It's been a while, I'll grant you, but - for one night only - here we are. The Great Unpleasantness is upon us: another General Election has come along and all of us here in Broken Barnet must do our electoral duty.
Since the last GE I have moved - from Finchley and Golders Green constituency to Chipping Barnet, once home to the nest of vipers that was the Barnet Tory association, now dying on its feet, due to changes in demographics, a lack of members and activists, and a change in the political climate.
So what, I hear you ask, of the other two Barnet constituencies? (In fact, Friern Barnet has now been joined to Hornsey, so strictly speaking there are three others in total).
In Hendon, Matthew Offord has seen the train coming and bailed out. Good riddance.
The new Tory candidate, Ameet Jogia - ha ha, is espousing the cause of clean air through less development, ignoring the mass profit driven development of Labour areas of his ward by the former Tory councillor, and now, hilariously, trying to endear himself to the residents fighting the long threatened development of the conservation areas in the Burroughs, by the pointless Hendon Hub plan. He assures them he can lead their fight against this terrible development. Which was, let me think, created by ... the Tory council and their contracted service providers, Capita. Hopefully the local Labour candidate David Pinto-Duchinsky will see him off.
And good riddance too to Finchley and Golders Green MP Mike Freer, also standing down. The godfather of the disastrous mass outsourcing of local council services, when Leader of Barnet council, who spent his Parliamentary years trying to further his career, getting no further than a couple of insignificant appointments, while watching his brighter colleague in Chipping Barnet ending up as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. The Tory candidate who replaces him is Alex Deane, a self styled 'political commentator' who apparently pops up on GB news, from time to time.
Winning smile?
He looks exactly like an AI designed photofit of the sort of Tory candidate that is guaranteed to appeal to loyal Tory voters (if there are any left in FGG) and to do the opposite for anyone else. Good luck, old son. Might be kinder if it wasn't for the company you keep: take a look at who is out canvassing with him. Yes, Freer, but also, second left - Brian Coleman, disgraced former councillor and AM, once thrown out of the party (by CCHQ) after this incident.
There is only one possible electoral choice in FGG: Labour's Sarah Sackman, who is an exceptional candidate: highly intelligent and able, but compassionate and caring too. Not qualities you will find in many Tory candidates.
Back to Chipping Barnet, then.
Saturday night was the occasion of the Barnet Hustings, and once again we gathered in the historic parish church at High Barnet, packing the pews so as to hear the arguments from electoral candidates. Or some of them, anyway: Tory MP Theresa Villiers, Labour candidate Dan Tomlinson, David Farbey for the Green Party, and - ah: Hamish Haddow for Reform. The Libdem candidate could not attend, due to family care commitments.
Theresa Villiers listens to Reform candidate Hamish Haddow
This was a re-run of a similar event, some years ago, when Villiers faced a young Labour representative, Amy Trevethan, who performed admirably on the night and in the election itself: with some support from the local party, she may even have beaten Villiers. This time round, as the local Labour party and London Region have slowly woken up to the novel idea that there might be votes in Chipping Barnet, the candidate has had at least two visits from the Leader, with Keir Starmer visiting Whetstone twice, once filmed in a cafe that had not yet opened, and then for some reason in Boots, our local branch where there are usually more bored security staff than customers.
The Labour candidate is a young guy, Dan Tomlinson, whose selection was probably unintended by the unaccountable London Region officers who oversaw the somewhat undemocratically edited long listing of candidates (only one woman and three white men) - complaints were made about this by several local members, but ignored. Not his fault, however, and he spoke well on the evening.
The church was packed: a reassuring sign that despite living in an increasingly virtual world, people still want to take part in real life political debate, in their local communities.
A couple of police officers stood at the back and perhaps due to Villiers' previous post as NI secretary, at the front, a couple of plain clothed security men in suits spent the evening visually scanning the audience, and, or so it seemed, staring suspiciously at our row, with at least two people of Irish descent shifting uncomfortably in their seats and thinking of bad times in Kilburn, in the 1970s. To be fair, at least one of us was also thinking about Villiers's forbear who was so disastrously in charge of Ireland during the Famine, and without whose mismanagement my mother's family and so many other Irish migrants would not have arrived here, in unstoppable boats, so long ago.
