 He was elected with a majority of 13,214 over the incumbent, Labour MP Walter Ayles, who had twice won the seat, in 1923 and 1929, when the non-Labour vote was split between two other candidates.That there was no Conservative candidate, in an election that saw the Conservatives win 55% of the national vote, does much to explain the size of Bernays's majority; and this fact, coupled with Ayles's record of winning when he had two opponents rather than one – he lost to a single Liberal rival in both 1922 and 1924, while beating a Liberal and a Conservative in 1923 and a Liberal and an independent in 1929 – likewise explains why, throughout the period 1931–1935, one of Bernays's chief preoccupations was to ensure that the Conservatives should hold him in sufficiently high esteem to refrain from opposing him at the next election.