"Your Potential Constituents"?

I have just had an email from someone here in the North West Durham constituency, asking me to promise to do something "if [I] win". It was sent this afternoon.

But no. No more elections for me. You are going to have to find another swot to beat up. I am older than the Chancellor of the Exchequer, older than the Secretary of State for Health, and older than the Deputy Leader of the Labour Party. I was older than both of the unsuccessful candidates for Labour Leader, and I have now been older than two MPs for this seat. Two.

I remain, however, the latest born candidate ever to have sought election above Parish level in Lanchester. For the County or the previous District Council, no one has ever contested this Ward who had been born later than 23rd September 1977. That is unlikely to change next year. It is not the only thing that is unlikely to change next year.

I am occasionally told that of course I faced stiff competition here, that it was an unusually strong field. Self-regarding middle-class drivel. This Ward has had the same Councillor for as long as I have been old enough to vote, and I have now retired from electoral politics. The right-wing Labour machine made flesh, he must have been 50 when he received my first vote for anything, cast in 1996 while I was wearing a school uniform, and he is still there.

The Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats do not even field serious candidates against him, putting up people from miles away, and not even putting out leaflets. Neither of those candidates even attended the count in 2017, when he once again sailed to the top of the poll merely for having remained alive for another four years. I defy anyone to list his accomplishments in office. On the contrary, it has been on his watch that the place has moved from having been on the beaten track to being in the middle of nowhere. We cripples would leave if we could. Although I am not sure quite how.

Rumour has it that he is going to retire next year. Believe it when you see it. Why bother now? And retire in favour of whom, exactly? In assiduously ensuring that he had no rival, he has ensured that he has no successor. He would never allow the seat to fall out of Labour hands. In any case, that would not be very likely in an area where being middle-class corresponded so closely to being a public sector Labour supporter. Hence the highly competitive politics and active Councillors in the neighbouring working-class Wards, but not here.

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