Stopping boats, of course, is the obsession not only of the Tory right, but of the limited company that is the Reform 'party', whose representative on Saturday night, a Mr Hamish Haddow, seemed curiously reticent about his movement's more controversial beliefs and policies. Perhaps he has learned to be more circumspect about his views. By a strange coincidence, it seems there was, once upon a time in Welwyn Hatfield, a Tory candidate also called Hamish Haddow who was dropped by the local Conservative association due to allegedly offensive tweets. This Hamish Haddow then stated he had stepped down voluntarily, due to 'online abuse'.
The hustings debate at St John's proceeded not just with the assistance of unacknowledged security, but watched by the all seeing eye of the Almighty and his agents in the church of England: stern rules for behaviour were laid out by the presiding ministers, and a volley of prayers and blessings was discharged over the heads of the slightly perplexed audience at the beginning and end of the event. The thought occurred that these hustings might really be some sort of covert harvesting scam: harvesting souls, that is, rather than email addresses and personal data. Probably an unproductive venture, in the dark heart of Chipping Barnet, for so long, but no longer, the stronghold of self serving suburban Conservatism - of the worst kind, when Brian Coleman was its star turn at fundraising strawberry teas, and Theresa Villiers was always returned to power, effortlessly passing through all electoral hurdles, on a fragrant cloud of feudal loyalty.
At this hustings, however, Villiers sat to one side, no longer the supreme embodiment of that self serving suburban Conservatism, dressed in her usual Thatcherite blue business wear, but now rather a forlorn figure, pale and nervous, peering through old fashioned specs and wearing a light pink, floaty dress, a look chosen perhaps to engage sympathy, in her hour of need. Blue, of course, is a forbidden colour now, for Tory candidates. Her leaflets are printed in green and do not mention The Party Which Cannot Be Named.
A few Tory councillors, including former council leader Richard Cornelius and his wife took their places: a a bus load of white haired, white middle class Tory activists had already hogged the front seats, primed to support their candidate - although on one side they had to compete for space with a hard rump of hard eyed Reform supporters, keen to see their man, in his shiny new turquoise Reform tie, fill the ancient church with Faragist heresy. Interestingly, some of the members of this cohort also applauded some of Villiers' pronouncements.
Rather puzzlingly, and clearly in honour of the Euros, the hustings organisers had decided to deploy a referee, standing in the aisle, waving red and yellow cards at the participants. No one was sent off, unfortunately.
Only six questions were allowed: they had to be submitted in writing and vetted before the event, which rather put a damper on proceedings. In their own way, however, the responses perfectly demonstrated the character and indeed the relative chances of the candidates in succeeding in their campaigns.
For the Greens, David Farbey spoke well, but clearly is experienced in addressing an audience, and his common sense views, unfortunately, appear to be atypical of the party's usual circus of barking activists and leaders.
Reform. Well. Mr Hamish Haddow was not experienced in addressing an audience, and indeed after a couple of sentences, some bad tempered members of the audience yelled that they couldn't hear him. Good, I said. Probably too loudly. When he spoke up it was to tell us, in a heavy South African accent, that "there was so much to be proud of, here in Britain". He claimed a family association with Barnet: his ancestor was Thomas Ravenscroft, he said, whose memorial is In This Very Church. We sat and listened then, for the rattling sound of ancient bones, spinning in their marble tomb.
Theresa Villiers, when it was her turn to answer questions, stood and addressed an unseen entity hovering high up, at the back of the church, with a curious sort of theatrical fervour that seemed out of step with the tone of the event, and reminiscent, perhaps, of Joan of Arc about to to be tied to the stake. She spoke with great conviction, about nothing very much, reverting to the dark magic power of saying the names of Sadiq Khan and Keir Starmer, as if this in itself would manifest some sort of hellish fury on Labour's campaign. To be fair, it provoked a mild round of cheers from her loyal Tory friends in the front pews.
She was, she said, 'a strong opponent of Ulez expansion'. Presumably she had been a big fan of the original Ulez scheme, run out by her man Boris Johnson, but now doesn't want the residents of Barnet to breathe clean air. In fact she explained, learning nothing from Susan Hall's campaign, that her sympathies lay with those who 'cherished a car'.
