You’ve had the thought many times as politicians talked nonsense on the telly: I could do that. And all of a sudden people are saying we need independent Members of Parliament. And so you think: I will do that — I’m going to become an independent MP. So what do you do next? First, you need to sit yourself down and answer some very tough personal questions. You remember that time, back at college, back in the day, that someone took a picture of you in women’s clothing? It wasn’t entirely an erotic thing but the pictures don’t look great. How do you feel about yourself, dressed as Diana Dors, splashed on the front of the local paper? Not good? Forget it then.
Second, is your spouse ready? Perhaps your wife will be quite happy to see the back of you Monday to Thursday. Perhaps she won’t mind being dragged around the Rotary Club Fayre on Saturday as you cut the ribbon on the tombola in return for Alderman Whisker’s support on the bypass application. Perhaps your husband has always wanted to be accosted in a pub by a stranger who tells you that he wrote to you once about putting a roof on the market and why haven’t you done it?
Third, where are you going to live? That reckless promise, that your heart and soul will be forever here in Homegate, now haunts you. The job is in London but you can’t afford a house in London and, now that expenses have been banned, you have to lug all your furniture up and down the motorway every week in a white van anyway. While you are in London, your wife will be sitting on crates at home.
Fourth, are you ready to give up your evenings and your weekends? There’ll be no more reading books and watching TV. None of that reading-the-kids-a-bedtime-story nonsense. You’ll be at work, walking through the voting lobby for the Marine Services Regulation Co-ordinating Body Amendment Act. As you have no party whip to tell you what to do, you’ll have to go to the trouble of understanding what it is all about. Knowledge, unfortunately, is the price of independence. Is there room enough in your head for all this rubbish? And are you ready for constituency surgeries? Do you have the steel required to say “I’ll write to the council” a hundred times to people you ought to turn in to the police?
Fifth, do you have strong views on car-parking charges at hospitals, the future now for the Tamil Tigers and special areas for dogs in parks? If not, why not? Somebody you meet will have and he will expect you not only to understand his view — which is hard because he is bonkers — but to share it, which is harder, for the same reason. Do you agree that the Middle East will never settle with a two-state solution, it needs a 23-state solution? Er, not sure. No, the pre-1967 borders is not a gardening term.
Right, you’ve passed the five tests. You are now sure that you are ready to become an independent Member of Parliament. So what do you do next?
First, you need to define your campaign issues. We know you are independent, but independent of whom? And independent about what? Now you come to think of it, independence doesn’t mean a lot does it? If you were Labour or Tory someone else would tell you the correct answer on the future of the General Teaching Council. So gather your campaign team together — that’s you and your wife and I think Fred and Gladys are coming — and pick out some themes. The campaign to put a roof on the market, that’s a must. It’s been on the front page of the Homegate Bugle three weeks in a row. Nationally, education, I think. That has to be the biggest priority. But what about education? You’re in favour of it, definitely. In fact, you think there should be more of it. And it should be better, not worse. You begin to wonder whether this will stand up to the intense scrutiny of an election campaign.
Next, we need some communications advice. It’s all very well declaring an intention to stand as an MP but how do you let anyone know? Mentioning it in the pub just doesn’t have the circulation. You could put it on the internet but who reads the internet round here? And, anyway, when you put it on the internet, where does it go? You could call a public meeting but how do you get across that you’re not inviting people to come and see a random member of the public madly shouting in a room?
So, the obvious thing is to produce a leaflet. Even the deal you cut with the local printer — I’ll look after you when I’m Prime Minister — will be ruinously expensive and he will assault you with objectionable questions such as: “What do you want to put on it?” They don’t help you with that bit. A picture of yourself, obviously. Alone or with the family? You want to convey the idea that you are a family man, but isn’t it exploitation? Won’t the newspapers use it later as justification for camping outside your son’s school? Never mind, let’s have the whole family.
