Friday, September 12, 2014

"For very good reasons, Britain's political parties do not campaign on election day"

Iain Martin, billed by the Telegraph as a "political commentator", wins our Bizarre Opening Sentence of the Day Award.

He reminds me of polling day at Richmond upon Thames in the 1983 general election. Having been up to do the good mornings and working ever since, I arrived on a doorstep 10 minutes before the polls closed.

A Conservative Party worker arrived on the same doorstep at the same moment. We compared notes and found we were there to knock up the same person.

2 comments:

Nick said...

I remember a commentator at the last election who earnestly decreed that the Lib Dems would need to develop a system that identified potential voters and got them to the polls.

I do wonder if any of them have ever paid any attention to real politics in their lives.

Phil Banting said...

On the evening of a more recent by-election I was sent to knock up voters marked with the cryptic code "AND". A group of Tories watched me for a bit and then one of them asked me why I was knocking up their voters. I just said that they were on my list and carried on while the Tories went off in a bemused huddle.

I later discovered that AND stood for "Asian - No Data".