Successfully Resolved?

Including a seconder who was a former District Councillor for this ward, more people in Lanchester signed my nomination papers than turned out today to canvass for Luke Akehurst. Unless I am very much mistaken, only one person in this photograph lives in Lanchester.

Whoever this Chris Bradburn is, then he had better take more votes than the winning candidate's margin of victory over Akehurst. If he failed to take at least the 414 that I did last time, then I ought to have seen this through even if I had dropped dead at the count, whether of natural causes or otherwise. Pretty much my dream way to go.

Bradburn is one of the Workers Party of Britain's 152 candidates. Yes, 152. Great Britain contains 632 constituencies. The Workers Party is contesting only one in four of them. Its long-announced candidate at Blaydon and Consett, where it has some established presence in Chopwell (of course; if you know, you know), has disappeared. Yet it simply has to contest North Durham, in the person of a candidate of whom no one has ever heard, who was probably selected after my nomination papers had gone in on Tuesday morning, and who was certainly selected after readers of this site knew that those papers had been completed, which was last Sunday evening.

The Workers Party informs us that, "Having listed a number of pre-approved candidates, the Workers Party has engaged with Independents and other groups who made representations to us. We have successfully resolved a large number of contested seats and considered numerous submissions from non-party Independents." Really? Who? Where? There is no Workers Party or Independent candidate for three of the four seats among which North West Durham has been divided, and that party never even acknowledged receipt of my email about North Durham. Bradburn had better do seriously well.

No signatory to Bradburn's nomination papers rings any bell in my head from the last 30 and more years of political and community activism in the old Derwentside area, and he is related to at least two of them, including a proposer who is presumably his wife. I am tempted to hope that she is his mother, since for all the stick that some people give me for living with mine, she has never proposed me for public office. Likewise, Bradburn's last assentor, the one without whom he would never have made it onto the ballot paper, is what? His father? His brother? His son? Still, that is where my vote is going to have to go.

Even if it were the last vote that I ever cast. While I still want the vacant position to which I was elected unopposed a year ago, my magazine and my thinktank are my focus now, with other projects in development. I live in this country rather than in any of the ones that it bombs, so, since I am not an hereditary peer, no General Election result in my lifetime has affected my life, and whatever the outcome this time, it is going to be no exception; even if I had indeed been the umpteenth Lord Lindsay of Lanchester, then the impact on me would have been a one-off, 27 years ago. Speaking of Lanchester, I have got the message, so you are going to have to find a new swot to beat up. Everyone who has been in touch to say that they had wanted to vote for me and now would not be voting at all, including some who would have been first time voters, you cannot begin to know how sorry I am.