It is more than possible that every Labour member of Durham County Council in North West Durham voted for me last year. The reasons ranged from being practically family to me, to hating my guts but hating Laura Pidcock's even more. I can think of no more than two possible exceptions, and of only one on whose vote for Pidcock anyone would put any money.
Having been liberated, voluntarily or otherwise, next May, several of them will sign my nomination papers in 2024, 30 years after more than one of them had first told me that I would be the MP here "eventually". Several of them offered to sign my nomination papers in 2019, but they were persuaded that then was not the time to be expelled from the Labour Party. Like a lot of other people, they have been introducing me at funerals as "our next MP", and then as "the man who should have been our MP", for about 15 years, or possibly slightly longer. They will resume doing so when political funerals of the old school resumed.
Someone who had been elected as a County Councillor for the first time days before, and who used to be a Parish Councillor with me, did sign Pidcock's nomination papers in 2017. But even he did not bother two years later, when they were signed by no one who had ever been elected above Parish level, if at all. Whereas my proposer was a former Deputy Leader of Durham County Council. I am going to go out on a limb here and say that the Labour County Councillors all voted for me. Certainly, none of them turned up to the count. Not one.
After a four-year campaign, will I manage a saved deposit, and more votes than the margin of victory? Certainly. Third place? Probably. Second? Why not? First? Never say never.
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