How I narrowly avoided becoming a poster boy for Lib Dem misery
by Stephen Tall on May 15, 2011
Andy Strange has written a wonderful blog-post — How I became a poster boy for Lib Dem misery — full of pathos (I was going to call it ‘pathetic’, but reckoned the adjective might be misconstrued). Do go and read it; hopefully it’ll cheer him up.
But Andy’s experience did remind me of a moment in the 2002 election count in Oxford Town Hall. 2002 was not a happy year for the Lib Dems locally. We’d just endured a turbulent two years sharing power with the Greens, following two decades of lazy uselessness by Labour. The city council was in a complete shambles, the finances a wreck, and the incompetence within the senior management was utterly chronic.
Combine all that with an inexperienced, sometimes naive, mix of Lib Dems and Greens — plus implausibly re-drawn boundaries which the Boundary Commission must’ve crayoned on a map in a night of drunken gerrymandering — and the recipe was disaster. The Lib Dems lost six seats, the Greens five, while Labour made eight gains, and won majority control of the council.
It was a hideous night. I was one of the lucky ones, retaining my own seat pretty comfortably (thankfully, as I was pulled out of it at 10am to go and knock-up one of the marginals we ended up losing). At one point I ducked out of the count to mount the stairs to the town hall gallery and grab a couple of moments of chill-out peace. I’d been up 20 hours by that point, and was utterly exhausted from weeks of gruelling campaigning.
My complexion was a lighter shade of pale, with black eye-rings that would shame a panda. In short, I was a media metaphor-hunter’s dream come true: solitary, drained, miserable.
That’s when I noticed from the corner of my eye, a TV camera swing round, and start to train itself on me. I stretched, smiled, shook off my momentary depression, and instantly re-joined the throng below. I was damned if I was going to make their job that easy; and that thought cheered me up. A bit.
- 5 comments • Tagged as: andy strange
- Share on Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Digg, Reddit
Leave your comment
|
Required. |
|
|---|---|
|
Required. Not published. |
|
|
If you have one. |
|
5 comments
New post: How I narrowly avoided becoming a poster boy for Lib Dem misery bit.ly/kQIcMT
by Stephen Tall on May 15, 2011 at 2:28 pm. Reply #
[...] How I narrowly avoided becoming a poster boy for Lib Dem misery on Stephen Tall’s blog. How a cheeky chap pipped the [...]
by Top of the Blogs: The Lib Dem Golden Dozen #221 on May 15, 2011 at 6:02 pm. Reply #
[...] I had written (thank you Stephen), went on to explain how it could have happened to him: ‘How I narrowly avoided becoming a poster boy for Lib Dem misery‘. He is obviously able to be more alert to TV cameras at election counts than I [...]
by Should I take out an injunction or demand royalties? « Strange Thoughts on May 18, 2011 at 4:26 pm. Reply #
New from me > How I narrowly avoided becoming a poster boy for Lib Dem misery t.co/lYn90cyp
by Stephen Tall on September 4, 2012 at 6:59 am. Reply #
New from me > How I narrowly avoided becoming a poster boy for Lib Dem misery t.co/deBCpPfo
by Stephen Tall on September 4, 2012 at 9:59 am. Reply #