Gordon Brown: My Part in His Downfall

You may be wondering why this blog missed a week; the answer is, of course, a repeat of my 2006 candidacy for mayor of Aspen Runnymede Borough Council. As in 2006, I shocked the local Liberal party with the radical option of actually going and knocking on doors; as then, I achieved absolutely nothing. Both Egham Hythe seats went Conservative with about 600 votes, followed by 200-odd for the Labour candidates and just below that for me and the Runnymede Runningmate.

It is of course completely ridiculous to try and draw conclusions from this, but I would point out that the Labour vote came as a surprise; 7 out of 100 voters I canvassed said they would vote Labour, which compared to the result suggests that pollsters should be applying a truly heroic "Bashful Brownite" adjustment to their results. And yes, people do vote BNP out of ignorance, or at least the guy who shouted that he was going to vote fascist did; they didn't put up a candidate.

It didn't seem the right moment to tell him, though. Later, I was chatting to a Tory who claimed to be impressed by Brian Paddick when I noticed a business card stuck to his fridge: Xxxx Xxxxx, Legacy Systems Architect, Home Office E-Borders Agency, based in one of those ridiculously named po-mo office parks by Heathrow (Civil service readers will know the one I mean). "Are you the E-Borders chap?" I asked. No, he said. "Well, thank God for that - or I'd have to kill you."

No, I didn't quite say that - I'm not actually Hunter Thompson. Actually I said that this was good news, because we were doing everything we could to crush his dreams and frustrate his plans. To which the Tory replied "Great! He keeps parking his sodding car in my driveway! And the FUCKING ALARM goes off EVERY NIGHT!" There's a surprise - a Home Office surveillance bureaucrat unaware of the costs of false positives, and completely inconsiderate of the ordinary citizen? Who could possibly have guessed?

The count was completely normal, and if anything less fun than the last time; all that stood out was the fact that another ward has a 'kipper who is actually Vietnamese (how's that work?).

Still, I have the satisfaction of being present at the LibDem Sorpaso; the moment we overtook Labour in share of the national vote. And unlike the original one, we didn't even need to include the estimated GDP of the Mafia to do it.