"I Thought You Knew"

The words from five horses' mouths over the last day and a half. 

Here are now the facts as I have established them. Before the close of nominations, every Labour member of Durham County Council for a ward in North West Durham, and every Labour member of Lanchester Parish Council, was tipped off in the post that Laura Pidcock and her menagerie of hangers on were under investigation for links to numerous terrorist organisations and to all the usual scary foreign countries.

The postmarks were not local, or these letters would have been binned as the usual crank material that politicians received all the time. Some or all of the recipients then went to see Pidcock, whose answer was not the one word, "No." At that point, all of them refused to sign her nomination papers, something that even Labour Councillors who would not have spat on Hilary Armstrong if she had been on fire still managed to do for her.

Some Councillors forwarded the letter to the Police. The Police have my fingerprints, my DNA, and so on, meaning that there is no possible link between the Pidcock letter and me, or else they would have found it. Does that sound familiar? It certainly should.

And the Police did not simply tell the Councillors to ignore this letter, as, for example, they did with the letter that Simon Henig and his cousins in the Crown Prosecution Service have tried and failed to pin on me. Rather, the order has clearly come down to fob them off because what they had been told was true and this investigation really was in progress. But these are not people to be fobbed off. They recognised instantly what was going on. As, no doubt, they were supposed to. 

On Friday, a copy of the letter that I had always been intended to receive finally popped through my letterbox. Had I had it before the close of nominations, then Pidcock would never have been on the ballot paper, because the Constituency Labour Party, which had never asked for her, had already been determined to deselect her, but had been thwarted by the calling of a snap General Election. Had I had this before the close of nominations, then the CLP would have had its second imposed candidate in as many years. 

As it is, though, no Councillor signed Pidcock's nomination papers, even in addition to the fact that several of them had in any case been anywhere between highly likely and absolutely certain to vote for me. As I ask all of you in North West Durham to do.