So we both held up our pieces of paper and we had both picked the same number between 1 and 100 – 37.

Quizmaster Michael was a bit flustered by this and asked us to have another go, and neither of us were allowed 37.  So we did and we both chose the same alternative number – 73.  At this point Michael thought there was a conspiracy to wind him up and just drew lots.  Quite appropriate since in Crawley we have a bit of a tradition of close results, recounts and drawing of lots to decide elections.

A lot of excitement over a half-case of wine!   Jayne and I donated ours to Horsham party as future raffle prizes, since we still have a few bottles in the cellar, which is what we call our bin cupboard.  A good evening though, and I even had a beer.

While out canvassing in Crawley some of my colleagues commented on how the atmosphere was more like that for a general election than for locals, certainly the activity is impressive.   Only one casualty that I know of, when one of our councillors got her finger bitten by a dog on Saturday.   Morale was boosted a bit by seeing the Tory literature which still contains the web address of a German porn site on it.

The Register had the story back in January, and it subsequently appeared as a prominent story in the County Times, but the local Tories appear oblivious to all that and continue putting that URL on their leaflets,  Or maybe they just like German porn?

Over in Horsham it is the Lib Dems producing the leaflets worthy of comment.  In Park ward they have one of their famous bar charts (surely the biggest argument for AV is that in killing off tactical voting the dreaded Lib Dem bar charts will be collateral damage) which show the Lib Dems just a few percentage points behind the Tories.  The thing is… Park ward has three Lib Dem councillors as far as I know. How they managed to get councillors with a lower share of the vote under any system is a mystery…

Unlike Crawley, which elects by thirds and therefore has an election of some sort every year, Horsham council has all-out elections so this is the only chance for four years to make any change to the council make-up and they are going for it over there, which is good to see.   Labour is putting up candidates in most wards and even has a full slate of three in one ward.

With a large area to cover, low membership, low funds and not much chance of success there has not always been a lot of effort in Horsham but they are really doing as much as they can with their resources.  The funds raised by the quiz night have been put to good use.  The election addresses in the wards they are putting more effort into are a lot better than the one I had for the general election last year, which was the best we could afford at the time, and they are actually knocking on doors and doing proper canvassing, which is good to see.

Obviously they are making use of all the new members gained since this time last year, and in a way that should keep them involved and maybe attract even more people to the party.  If Labour win even one seat in Horsham, or even come a respectable second anywhere it will be an historic result and good luck to them.

Over here I’m hoping we will hold on to what we have and pick up a few extra seats.  We have some candidates who will greatly enhance the Labour group and the council itself if they get elected.   I’m not singling anybody out, but they know who they are.

The referendum looks like being a bit of a non-event though.  Only one person I spoke to in all canvassing sessions mentioned it.

An even more controversial idea was to redefine the criteria for winning the quiz.  Instead of the winner being the team with the most points, it could be the team that won the most individual rounds.  This would prove hugely unpopular, but I would love to be able to say to all the traditionalists in the party “OK.  If you don’t like my first-past-the-post idea we will go back to the old-fashioned proportional method of deciding the winner if you think that’s more fair.”

I think I’ve worked out why I am not put in charge of things more often…

Now then, back to the questions.  We have a round on lyrics to Yes songs, a round on Sherlock Holmes, a round on George A. Romero’s zombie films and a round on the seven layer OSI model for networking.  Should cover all the bases I think, except sport.  Just time to dredge up 10 facts about US college football.   I do hope I’m joking.

The data is available as a Google Doc here and you can download it all to your own computer to pull it about in Excel.¹One reason I was pleased to see it was that it gave me a chance to play with Excel 2010.  I installed it the other day, having bought Office 2010 Professional for the bargain price of £8.95 but haven’t had a reason to use it before now.

The reason for my surprise was to do with just how much informatin about the party is contained in it.  The spreadsheet effectively gives the membership of every constituency party in the country!   I know the party is gloating a bit about how many extra members have joined this week, but I’m not sure that, say, Banff & Buchan CLP really want it know that their membership is lower than that of Broadfield.

According to the figures, there were 178 ballot papers sent out in Horsham.  It might not sound like a lot, but I reckon that when I was selected there were fewer than 150 members so a 20% increase is good to see, especially in a constituency where there has never been an MP or councillor.

A few thougths about the voting and the results, illustrated by charts, because I wanted to play with charts.

There has been a lot of talk about ‘the unions’ winnng it for Ed Miliband.  This gives the impression (deliberately? or just conveniently for those in the media with their own agenda?) that there is still the old-fashioned block votes.  Of course, as anyone involved should know, the union section of the electoral college is based on one-member-one-vote, which does not blindly follow whateverthe union leaders say anyway.  I’m pretty loyal to my union, but still voted for Ed Balls despite their endorsement of Ed M.

The weird thing is that if there is anything remotely resembling a block vote now it is in the MP/MEP section, where each individual’s vote carries as much weight as hundreds or thousands in the other sections.

