I’m very tempted. I’m probably voting Huhne-Campbell-Hughes-Oaten. I came to that order myself, but was then surprised to see that lots of people in the party who I take seriously seem to be jumping the same way.

My views are not set in stone, and there could be much to change my mind. I’ve not seen a single hustings yet, and haven’t spent much time reading material from the candidates.

There are, of course, other people in the party I take very seriously who have taken very different decisions about which way to swing, including, as far as I can see, everyone who has ever employed me!

And I’m also a little concerned about the prospect of my posts ending up being aggregated into a serious website. You, dear reader, will have noticed that my pre-occupations in this arena are seldom political. My wafflings about laundry are not at all suited for sharing with solely political people.

Decided. I shall sign up, but I shall only give them the RSS link for posts categorised as ‘Politics’. And there may well not be any further posts in that category before the close of nominations.

The bloggers are all coming to the same point of view. We supported Kennedy in the recent past, even after the attacks began. But now we get it. He can’t continue.

Richard Allan, Will Howells, the people at Apollo, Jonathan Calder are amongst the many.

Although it pains me to say it, we’re starting to understand why it had to happen this way and not through the constitutional processes the party has. Why did no-one challenge Charles when he stood for re-election in June?Because he’d have won hands-down in any all-member ballot. It would have been a waste of money posting out the papers. Now we know that for a long time, our MPs have been keeping mum about legitimate concerns about Charles. How could they have let the rest of us know — the ones of us who get to vote for leaders of the party — without making the waves that have been made in the last few weeks? We all knew the innuendo about the drink problem. Did any of us think it was actually serious?

But any ambitious MPs have been paying a dangerous game. If Charles resigns under these circumstances, anyone who has been overtly attacking him will not fare well.

This leaves us agog. Who will stand in the election? Some people are postulating a care-taker Menzies leadership for a decent period. I don’t think that will clear the air. We need people to set out their stalls. A proper election will get a few more faces more widely known.

But we can’t be too hopeful. We can’t expect any contest of ours to give us as much bounce as the Tory campaign. But I don’t see why a swift leadership election should necessarily hurt our chances in the May council elections this year.

The bloggers are all coming to the same point of view. We supported Kennedy in the recent past, even after the attacks began. But now we get it. He can’t continue.

Richard Allan, Will Howells, the people at Apollo, Jonathan Calder are amongst the many.

Although it pains me to say it, we’re starting to understand why it had to happen this way and not through the constitutional processes the party has. Why did no-one challenge Charles when he stood for re-election in June?Because he’d have won hands-down in any all-member ballot. It would have been a waste of money posting out the papers. Now we know that for a long time, our MPs have been keeping mum about legitimate concerns about Charles. How could they have let the rest of us know — the ones of us who get to vote for leaders of the party — without making the waves that have been made in the last few weeks? We all knew the innuendo about the drink problem. Did any of us think it was actually serious?

But any ambitious MPs have been paying a dangerous game. If Charles resigns under these circumstances, anyone who has been overtly attacking him will not fare well.

This leaves us agog. Who will stand in the election? Some people are postulating a care-taker Menzies leadership for a decent period. I don’t think that will clear the air. We need people to set out their stalls. A proper election will get a few more faces more widely known.

But we can’t be too hopeful. We can’t expect any contest of ours to give us as much bounce as the Tory campaign. But I don’t see why a swift leadership election should necessarily hurt our chances in the May council elections this year.

P7120012
Originally uploaded by nilexuk. During elections, we print target letters, mailmerging letters to thousands of people. By-election stalwarts of many years’ standing will tell you horrendous stories of feeding arrays of 4ppm primitive laser printers with paper long into the night.

Now we have fast, modern laser printers like this HP Laserjet 4200 with its three-ream paper hopper that can print at 30 or more pages per minute, and speeds up the job no end.

But they get hot, all the more so when you’re facing the electorate in July and your office is cooled only by the odd fan here and there. When the printer gets too hot, the paper coming through starts to curl, which means it won’t go through the folding machine, and in really bad cases has to be folded by hand by the army of clerical helpers.

So when the need to print is not too pressing, someone thought they’d open all the printer doors and let it cool down a bit.

Pretty much all the rest of my photos from Cheadle are of the fantastic views you get from the holiday cottage we were staying at, which was The Hayloft, c/o Three Chimneys, Cobden Edge, Mellor, SK6 5NL, tel no available here. Stockport may not be an obvious place for a holiday, but this really was a gorgeous place.

