We had a Labour constituency meeting tonight, and given recent news stories I couldn’t resist proposing, under any other business, that we invite Michael Gove to Crawley and then leave the minutes with those remarks on a Town Hall photocopier.

It would be incorrect to say that we are not enjoying all this, but I do wonder if it wasn’t a deliberate attempt by the local Tories to distract attention from their endless in-fighting within the town by pouring petrol onto the bonfire of in-fighting amongst their leaders. Talking of which, what a dreadful choice the Tories seem to be offering us: George Osborne or Boris Johnson. It makes Sophie’s Choice look like an easy decision to make in comparison.

Choosing which of them should lead their party, and possibly the country, is like asking which of Jedward you would like to be your phone-a-friend on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? or which 1970s celebrity you would ask to keep an eye on your teenage daughter while you are on holiday.

Anyway, back to the original story, you have to laugh at their chair’s attempts to bluff her way out of it in the Crawley News story:

When the Crawley News spoke to Mrs Bloom this week to clarify why Mr Gove would not be wanted here she said she could not remember it ever being said and questioned the authenticity of the document – even though it does appear to be genuine.

“I think that is not genuine,” she said. “I cannot remember that ever happening.”

Well the meeting which the minutes relate to was back in December, and appears to have been quite dull so it wouldn’t be surprising if it wasn’t very memorable.

Here’s a thought though: using Occam’s Razor, the most likely place this printed email would have been found is the Town Hall. It is the place where Tories can print things that is also widely accessible to people who are not Tories and do not like them. Also, I seem to remember that the photocopiers there, in common with many workplaces, are not photocopiers but MFDs – combined copier/printer/scanners. It is just as likely that the document was there not because it had been copied but because it had been printed from the network.

If that was the case then it also looks like somebody was using their Crawley council e-mail address for such internal party matters. By the way, personally I don’t have a problem with that. It is not as if sending an e-mail from a council address incurs any cost, but some people get very worked up about that sort of thing.

The biggest unintentional laugh from the Crawley News story was this:

“It brings the spotlight on Crawley and lets people know what we have been doing.”