuously held by the Tories from 1931 until 1997, but in retrospect the crucial turning-point was 1983, when it suddenly became a Tory-Liberal marginal in 1983 due to the rise of the Liberal-SDP Alliance. The Liberals and then the newly-merged Liberal Democrats had a succession of near-misses in 1983, 1987 and 1992, with the Tories’ margins of victory ranging from just 1.1% to 2.5%. The constituency then became the scene of a mini-crisis for the Tories in 1994, when the incumbent MP James Douglas-Hamilton inherited a peerage.
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