Saturday 6 January 2018

Political Advice

Ben Sellers is an old friend of mine, but what exactly does he do as the Political Advisor to Laura Pidcock MP? Not least in view of the fact that he still has a thriving small business, how much is he paid? His political advice has led 472 of Durham County Council's Teaching Assistants to lose 23 per cent of their pay. In view of that fact, he ought to be paid no more than one pound below the salary of any of them. The same is true of the members of Durham County Council, whose allowance should be reduced to that level.

Oh, how the stalwarts of North West Durham Constituency Labour Party come whining to me. "She's an embarrassment." "She lowers the tone." "She brings the party into disrepute." "Every time she opens her gob, her brain falls out." "She's going to lose this seat to the Tories."

What could you possibly expect from me, of all people? Sympathy? If it is not 10 years, then it is not far off, since I was first introduced at a funeral as "the man who should have been our MP". That has become almost a part of my name. But you unanimously reselected the Chief Whip from the Iraq War; give that a moment to sink in. She ended up having to "retire" because of her fiddled expenses, yet some of you tried to install her office boy, who was hardly unimplicated in that affair, as her successor. She appears on your election literature to this day.

That office boy had previously been allowed to lose you a District Council seat here in Lanchester, without any selection process whatever, because the alternative would have been to let me have the seat. You wilfully chose to lose a seat by putting up a pig's bladder on a stick, rather than follow your own procedures and give the chance of it to someone who had been chairing the Branch for several years, who had completed a full term on the Parish Council, and who was a governor of two schools in the ward.

But now you have the gall to come crying to me about Laura Pidcock. She is exactly the kind of gobby, chippy illiterate that, in my experience, you have always preferred. Right down to the fact that if you check her CV against her background, then she is not a working-class girl made good, but an upper-middle-class underachiever.

Are you not going to vote for her? Are you not going to campaign for her? Are you not going to sign her nomination papers? Are you going to sign mine instead? Are you going to get the ludicrous charge against me dropped, just in case there is a General Election this spring, which is unlikely, but not impossible?

You laughed at me for years and years, precisely because I was nothing like Laura Pidcock. Well, who is laughing now? If the Tories do not take this seat either next time or the time after that, then I hope that you and she will thoroughly enjoy your 35 years of misery together. You richly deserve each other so very, very, very much.

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