There's always something new in the life of politics
HERE’S the form when you are canvassing with a parliamentary candidate.
In a housing estate the team fan out and head for front doors, but at the same time keeping within eyeshot and earshot of each other.
The candidate keeps a central position, ready to stride up the front path with hand outstretched, if one of the canvassers signals that someone is answering the bell and starting to unfasten the door.
This is the cue for the canvasser to discreetly retire and leave the talking to the candidate. After all, it is him or her who wants to be elected, not the canvasser.
Now as we all know, we have just had a General Election – and the other day I was a canvasser in a certain community in Sutherland.
Following the routine I describe above, on hearing footsteps approaching a particular front door, I beckoned my man forward and simultaneously backed away towards the garden gate.
But hardly had the man who came to the door been greeted and handed a leaflet – when he suddenly turned towards my retreating figure, looked directly at me, and said "Here, you – I have a bone to pick with you!
"You wrote in your letter in the Raggie that the shoes in Lidl were good. Well I went and bought a pair on the strength of it – and they’re absolute rubbish!"
It is an old custom for candidates to tour round polling stations on the actual day of the election.
The candidate is allowed to pass the time of day with voters (but absolutely nothing else; because that might be construed as canvassing within a polling station, something that is against the law) and the candidate is also allowed to thank the presiding officer, the person in charge of the polling station, and his or her team for their efforts.
The candidate is also allowed to inquire as to the level of turnout of voters. From this, and the time of day at which the figure is given, you can roughly predict the final proportion of the electorate that will have voted when the polls close. Beyond that, you cannot have much more of a conversation with the team in the polling station; except that on several occasions I have been known to accept a proffered sweetie.
But that’s not the point of this. Rather it is about a surprise discovery that I once made at an election. Unbeknown to me, it turned out that a friend of mine had been appointed a presiding officer at one of the polling stations. I expressed my surprise and pleasure is seeing him in his new guise.
"Very pleased, Jamie. First time. Been longing to do this for years…" he murmured in my ear, perilously close to breaking the rules.
Later, much later, at the count in Wick’s Assembly Rooms, there was something of a commotion near the stage upon which the final result was to be announced in due course.
Ever inquisitive, I made my way forward through the throng and over to the rope barrier that kept us back from where the black ballot boxes were being opened.
Two hefty men were going at one of the boxes with hammers and chisels. They were making a real din and at the same time Highland Council officials were looking on anxiously.
"What’s the problem?" I asked.
"Och, when he’d checked that the box was locked when the polls closed, a new presiding officer went and put the box’s key through the slot and in with the votes. It’ll no shake back out through the slot and were having to break the box open to get to the votes."
Still curious I asked which polling station the box came from. OMG – it turned out that it was my friend’s. He was never asked to be a presiding officer again.
Chatting last week with Black Isle councillor Isobel McCallum, I asked her how her young and pretty daughter Lindsay had enjoyed being a Conservative candidate in the election.
"Fine, Jamie. Quite an experience for her. But wait till I tell you – when she and the other candidates were called forward to look at the spoiled ballots, well she got a surprise!"
The spoiled ballots are ballot papers which have not been filled out right, on which there are two votes marked down on it, or a vote that straddles two boxes, or has something scrawled across it like "They’re all useless".
I cocked a quizzical eyebrow at Isobel: she sipped her Highland Council coffee.
"You’ll never believe it, you’ve never seen the like – one of the ballot papers had no votes on it – but what was on it was a written proposal of marriage addressed to Lindsay!"
I must admit, I’ve been doing politics for a long time now, but that one takes the biscuit.
