I do not know who will be at next Thursday's hustings, to be held at 7:30pm in Lanchester Methodist Church. But I know who will not be there. The BNP, mercifully. Or the Labour candidate, a Lanchester resident and Parish Councillor, Pat Glass. Apparently, she is "too busy".
In her place is coming, not her agent, who is a County Councillor for Lanchester and the Labour Chief Whip on Durham County Council, but her son, who might not even live in the constituency. In any case, I hope that he dazzles everyone with tales of her heroic doings at precisely eight meetings of Lanchester Parish Council. Or, if she turns up on Tuesday, nine, an average of three per year. Those constitute the sum total of her political experience, as is evident from the leaflet that she has already put out, which forswears any desire for a parliamentary seat and expresses utter astonishment at having been selected. Why would her agent, my old friend who barely knows her, have put that out...?
This insult to the electorate simply cannot be allowed to happen. The Tory candidate's very name remains unknown even to her own activists. The Lib Dem is a septuagenarian County Councillor who is doing it because politics is his hobby; he has no desire to be an MP. The Independent Watts Stelling, for whom I would vote if I were not a candidate, is also getting on a bit, and his real concern is to highlight certain local issues. There are nothing more than rumours of UKIP. There are not even rumours of the Hard Left factions such as have tried their luck in the past. The BNP is the BNP.
The five hundred pound deposit is not a problem, obviously. In fact, it has been sitting in a safe place for over a year. But I refuse to be a paper candidate. I insist on being in it to win it. For that, I need ten thousand pounds by the early part of next week. If you want me - if you want anything better than the above - then this blog has a PayPal button, and my email address is davidaslindsay@hotmail.com.
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"For that, I need ten thousand pounds by the early part of next week. "
ReplyDeleteSorry, I can't get it to you until Friday.
If you really could get it to me, then that would be all right, if a bit nerve-wracking.
ReplyDeleteWe have enough for a deposit-saving campaign. But that won't do. In it to win it, or not at all. Just read the whole post.
To be honest, I'm not sure it's going to be money well spent. I'm new to your blog, but various friends told me it was being written by a well-connected politically astute operator. But you find yourself ten large short just days before the election.
ReplyDeleteWhen did you first realise funds would be a problem? What steps did you take to address this? Who are your contacts and how did you work them?
I need to know you're as serious and as capable as you've been advertised as being.
I am not "ten short", but that is as much as a campaign is allowed to cost, so that is how much I'm looking for. No risk will I take on this.
ReplyDeleteIf I move from being in a position to mount a creditable campaign, to being in a position to mount one on that scale, then I will be the first past the post on the night, I guarantee it.
Do please email me.
Wait a minute - do you mean you already have some funds and want donations to top it up to ten grand, or that you need donations of ten grand?
ReplyDeleteThe former. But anything left over (ha, ha) will be carried over to the think tank, which is slowly cooking away nicely.
ReplyDeleteHow much do you need just to get to the campaign spending limit? I'd need to know more about the think tank before I was prepared to donate to that, and there might be legal issues with using money donated for one purpose for a different purpose later?
ReplyDelete"No risk will I take on this."
ReplyDeleteSorry David, if you're not prepared to take risks for what you believe in, I'm not sure why I should.
I'm out.
Sir Blanc, you know what I mean - I am determined to be in a position, not merely to win Brownie points for having been plucky and for having made a stand, but to win.
ReplyDeleteNorth Star, way ahead of you. Email me.
For goodness' sake, David. Listen to yourself. The Labour Party is being massively outspent by the Tories and Lord Ashcroft, but they're not giving up. Why do you suddenly need to spend at least as much as - and quite possibly more than - your opponents? Haven't you been working the seat already?
ReplyDeleteThe implication of your campaign message is that you belive only people who have experience on local authorities should be allowed to stand for parliamentary elections. Is this a fair assessment?
ReplyDelete"I am determined to be in a position, not merely to win Brownie points for having been plucky and for having made a stand, but to win."
ReplyDeleteThen why don't you have the money?
Anonymous, not at all, but I do believe that it calls for people (Watts Stelling and the Lib Dem Owen Temple, for example) with rather more political experience than attendance at eight Parish Council meetings, all of them in the last three years.
ReplyDeleteRav, I refuse to be a paper candidate. It takes ten grand to win a seat, since that is the maximum allowable. So that is what I want, and will insist upon to myself. The alternative here this time is too bad for me to permit myself to indulge in mere gestures, or content myself with doing creditably well. Yes, that would have happened anyway. But it is not good enough.
I have the money to stand, pardmo. I have always had it. What I need now is the maximum allowable in order to be able to win. Under the current appalling circumstances, absolutely nothing less will do.
ReplyDeleteNo, David. It takes work to win a seat. Sounds to me like you're just lazy - that or looking for excuses for defeat before you've even been defeated. Pitiful.
ReplyDeletepardmo, I have always had the money to stand, but under the current appalling circumstances I will settle for nothing less than the maximum allowable in order to win. Thus resourced, I certainly would win.
ReplyDeleteRav, you don't know what you are talking about. Anyone with anything worthwhile to say, the public discussion here has reached, if not passed, its natural limit, so email me and we can go into detail.
