Category: Elections

Selecting the select few

Meetings come in a few briefly described types: those where the result is stitched up beforehand and the members are a rubber stamp; those of high tension and raised voices with fortunes and careers made or broken on a knife-edge; ones where the members doze while the few who are interested get on with the business; and those like tonight’s where nationally important issues are at stake but everyone is too polite to make a thing of it.

This is a bizarre election:  you should never have constituencies still without candidates barely a month from the poll, but this has been a bizarre time for politics for a long time, and several Conservative Associations were having their selections tonight – and some still have not had theirs, and at least one has had a spill already and needs a new man. This is unprecedented. On the Labour side it is worse – they find themselves with a slate of candidates full of those whose advancement came through publishing weird, hatred-laden conspiracy theories, and they cannot be removed or there would be few candidates left. (My, the next Parliament will be fun.) That is where we are though.

Back to tonight and a packed village hall. Three candidates, all of them good, all knowing their political careers are on the line. All have a line in big speeches, which helps I suppose.  Only one is local though, and that counts in a parochial part of the county like ours.  It does not help that it was all last-minute, our longstanding member having deselected himself.  (The number of defenestrations has been an unwonted phenomena.)

We have to ask how far personal favours go.  It is for local members of course, and if one candidate was obviously parachuted in at the will of CCHQ, that does not give her a free pass, especially against a local lass.

They were all impressive.  I thought we might skip over how they had voted in the Referendum, which would have been damning, but no: out it came and was damning indeed.  Next – would they turn renegade like the man they were to replace?  All were ready for that question and all had pledges of loyalty of course.  (Every man has his price.  I do not want to find out what it is.)

No favours; that is what I decided when I went in.  Come off it though – politics is all about personal favours and whom you can best assume will give a leg-up when you need it. I have shamelessly schmoozed cabinet ministers (only to find them in turn ejected from their offices, so perhaps I am best avoided).  “The best for the nation” often comes down to “if they are all equally good, who is a friend?”

Three on the stand, all with jawdropping achievements in their CVs – I reflected on how empty mine would be were I invited to try my hand. Not a single Protestant among them disappointingly: an unheard of position not so long since. All otherwise had good records and good pitches.

I know who had the best pitch and the best presentation, but only one had voted Leave in the Referendum, and for some in the hall that was the decider, for enough to secure the nomination.

I wonder how often the same game has been played out in village halls up and down the kingdom.

Bizarre self-defenestrations

The election campaign has only just begun and is already looking like the most bizarre one in living memory. We expect the howls of faux-outrage when a leading politician says something that can be twisted in an outraged misquote to build a Twitterstorm, and we expect tumults over tiny things that convulse political insiders but leave the rest of the voters just puzzled, if uncomfortable that something has happened, and even if we do not know what it was, well, it was bad if those who understand it think it was.

We have also come to expect SkyNews acting as the broadcasting wing of the Labour Party.

The Liberal Democrat leaflets with dishonest bar charts and made-up voting figures? That’s practically compulsory in any election

No; the bizarre thing is the pattern in the sudden loss of leading candidates, and the reappearance of others thought disposed of.

Tom Watson – the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party no less. If you are heading into an election with an unpopular leader seen widely as a lunatic, then you need an apparently sane man aboard as a reassurance, but now he is gone. Even as his papers were about to go in, he is gone – out of the deputy-leadership and not standing for his seat. The timing is unspeakable. He was the one the Labour Party kept in so the Party did not look too swivel-eyed. Except of course that Tom Watson entered the ‘loony’ category when he championed ‘Nick’ the fantasist in his accusations against respected, innocent figures. Momentum tried to depose Tom Watson for no being a Communist, but perhaps the dead knife was wielded by one of his victims: Harvey Proctor pledged to stand against him, and remind the voters of what he had done.

Then came Chris Williamson – kicked out because he could not see that expressions commonplace in Germany in the 1930s might not be appropriate in a civilised society. He has reappeared, not for Labour but standing against their candidate, as an independent, at least at the time of writing. Regrettably, he is unlikely to split the red vote too badly. Only a cynic surely would suggest that he is just after the cash settlement that outgoing MPs get only if they stand and are defeated.

Then there are Brexit Party candidates standing aside in droves, on the basis that they do not want to win votes that could more usefully go elsewhere.

This is only Day 1. What monsters will the next 6 weeks bring us? Popcorn please.

Honest, Georgian elections

The vigorous elections of the Georgian Age are a matter of legend and literature: the riotous county elections, the backroom nod in the pocket boroughs (and the evictions of those who voted the wrong way), the language of public debate that caused lynch mobs to surge through the street, and – first and foremost – the bribery.

The Georgian Age brought Britain untold wealth, some of it generated in the hell-hole slave plantations, but most not; most was honestly earned through industry and trade. It brought us a flowering of culture, celebrated today in endless Jane Austen adaptations, and these give some glimpse of how the British world was growing. All this was in a time when political turmoil was the norm.

It was more honest though.

As I read the literature, there were three ways to get elected to the House of Commons in the Golden Age before the Reform Acts: an open election in a county or a populous borough; appointment to a pocket or rotten borough owned by a patron; or bribery – heavy bribery. A pocket borough was effectively what we call a ‘safe seat’ these days, one of those ones where they vote for the usual party even if its candidate tortures puppies for fun.

Bribery now, that is familiar to us today. We pretend to look askance at dishonesty but millions change hands to buy votes – the voters insist on it.

In the Eighteenth Century the candidates were more honest that ours: the candidate paid heavy bribes from his own pocket. In our day he pays from the voters’ pockets.

Books

101 Uses for a Dumped MP

With happy abandon, many MPs are abandoning the Commons, before they are kicked out on their backsides by a relieved, vengeful electorate. Those confident smiles: have they even thought about what they will do when they emerge into the real world with the rest of us? Do they think they have a future? Bless!

Here’s part one of 101 uses for a dumped MP I wrote down on an old envelope at lunchtime:

  • Reality TV show. Just don’t ask for a £million: you’re not worth it, and if you are, you won’t want to be seen in that trash, even with a strong medicament.
  • (Top slots by the way are I’m a Has Been, Get me a Camera, and Strictly Come Off It: talk to my agent; she’s good.)
  • Start a think-tank: but first find a wealthy donor who is prepared to pay you a salary out of pity. You don’t have to produce anything of value; just collect the cheque at the end of the month.
  • After-dinner speaking. If you were a Prime Minister or Speaker, you may earn five figures for a slot or six for a conference; four figures for a senior cabinet minister.  Anyone else, well, you can always do children’s parties.
  • Bag a pundit slot on a politics programme: but there are very few going and only to those with wisdom and charisma, so that’s most ex-MPs out already.
  • Sue a journalist who pretended you wanted to be on a reality TV show – that is really, really defamatory.
  • Chair a quango. There are plenty out there, usually created to give jobs to otherwise unemployable Blairites, but maybe they will expand to let you in if you mouth Common Purpose platitudes?  They may employ you as a condolence for your powerlessness. You will still be powerless.
  • Start a charity. Two versions:  the genuine, voluntary charity if you actually hope to go back into politics, and you can still think that if you like, or the better route is a grant-farm, where you can be paid your old salary out of taxpayers’ money without actually doing any good; just like the old days.
  • A regular slot on Classic FM: just leave it long enough so they forget about, well, you know.
  • That thing that Ben Shapiro does, with an on-line politics / interviews show?  Shapiro makes a mint, but then he is an intellectual giant and you are not.
  • Beg on the streets.  It’s practically what you have been doing for the last few years anyway.

And the most radical suggestion of them all:

  • Get a real job like a normal person.

See also

Books