We are now half way through the election campaign and most of us will be feeling a bit knackered.
Elections are a bit like the Tour De France. A massive daily effort with actual and metaphorical daily climbs and sprint finishes.
We thought we’d take a minute to appreciate the key people in the election in a series of posts which will hopefully sustain us through to polling day.
Up today are the election agents. They take a lot of legal responsibility to keep the campaign and their candidate on the right side of the law. They are the ones who have to get the nominations together, manage the campaign budgets, keep records of donations and make sure that everything the candidate and campaign does complies with increasingly complex electoral law and they can’t even have a rest after polling day. Then they have to pay all the bills and get the candidate’s expense return in by the deadline.
Even in a seat with a smaller campaign, it’s a big job.
So a massive thanks to all the agents who perform this skilled and daunting task. Please use the comments to tell us how brilliant your agent is.
One Comment
Just to add, to amuse campaigners: I and others have long joked that we can campaign successfully with less money than the Tories because their members are either too old or too posh to deliver leaflets, so they have to pay others to post them. On Thursday morning the first Tory leaflet of this campaign was pushed through our door in Saltaire (in the Tory-held Shipley constituency) together with a leaflet on local supermarket prices. So it’s not a joke; they don’t have enough activists to deliver their own leaflets even in seats they hold!