I posted a month ago that I’d sat through a full council meeting where we spent the day agreeing with other. I said then how unusual that was — but today, it happened all over again. All four parties agreed on every substantial bit of business at today’s full council.

They weren’t topics about to take lightly: some basic business in setting up consultation on renewing the city’s public drinking by-laws; reviewing the accounts following a discrepancy highlighted by the district auditor; changing our committee nominations because one of our councillors has taken on a directorship of the Arms Length Management Organisation looking after council housing in Nottingham. (Actually, I’ve done that too.)

And finally, a really weighty debate about the problems of gun crime in the city, rising directly from the murder of Danielle Beccan a few weeks ago.

All this taking place whilst campaigners for Fathers 4 Justice (a group a colleague in Wales has started calling Fathers 4 Misogeny) were staging a sit in on the roof of the Council House, having climbed up there on ladders at 3am the night before.

Busy day!

A very long day spent working at a by-election within the Leicester Stouth constituency.

I really hate polling days with the Lib Dems: they’re always exhausting. Today, like too many days before it, I got up before 5am in order to be leafletting at the crack of dawn. We deliver “Good morning” leaflets across the target area in the hope of impressing the voters on the early-bird principle. It’s our last chance to get our message across, but it does make for long days.

Delighted to learn, on getting to Leicester, that my name was down for being the guy who stayed at the committee room with the computer tapping the information into the voter-ID database, and marshalling the troups. So whilst my colleagues have been freezing their nadgers off a polling stations on the day that looks like it’s going to have the season’s first frost, I got to sit down, all day, with my hands in their default position on the keyboard of my laptop

Today’s committee room was a huge, vacant, furnished house in a nice suburb of Leicester. So being computer guy was better than usual. I didn’t get a desk, but I did get a sofa. Bargain.

I’ve basically spent the day lounging, eating crisps, chocolate and white bread, sitting at my computer. A long day, of course, given that it’s gone 9pm whilst I write this on the train on the way home, and I was at work in Leicester by 7.30am, but it could have been a lot worse.

The work is also sporadic, and it’s important to maintain a presence in the committee room, which militates on the whole against leaving to take number (“tell”) at a polling station, or to chivvy reluctant voters out to vote (“knocking up”) or even to do routine leafleting.

Basically what I’m saying is I got paid to sit and catch up on my news backlog. I must have read 4,000 posts in the rec.travel.europe newsgroup today. If only I’d also had an internet connection… but unfortunately I left my bluetooth dongle at home and the vacant house didn’t have a connection.

I did have some brief moments in the fresh air, spending a nice hour with a charming Tory teller at the Lancaster College, a Leicester boys’ school.

At this point, I don’t know whether my lounging / telling / database work (and of course the much more arduous work of 40 or so activists who have been at schools, churches, and on the doorsteop all day, actually paid off with getting our guy elected. It certainly should do: it’s a ward we’ve held for twenty years, we are defending the seat of a councillor who succumbed to cancer earlier in the year, and we have thousands of registered supporters. But there has been much wrangling in the run up to the fight, the voters can’t support our councillors on a number of issues, and the local Conservatives seem to have learned how to put up a good fight after years of simply dreadful leaflets. Time only will tell whether the neck-and-neck fight went blue or gold.

The reason for the new subscription to rec.travel.europe is that I’m working on an elaborate fantasy for a holiday after the general election next year. A higher number of weeks than usual for a holiday, me, a car, a tent, and mainland Europe. Paul also for as much time as his employers can spare him from work. I’d better get saving now.

Strange times have been how the week has been going: with Tuesday being the American elections, I stayed up til 4.30am Wednesday to see the results come in. Neck and neck all the way through, but with Dubya just that little bit ahead at every step. It was pretty clear from very early on that Kerry just wasn’t gonna cut the mustard. Disappointing. Terrifying, even: what fresh horror will rain down on the cowering world with Bush back in the driving seat?

I carved this in his honour:

Well, I didn’t, of course, I carved it for halloween last week, and just didn’t post the picture till now.

In addition to hollowing out the shell, I made pumpkin soup out of the flesh, slow roasting it for an hourn then boiling with milk and seiving, and dry-roasted the seeds. Whilst the seeds are tasty, I have discovered I don’t like the taste of pumpkin. And that huge great fruit made barely half a pint of soup. PAh!

BetLiberal

This is not something the Lib Dems have set up, I don’t think, according to, er, “back channels”. (I’ve been watching too much Alias.) It’s just a website where the ordinary citizen can make a fast buck.

BTW, this was one of many things I forwarded to my jokes list on Yahoogroups, which you too can sign up to here.