Wednesday, February 14, 2007
Delighted to be selected for Stratford upon Avon
Last Thursday was the day the snow began to fall. Local Authorities in the West Midlands were busy congratulating themselves on their success at gritting the roads properly, which was all very well until it fell again the next day, and the region came to a stand still.
But last Thursday was significant for me in a very different sense. It was the evening on which Stratford-upon-Avon Liberal Democrats voted to adopt me as their Prospective Parliamentary Candidate -- fourteen months after Menzies Campbell first leaned across to me at a dinner and said "I hope you stand for Stratford."
For the unselected parliamentary candidate, life is on something of a go-slow. You can't move house, look for a new job, undertake major new projects, even take a long vacation. Suddenly, in the space of just a few days since selection, life has dramatically speeded up. Literature, photographs, press releases, consultations, fund-raisers -- the list goes on. Full-time waiting for something to happen has now given way to (almost) full-time rushing around.
The first dust will, quite naturally, begin to settle in a short while.
But when it does, Stratford Lib-Dems and myself will be locked onto a course that runs all the way to the next General Election. And beyond. We need something like a ten-percent swing to win the seat, and we need to do it by winning votes straight from the Tories. Ludicrous? Perhaps. Almost as ludicrous as the suggestion that Liberal-Democrats could win Solihull from the Tories in 2005. Which, of course, we did.
Notice of our intentions in Stratford is hereby given.
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