Tag Archives: vetting

It’s coming to that time when nobody wants to leave anything to chance, when the pressure is on. Yes, I’m talking about the end of the football season, with titles, promotion and relegation still to be decided.

I spent part of yesterday at Portman Road, as Ipswich Town fought out a rather nervy 2-2 draw with promotion rivals Middlesbrough, in front of nearly 30,000 spectators, and was struck by the similarities with a political campaign. You bring together the best team you can muster, prepare as best you can, determine the appropriate strategy to defeat your opponent and hope that the ball runs kindly for you on the big day.

At least, that’s how it often used to be. Nowadays, with five political parties all vying for supremacy, the variables can be bewildering and the outcomes potentially even more so. As that veteran of Birmingham politics, Paul Tilsley, said to the Guardian,

I think the result is going to be somewhat of a bugger’s muddle. I cannot see you getting to a result on 7 May where you could put two parties together to govern Birmingham. No single party is going to win.

I suspect that, where I am, in Ipswich, the picture is similar. The town has traditionally been a Labour/Conservative marginal, but with both parties unpopular and vulnerable, the Greens and Reform will hope to lure voters away from the left and right, whilst Liberal Democrats will hope to benefit from politically homeless centre-right voters. I frankly wouldn’t like to call either the Borough or County Council outcomes, and I suspect that there’ll be an outbreak of genuinely “no overall control” authorities post-7 May. Mind you, Ipswich still elects in thirds, so the worst case scenario will still leave Labour in control here.

It’s a busy week ahead too, with Sir Kier Starmer supposedly under increasing pressure over the continued fallout from the Mandelson Affair. Whilst I find myself wondering where any replacement might come from, we will at least get greater insight into how the vetting system works. And that leads me to, perhaps, one obvious question – why would you announce a highly sensitive appointment before the vetting is completed? It’s almost as though the vetting is irrelevant, that a box must be ticked. It is an odd way to run a railway.