The Best Things Come

"I don't know what took you so bloody long to say it," were the words of an extremely senior figure in these parts in response to my previous post that I would stand for Parliament against Durham County Council's scrapping of transport to Catholic schools. After all, this has now been going on for weeks.

My hysterical baiters who have tried to post abusive comments on that do not seem to grasp that the people who have in some cases come close to begging me to do this have known me for anything up to 30 years, went to school with me, taught me, served on Governing Bodies with me (especially the one most affected by this policy, from which I was removed to the institution's incandescence by a politician whose own party subsequently forbade him from seeking re-election), and various combinations of those previous dealings with me.

Then there are the people, still hugely influential in their communities, who have either left the Labour Party or could do so perfectly happily. When the former government abolished Derwentside District Council, it deprived them of the greater part of their incomes. So they owe the Labour Party absolutely nothing, apart from a good, hard slap should the opportunity arise. Again, these are people who have known me very well indeed for a very long time, and several of whom were devoted to my late father. On that basis, a number of them always wanted me as Hilary Armstrong's successor.

Words cannot express the depth of their very public loathing for the probable Labour candidate for a new seat formed out of most or all of North West Durham and most or all of that candidate's present constituency, North Durham. In a good many wards, I honestly cannot imagine who would sign Kevan Jones's nomination papers. And people notice that in areas such as this. North West Durham, please note, is where the word came down from on high that the Labour candidate simply had to be a Catholic, despite the fact that the Labour Party's own rules ban Catholics from all-women shortlists.

But by no means all of my Labour or ex-Labour supporters are Catholics. The voters angered by the school transport policy are enough to save my deposit and to cut the Labour majority, which fell by 50 per cent last time, sufficiently to give this seat to someone else under First Past The Post. They are enough to keep me in beyond the first or second rounds of an AV election, especially if there were Far Left or Far Right candidates, which there would be. But they are not the sum total of my support, and certainly not if second and subsequent preferences came into play, especially against quite so divisive a figure as Kevan Jones.

I could reasonably hope for the second preferences of everyone whose first preference was for Watts Stelling, and I could realistically hope for him and his Councillor supporters to say so, in which case I would gladly return the compliment, since nothing could persuade me to endorse in any way either Kevan Jones or one of the Coalition parties. My dealings with him and with them have always been more than cordial, and his and their co-operation with my principal base, the sane section of the old Derwentside Labour, were exemplary.

My views make me the natural second preference candidate for Labour voters, who would undoubtedly be the single largest bloc in the first round. Many of my views also make me the natural second preference candidate for Northern, rural Tories, who have no chance of winning here and whose party no longer speaks for them, as its candidate here will almost certainly make abundantly clear; again, I could reasonably expect key local figures to say, if not that, then something as near to it as made no practical difference. I hate to break the news to certain people who read this blog, but they have met me before, you know. Funny emails introducing me as if I were a stranger to them would not be sympathetically received.

And so one could go on. Pray for my health. Email me. See the PayPal button on this site. And, to make this a lot easier, vote Yes to AV.