"The Bloke With The Most Votes Won"?

I could have lived with that.

But in Lanchester in 2003, there was no selection process of any kind. The first that I heard of the Labour nominees was when I was presented with the nomination papers in the pub. Yet I was chairing the Branch, and had been doing so for some years.

Nor are we talking about candidacy for a voluntary position here.

Then as now, being a councillor at District or County level was really quite generously remunerated, with several additional little perks. Although this has since changed, in those days it even involved membership of the local government pensions scheme.

All while having any other job that you liked. For example, putting the kettle on in the office of Hilary Armstrong, an MP who was not famous as the most attentive of constituency Members.

There is a very special level of entitlement that manifests itself in having one's only constituency office in one's house. Perhaps one needs to be the offspring of one's immediate predecessor in the same seat? Another in that position was Greville Janner.

But I digress.

Several ongoing years chairing the Branch, various other positions at Constituency and District levels, a full four-year term on the Parish Council, two school governorships within the ward, and, frankly, no one else who wanted the District nomination.

Or so it was assumed.

But I had restricted my thinking to credible candidates, rather to someone who had only ever been a student politician (something that I had never been, having been politically active before I went to university, and remaining so here rather than there throughout), and who essentially remained so: a leafleter, perhaps a canvasser at a push, but with no discernible aptitude to anything more than that, and a very recently co-opted Parish Councillor due to a death in the absence of absolutely anyone else at all.

That was the High Blair Period, when what mattered was having the look of a boyband member and the culture of a boyband fan. Books, broadsheets and Radio Four were Old Labour. 

Everyone at District level, where they were known for putting the phone down on Hilary Armstrong's staff and possibly on her person as an expression of contempt, had assumed that I would be the third candidate in Lanchester, alongside the two sitting councillors who were seeking re-election.

They spent several years thereafter asking me at every opportunity, "Have you never thought of standing for the council?" It went right through me. The memory of it still does.

I would have settled for that. I would cheerfully have been a councillor for Lanchester for as long as the voters had wanted me. And for as long as my health had appeared to hold up. But, although that question was there 12 years ago, I did not then know about it.

To this day, the whole thing feels like a kind of identity theft. Someone else stole my life. And, as set out above, I was indeed robbed.

Of course, the electorate was having none of Neil Fleming. Alas, he took down a highly serious figure with him. That ought to have been the end of him. But it wasn't. From Carlisle to Stockton South, it still isn't.