Bob Russell, the Lib Dem MP for Colchester, claims to have set a record by holding a surgery that lasted for 12 hours.
It seems that 36 people made appointments to see him last Friday. It’s not entirely clear whether he had originally planned it to go on for so long, or whether he just had a very long list of people who wanted to see him.
He claims to have seen 10,000 constituents at his surgeries since he was elected in 1997.
So your challenge today is to establish whether this truly is a record. Do you know an MP who has held a longer session?
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6 Comments
That made me jump out of my skin. Bleary eyed co-editor having a day off imagined it was a different kind of surgery. Blood pressure slowly returning to normal. Cleverly done.
When I worked for Willie Rennie, life seemed to be a constant surgery although we never had an actual session go on for longer than a couple of hours.
And at the end of 4 years, we’d helped 10,000 people.
Impressive. I have to say, I attended a 5 hour surgery once, but never 12 hours.
The thing with surgeries (at least for me) is that they took massive chucks out of my day, but at the same time seemed to fly by. I really enjoyed them because it felt like this was us really get to the hearts of issues affecting local people and making a difference, even when all we were was a friendly ear willing to listen (which was rare).
@Caron, I read the headline the same way you did. Be still my pounding heart.
Although Ed Davey can’t match a single 12 hour session, he is still managing 6 or 7 surgeries each month since he became a minister, and has seen over 14,000 constituents in surgeries since elected in 1997.
If you add in people who have been helped by letter, email or phone, that jumps to approximately 47,000 cases in total. It has really had an impact – on the doorstep everyone seems to have either met him or knows someone that he has helped.
One hopes that the attendees had some idea of how long they might wait for their appointments.