Newman Offers "Galloway" Defence

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Covered on his blog yesterday, the Islington Tribune today reports N's joke at the expense of Chris S and myself and the fiasco over the council election voting forms last year.

Basically, without a local campaign agent in Islington North, all the work of verifying nominators' signatures in a number of wards was left to our overworked Chairman, Chris S, now redeeming himself as the extremely hard working, intelligent and no doubt underpaid researcher to Conservative shadow education secretary, David Willetts.

As for the story of the candidacy that was not to be, the situation (rather prosaicly) was that a number of nominators who swore that they were on the electoral register in Mildmay turned out on closer examination not to be. That closer examination took place only about one hour before the close of nominations. Although there was a last-ditch attempt to replace the vital invalid signatures, we still fell one short. Incredibly, Islington Council had managed to put one crucial nominator on the electoral register of an adjacent ward, despite her having resided in Mildmay for years before the date in question.

Anyway, the Lib Dems turned out to be the principal beneficiaries of the signature collection cock-up, retaining crucial votes that otherwise may have gone to the Conservatives and which may have meant Labour narrowly taking the ward, and thus the Council.

Whereas Galloway later protested that his tribute to the Butcher of Baghdad ("Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, and your indefatigability") was in fact addressed to the Iraqi people as a whole, Newmania protests that his words ("the denizens of Mildmay are almost bestially stupid") were in fact meant about me alone.

Still, after this Boris-like escapade it will sadden readers to learn that Newmania will shortly be pursuing alternative career options in another local Conservative association, hoping that the burning building he's fleeing will have engulfed in flames all of its residents (denizens), preventing news about this petite affaire from ever escaping!