How are they getting away with being allowed to spend that much? It should be the one leaflet that you get delivered free by the Post Office and that should be it, no further spending allowed.
ReplyDeleteIf the only way to get views like yours into Parliament is as an Independent then the Labour party has ceased to be any use to anybody. We all knew that this women only bollocks was on its way so I don't blame you for getting out. If it hadn't been for that the Labour selection would have been yours for the asking.
Does this Pat Glass have any political views or has nobody asked her? She was probably told that it was souped up social work and opening fetes so she had to be in the constituency from Thursday night to Monday night and scrutiny of legislation can go bugger itself.
Please do not swear on my blog.
ReplyDeleteBut please do email me.
Simple question - if you don't get £10k, will you stand, yes or no?
ReplyDeleteIf 10k guarantees you a win, why not take out a loan? The repayments will be very small against an MPs salary
ReplyDeletePol, been there, done that, not going there again. (Nice to have had an unpublishable comment from dear old Jon, who clearly cannot conceive of this king's ransom. Life has not been kind to Jon in so very many ways...)
ReplyDeleteBishop Auckland, I don't anticipate that problem. But what are you doing, just to make sure?
Jon has spent it all on drugs and the ongoing turning of his wife's liver into foie gras.
ReplyDeleteFoie gras, indeed! People like that may have made money in the Eighties, sufficient to send their mentally defective spawn to institutions capable of stealing for them the university places that should have gone to someone else. But Jon's only class is Class A. Margaret Thatcher has an awful lot to answer for.
ReplyDeleteI fear wr're veering off topic - David, has anyone emailed about you about your small financial difficulties since your pleas?
ReplyDeleteAt least there will be no second generation of spawn, nothing grows on a beaten track. When she popped his cherry, your words to his face were "Everyone has to start somewhere, I suppose".
ReplyDeleteYou are probably going to tell me to get back on topic. Fair enough, the cheque's in the post.
Riki, yes, which is not bad going in three and half midweek hours. But of course I am not going to discuss details on here. Feel free to email me if you can help.
ReplyDeleteIt has always been one of your most notable features that you inspired quite such fierce and even violent loyalty despite being one of the most mild-mannered of men yourself.
ReplyDeleteA lot of people will just need a nudge now that the Election has been called, and this post will be one of David's many nudges.
ReplyDeleteAnonymous, tell me about it, a blow-in county councillor who didn't renominate David as a school governor because he had left Labour was deselected by the branch (mostly the work of the man who is now agent to Pat Glass) and driven from public life. He still lives here but no one ever sees him.
David would never do that sort of thing but he has never been short of people who would do it for him without him even asking them. Pat Glass, politically active for all of three years, had better watch her back.
I don't believe she'll stand in the end. Politically inexperienced, she has been badly affected by the posts and comments on here, especially since she knows that they are what a lot of people in the local party think.
ReplyDeleteDavid was very close to the old Derwentside leadership in particular. Now bitterly anti-Labour, they and theirs see him as the legitimate heir, as David himself might say it's a kind of Jacobitism. Pat's pressganged, invisible agent was one of that leadership.
He was also very devoted to David's father, a sort of local saint, a status that David himself is rapidly approaching in certain circles.
ReplyDeleteIf elections were won by old ladies' prayers David would be in already. His campaign posters will hang for decades alongside and as equal to pictures of the Sacred Heart, the Virgin Mary and successive Popes. The Sacred Heart one also sells healthily among the Salvation Army.
ReplyDeleteBy this point in the next Parliament, David will be in one House or the other. The only question is which one.
ReplyDeleteWhoever this Jon is he seems to have clashed with David when they were students. He should ask himself why he still feels the need to come back for more. In his heart he knows that David is a very great man.
I am told that teachers and contemporaries could see it at school and that the great and the good of Durham University have always seen it even if the students in his day could not because they found it threatening to their public school superiority. Obviously in at least one case they still do.
Neither his teachers and contemporaries at school nor the great and the good of his university are the only people who see it now. By this point in the next Parliament, David will be in one House or the other. The only question is which one.
Is it still going ahead on the night of the first Leaders' Debate?
ReplyDeleteDunno, I'm not organising either.
ReplyDeleteSo, R, Kevin and Tim, how much have you donated?
ReplyDeleteDavid, how much do you still need?
I'm hardly going to discuss that on here.
ReplyDeleteEh? Here is exactly where you started discussing it.
ReplyDelete"I'm hardly going to discuss that on here."
ReplyDeleteDavid, this shouldn't be a big secret. Fundraising campaigns all over the globe make a big thing about how much they've managed to raise, not least in order to encourage people to push them up to and over their target. The firm I work for is currently raising tens of millions for a large capital project, and the figures are available online for all to see.
Bunging a hundred quid to someone who's only raised a negligible sum (if that) is almost certainly a complete waste of money. Bunging a hundred quid to someone who's only £500-1000 off target is a very different matter.
So which category do you fall into?
The latter, if either. But that's my last word on the subject on here. People who wish to make offers may feel free to email me.
ReplyDelete