Then you need a slogan. Local boy made good. No, that implies everyone else here is bad, which is true but you can’t say that. And are you really local? Sure, you live here now. But weren’t you born 15 miles away, on the other side of the county boundary? That makes you a foreigner and a liar, to boot. You have been telling people, on their own doorsteps, that you are local. But you are not local. You are foreign. So, Independent Voice for Homegate.
With your election leaflet printed, out you go on to the streets with your team. Only Fred’s got a bit bored with politics. He’s not that sure how to reform the health service, really. So, you’re not so much independent as alone.
You knock on the first door and launch into your spiel. “Hello sir, I’m standing as independent candidate and unlike the other politicians I’m just an ordinary man . . .” “Yes, I rather think you are,” says the idiot (I mean voter). The next person asks if you have private health insurance, which you do. But why did he ask, you wonder? Will you lose his vote if you admit it? Shouldn’t you, of all people, a proud independent, be telling the truth? So you split the difference: “Well, I do but I don’t use it.”
“Why don’t you cancel it then?” Damn you, Jeremy Paxman. After two hours, three crazy dogs, four accusations of culpability for the Iraq War and five demands to put fluoride in the water, it starts to rain. Suddenly, you having no campaign team, no infrastructure and no funding starts to count.
You’ve got to grips with the issues by now. You’ve worked out what people are concerned about — street crime, schools, care for the kids and parents — and you’ve developed a good line in what needs to be done and how you might help. You realise that your first thought — that I could do this — is right. You could. But it’s bloody hard work. And so you start to wonder whether it wouldn’t have been better to have joined one of the two main parties after all. The whole point was meant to be that you were independent. But you can be independently minded without being an independent MP. Can’t you? Not so fast, maverick loony.
Remember that the faction that controls the selection of the local MP does not want anyone with independent ideas. It doesn’t want an independent MP, it wants a Labour MP who does what it says and spends most of his life drinking in its bar. Independence is not something you can wear on your sleeve. It has to be hidden up it.
You’ll first have to find a local councillor who will help you. This will be all but impossible. They all have their candidates, all forged in blood feuds of a thousand years standing. But imagine you strike it lucky and you get insider guidance on how to secure the seat. Now listen carefully because this is what you need to know.
You need to get hold of a membership list. If you do, don’t tell anyone, ever. The fact that you have a membership list will be used against you as a category of crime equivalent to murder. The rules are that local activists are allowed membership lists and you are not. Then you need to secure nominations from branches, trade unions and affiliated organisations. Each branch can nominate three people to go forward to the shortlist but one must be a woman, one must be an ethnic minority, who might also be a woman, and one can be anything, including a woman? Got that? Put it this way — you are a white man so you qualify only in one category. Twenty-two of the 23 candidates are white men so you are all competing for the same vote while Mrs Gurumurthy, who became a councillor by accident after walking into the wrong town hall meeting, is assured of a place at the hustings. After two months of leg-shattering street stomping, the branches vote. Four people, all blood relatives of the favoured son, turn up and he wins 4-0. The nominations are in, they are passed to the Executive Committee of the General Committee, which “has mind” to the process and pulls out a piece of paper on which it had written the names of the winners six months ago.
No, it’s never going to work. You’ve given up independence, applied to join an asylum and they won’t let you in. And they think that you are the mad one.
So, you’re back on your own. Your campaign takes shape, you get your picture in the paper, an interview slot on the local radio, which you come through unscathed. You get four seconds on regional TV and an old lady on the market says she’s definitely seen you before somewhere.
The day dawns and you awake with the dream that, although your campaign has been a little on the low-key side, the public will, all the same, troop in their droves in silent acclaim to applaud you at the ballot box. The Tory candidate has no chance, neither do any of the others and the Labour candidate will surely be revealed as a crazy. He is. He wins a landslide. You win a moral victory with a swing to the independent candidate of 4.7 per cent, which makes a visible but insignificant dent in the Labour majority of 18,000.
As the officer returns the Labour member to Parliament and your political career ends you wish him well and thank your stars that you didn’t win.
