On her blog the Conservative MP Nadine Dorries recently wrote,
For those who may not know – you become a ‘prospective candidate’ from the moment of selection until the legal election period begins which is when you transfer to being a candidate. You cannot be a candidate from selection because if you do call yourself such, the period of time you incurr election expenses kick in. Parliamentary candidates are Prospective Parliamentary Candidates, PPCs from selection until the election is called and then become Parliamentary Candidate from that time for the period of the short campaign. I imagine the same law applies to local candidates.
Oh dear.
The short response to all that is – she’s got the law wrong.
The ironic response is to point out that she’s one decade and two major changes of election law on expenses behind the times, the second of which was the Political Parties and Elections Act 2009. You’d have thought she would have noticed the second Act at least, because not only did she vote multiple times on it as it passed through Parliament, she was even a Teller in three divisions on it.
In other recent blogging news from her, there may soon be an answer to the mystery of her apparently massively exagerated website traffic figures, which she and her office have declined to answer my queries on. For she also recently blogged:
Stats
I don’t understand them. Will have them translated tomorrow. I don’t get what page views means if my blog is just a rolling page. It’s not like you click from one to the other? Anyway, it’s a lot!!
What was it Noel Coward said?
Somehow I suspect she wasn’t thinking of his comment, “I love criticism just so long as it’s unqualified praise”.
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The short response to all that is – she’s got the law wrong.
So what does the law say?
For the recent election the law made nothing of the previous distinction between ‘prospective candidate’ and ‘candidate’. Any local campaign spending from 1 January 2010 to 11 April 2010 (the day the general election campaign formally began) was deemed part of the ‘long campaign’ and restricted to £25,000 + 5p per elector (borough) or 7p per elector (county).
never mind – she will claim that the post was 70% fiction as she is wrong
for some time now calling yourself candidate hasn’t triggered election expenses before the start of the election period.
Given that she appears to forget everything she’s said from one minute to the next (70% fiction; 30% fiction; completely true) I don’t hold out much hope for her remembering even one bill that she voted on.
The Honourable Member for Mid Bedfordshire would do well to take more of an interest in matters to electoral law. There could be By-Election in the offing much sooner than she would care to imagine. How’s the expenses claims going Nadine? Are they 70% bogus?