In contrast, Labour's Dan Tomlinson spoke of the worry he had, when walking through the traffic fumes of Whetstone High Street (part of the Great North Road) with his three month old baby. Who is more cherished? A dirty old gas guzzling, polluting car, or a new born child? Again, Villiers is simply out of touch with the reality of life for most ordinary families in Barnet.
There was a question about police numbers. The Labour candidate pointed out that yes, numbers had dropped because the Tory goverment had cut London's policing funds. He could have added that our stations and officers had been cut by Villier's mate Boris Johnson. When she tried to suggest she was going to save Barnet police station, she was roundly booed, and many people reminded her - loudly - that it had been Johnson who had first put this station on the list for cuts.
A question about 'communities'. Responses from the more sensible candidates referred to the importance of facilities for young people. Villiers ignored the impact of cuts on community schemes and waffled on about 'Prevent'. The Tory approach seems to be that it is better to grass up kids with dangerous thoughts than investing in preventing young people from forming those thoughts in the first place.
The Reform candidate thought the solution to community problems was youth clubs, Barnet FC, Saracens - Grow them, he suggested, of the latter, clearly unaware that the previous Tory council had lent them £26 million of public money to subsidise their private rugby club. His biggest idea, however, was that children should be taught to swim, so that - as he explained - they would 'learn how not to drown'.
The image of a child washed up on a beach facing the English channel suddenly appeared in my head, for some reason.
A question about integrity in politics. David Farbey referred to the Nolan Principles, a model which has been totally abandoned by successive Tory governments - and listed just some of the terrible scandals associated with these administrations: expenses, duck houses, MPs watching tractor porn in the House, Johnson, the betting scandal ...
Villiers, who not so long ago was one of a group of Tory MPs given a suspension from Parliament for trying to influence a judge presiding over the trial of a former colleague for sexual assault, began her response dismissively by commenting that we had all been worrying about this issue 'since the Roman Republic' ... Decline and Fall, Theresa, decline and fall ...
I thought about my own correspondence with her last year headed, in regard to her acceptance of a donation from Mrs Chernukhin, the wife of Putin's former associate, and the potential for, or a possible perception of, a conflict of interest in Villiers' membership of the committee tasked with overseeing/suppressing the (redacted) Russia Report. I had asked her why she did not recuse herself. Her response was that Mrs Chernukhin now has a British passport, and claimed that the report had been drafted before she joined the committee. Checking this out it seems she joined in June 2020, the report was (sort of) published on the 21st July.
Her career has drifted in the doldrums since then, after backing the wrong candidates for PM - what do we want? Andrea Leadsom!
In her closing comments she seemed to accept that things weren't going to go well for her: she made a comment about us having heard from three men explaining 'why I should step aside' - as if the constituents' votes had nothing to do with the electoral outcome. She had also pleaded with the audience to let her be their voice against - erm - Sadiq Khan, and Keir Starmer, implying that although she accepted there was going to be a massive Labour victory, she, Theresa, would remain in her rightful place as the appointed champion of Chipping Barnet. Noblesse Oblige, after all.
I think not. I think the majority of people in the audience and in the constituency will prefer a message of hope of something better, someone, as Labour's Dan Tomlinson put it, 'on the side of the vulnerable' and wanting 'a just and fairer society'.
Villiers sat down, defeated. She knows the game is up.
If I wasn't a heartless woman, with a long memory, I might have felt sorry for her. But I am, and I don't.
There is no choice, on July 4th. Don't waste your vote on Greens, or Independents - and if you think Reform has any answers, please give your head a wobble: choose the only candidate who can remove Villiers from her seat, and help elect an alternative to the years' long succession of corrupt, incompetent and cruel Tory governments.
We thought Britain was broken when Cameron was in charge, didn't we? Now we know we are at the threshold of something much, much worse. Do I think Labour is practically perfect, in every Poppins like way? No. Is Starmer without sin? No. I don't like his u turns on so many policies: but - he wants to be elected: politics is always, and will always be, the art of the possible, what can be done, rather than what we want.
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