Tuesday, April 23, 2024

Another hold up with the Lib Dem selection in Sutton and Cheam


There's news of a further hold up in the attempt to find a Liberal Democrat candidate for the eminently winnable seat of Sutton and Cheam.

Early yesterday Michael Crick tweeted:
According to Inside Croydon, the original shortlist for the meeting had only two names on it: former London mayoral candidate Luisa Porritt and Sutton councillor Luke Taylor.

Radical Bulletin in the latest Liberator (issue 422) reported after the original call for applicants was issued:
This presumably means that Sutton & Cheam’s former prospective parliamentary candidate David Campanale has finally been ousted from that role after an interminable series of appeals that began last summer when the constituency first sought to remove him.
Although Campanale was originally a Liberal Democrat he left to join the highly socially conservative Christian People’s Alliance and rose to be its leader and author of its 2010 general election manifesto. Some of this was unexceptionable but it also said: “A new hierarchy of rights has put the needs of sexual minorities above religious freedom” and inveighed against “sex in view of families enjoying parks and open spaces” (Liberator 416).
He stood as a Lib Dem candidate in Spelthorne in 2019 - though few outside the area appear to have noticed - but Sutton & Cheam is a rather more serious proposition as the party held it from 1997 to 2015.
Some Sutton members felt they should have been better acquainted with Campanale's past by the party before the original selection meeting and were unimpressed to be told they should have looked on Google.
The current Conservative member for Sutton and Cheam, Paul Scully will not stand at the coming general election. In 2019 he had a majority of 8351.

As Liberator says, the seat was held for the Lib Dems, in the person of Paul Burstow, between 1997 and 2015.

3 comments:

nigel hunter said...

They had better get their finger out of the hole and sort it out.

Anonymous said...

Any chance of getting Paul Burstow back?

Patrick Coleman said...

Seat also held by Graham (now Lord) Tope from Dec 1972 by-election to Feb 1974 GE. I had forgotten the cause of the by-election - Tory MP Richard Sharples resigned to become Governor of Bermuda (sadly assassinated in March 1973 with his dog Horsa and his aide-de-camp)