Anyway. Time for a chart:

Actual votes in the leadership ballot

This shows the actual votes cast, without any sort of weighting for the three sections.  It shows the first preference votes, where Ed M had something like 11,000 more votes than David M in the first round.   Another way of looking at it is in percentage terms:

First preference votes as a percentage

The blue columns show the results of the first chart with the percentage of actual votes cast.  The red columns show how the percentage actually used in the ballot.  The difference is mainly because the tiny green slivers in the first chart, which represent the MP/MEP votes actually count as much as the other sections.

None of this proves anything really, just that making charts in Excel is easy and fun.  It does show that whichever way you look at it, the race between David and Ed was close.  Neither candidate was particularly unpopular in any section of the electoral college.  The spreadsheet lists the individual preferences of all the MPs and MEPs so you can see how a lot of them who had Ed 1st had David 2nd and vice versa.

I do think there is something wrong with the way the weighting is done though, and not just because the MP section is worth a third of the vote even with only 266 members.  That would not be so bad if it was a secret ballot on their part.  I think that must skew the results a lot.  Maybe I am being unnecessarily cynical, but if everyone knows how you voted and you might want favours from the new leader, wouldn’t it be tempting to vote for who you think will win rather than who you want to win?  (Granted, the two might be the same.)

I will leave it to somebody with more time on their hands than me to work out whether all those who are likely contenders for shadow cabinet positions just happened to vote for the person who looked most likely to win for the last 4 months…

I think that is my main conclusion: the MP section should certainly be a secret ballot and should probably have a reduced significance.  Yes, I know all the arguments about how the MPs will know the candidates better and have a more informed opinion, and how they have to work with the leader, but is does that outweigh the principle of democracy?

The other stunning statistic from the mass of numbers is the turnout in the affiliates section: just 9%.   The highest turnout from a union was ASLEF with 25%, but the larger unions all had a turnout of around 10%.

My own union had nearly 950,000 voted not used.  Back when there were block votes those votes would have all been cast on our behalf, and not necessarily the way we would have wanted them cast, which was recognised as unfair.

There is a bit of irony in all this.   A union could have ballotted its members and then thrown its whole block behind whoever the most members wanted, even though in a 5-horse race like this it could have been nothing like a majority.  Unfair? Certainly, but it is just like first past the post when you think about it, and I suspect that those who objected most loudly about it are those who are the most enthusiastic supporters of FPTP in other areas like general elections.

What occurred to me was that the unions didn’t really win it for Ed, but if they had really put their minds to it all those members could have won it for whoever they wanted to.  What is all the 91% or non-voters in that section had all voted for Diane Abbott?

I’m not saying they should have done, but it is a bit like the country as a whole – there is a huge mass of people who have the power to decide who is in charge and they never take advantage of their numbers.

1. or Open Office of course

I don’t think it would have changed my mind, I was very relieved to find that Balls justified my decision to give him my first preference, but I would have welcomed the chance to see this beforehand.  The local hustings in Crawley had proxies for four of the candidates, which isn’t the same really.  OK, so I could have travelled to one of the events in London or elsewhere in the South but I didn’t.

One thing did occur to me during the show: when the time comes to make a movie of this competition, as it surely will, I think David M should be played by Rowan Atkinson and Ed M by David Baddiel.  Not sure about the rest of the casting yet. Nothing sprang to mind immediately.

When I turned up at the Hawth I was looking at the posters of forthcoming attractions and amidst all the details of musicals, tribute bands, and musicals based on tribute bands that seem to constitute modern middlebrow theatre fare, there was a poster for something called “The Anderson Wakeman Project 360″ which turns out to be a 20-date  tour by Jon Anderson and Rick Wakeman (i.e. 20% of the classic line-up of Yes) with Crawley the second date on the tour.

I know I won’t be able to resist it, and yet the tickets are £32.50 each. Eek.  Don’t suppose I can persuade the local papers to hire me for a day as a reviewer, so it looks like I’ll have to treat myself as a slightly belated birthday present.  Brilliant to have two performers of such stature playing in Crawley though.

Everything else was going to be an anti-climax after seeing that, but the meeting went very well.  It was an unusual hustings in that none of the candidates was there, but four of them sent advocates to speak for them.  David Miliband had Ivan Lewis MP, Ed Balls had Sarah McCarthy-Fry, Andy Burnham had Cllr Keith Dibble from Hampshire and Ed Miliband had Tom Simons.

Not sure exactly who Tom is.  He is either a party worker or an ex-party worker who has joined Ed’s team.  Nice enough bloke though and he did a good job considering he is not as accustomed to public speaking as an MP an ex-MP or a councillor.

It really is a shame that nobody from Diane Abbott’s team was available, but some of the other surrogates did actually make some points in her favour.  Specifically when discussing the past, one of the speakers did point out that Diane Abbott is the only candidate totally free to criticise past mistakes, having not been part of the cabinets that went to war with Iraq, messed up the 10% tax etc. etc.

For me that summed up the spirit of the event and the whole contest so far.  There was a lot of respect and civility from all sides: none of the surrogates attacked each other or the other candidates.  The candidates themselves seem to have refrained from personal attacks and this can only be a good thing – they will all have to work together when it is all over after all.  The personal relationship between Blair and Brown and their followers really poisoned the party for a decade so I’m glad to see a more constructive atmosphere with this lot and I hope it continues.

What we do not need is a competition like they have in the US for presidential candidates where the front runners spend months providing ammunition for their opponents to use in the actual election.

All the speakers who were there did a difficult job well.  It can’t be easy having to speak on somebody else’s behalf, making sure you don’t misrepresent them, and making it clear where you are offering a personal opinion or something that you know your preferred candidate believes.  They also all made good points in favour of their candidates, making it really hard to know who to prefer.

This should mean that whoever wins we will end up not only with a capable leader, but one with a good team around them – as long as they can see this through to the end on good terms.

The result?  David Miliband got the nomination on the third round of counting preferences, with his brother coming second.  I think I would have been happy to see any of them nominated though.

Especially numbers 6, 7 and 8.   In fact, 8 should probably be enforced and backed by physical punishment

I was reminded of when I lost my seat in the Crawley council election in (I think) 2004.  At the time I was deputy mayor and because of the way things work, until the new council met to elect a new mayor and deputy I had to continue doing that job for a few weeks, even though I wasn’t even a councillor.  It was very strange and more than a little unpleasant.

Having taken a kicking at an election there is a natural inclination towards hiding away for a while and licking one’s wounds in private, but I still had to be prepared to go out on official engagements and smile for the photographers.  I imagine Gordon’s position was like that, but many times worse – because of the greater responsibilities, the greater publicity, and his well-known difficulty with smiling.  Fair play to him for sticking around when I’m sure he would have preferred to slip away.

What if he had resigned as PM on Friday 7th?   The whole government would have had to follow him and there would have been great pressure on the Queen to invite somebody to form a government very quickly.  She could have just asked Cameron straight away and he would have had to form a minority government.  The Lib Dem leader famously can’t enter into a coalition without getting all sorts of agreements from his party and there would not have been the time for that.

Godon should be thanked for remaining as PM and not pilloried for it.  Apart from anything,  it did nothing for the public’s understanding of how our unwritten constitution works to have such lazy headlines as those in the Sun and Daily Mail.  The same goes for all those digs about Brown being an ‘unelected Prime Minister’ – they just encouraged the belief that we do elect a PM at a general election.

Maybe that suits a lot of people though: if the public really understood how the system works there might be more pressure to really change it?

Which takes me full-circle to the original thought.  Maybe Brown wasn’t as unelected as the papers suggested because of Blair’s statement about not serviing a full term.  Because of that, when the public voted in 2005 it could be argued that if they thought they were voting for a PM they were doing so in the full knowledge that they were voting for an unspecified Labour PM?  Just a thought.

This time he has gone for a long speech that is packed with soundbites.  I think my favourite one is this remark about Cameron:

Because he’s ok at question time. Not so good at answer time.

Now that would have made a far better poster than that ridiculous Gene Hunt effort.

Patrick Stewart sympathising after learning that I am standing in Horsham

Had a great day today.  This afternoon was so good it even took my mind off the £160 it was going to cost to get the wipers fixed on our car – the linkage had broken – because we had a celebrity visitor in Crawley town centre.

Not just any celebrity visitor but Captain Picard from Star Trek, otherwise known as Patrick Stewart.

The best thing about it was that he is not just a celebrity lending their name to the campaign, but a committed and long-standing member of the party who knows all the isuues and can debate them with anybody.  If you will pardon the tacky, trekkie reference, he is brilliant at engaging with the public,

There were quite a few double-takes as we went around the town.  People were arguing about whether it was really the bloke from X-Files or not, and then flocking (if we are allowed to use that word now)  round him when we told them it really was him.

Chris Oxlade, Labour's candidate for Crawley with his newest fan

It turns out he is a really nice bloke, but I knew that already.  Back in 1993 I went to see his one-man show at the Old Vic when he did A Christmas Carol.  It was absolutely brilliant and led me to go back to reading Dickens.  Previously I had found Dickens a bit daunting, but after that show I ploughed through half a dozen of his books.

Anyway, my Mrs at the time wanted his autograph as she was heavily into Star Trek, but the crowds around the stage door were huge.  Patrick signed autographs for ages, but still the crowd was 12 deep around him when he had to call it a night and go home.  I wrote him a letter, care of the stage door, complimenting him on the performance and mentioning our disappointment that his huge fan base prevented us meeting him.  By return of post we had a big, glossy signed photo. Result.

The reason why Patrick Stewart was in Crawley is that he normally campaigns in the constituency where he lives, Bermondsey South, but this year he is doing a play in Chichester so can’t get back up there.   He called somebody in the party and asked if there was anywhere in Sussex he could help out and they suggested Crawley since it is marginal and has a direct rail link to Chichester.