BRECON & RADNORSHIRE BY-ELECTION – COCK-UP OR STITCH-UP?
Last week on the 1st August there was a Parliamentary by-election, the reports of which had been very overshadowed by the national political events, like the formation of the new Boris Johnson Premiership and Cabinet. Then almost out of the blue, as it were, we learnt that the Conservatives have lost the seat.
There were suggestions in the Remainer Main Stream Media that Boris has already lost his bounce. A more obvious point on the facts would be one that they are not so keen to report, given their pro-Labour bias, that in fact the Labour candidate had almost lost his deposit in a Welsh constituency which had once been part of Labour’s Welsh permanent fiefdom! The seat was Labour for many years until 1979.
A bit more enquiry reveals that the Conservative Party’s candidate had previously been the MP, but the by-election was called as a result of a Recall Petition because he had been convicted of creating fraudulent invoices and claiming fraudulently on his parliamentary expenses.
So what on earth induced the Conservative Party to put him up again as a parliamentary candidate? Was it incredible arrogance? Incredible stupidity? Or some sort of devious plot?
Of course in human affairs generally it is often a mistake to discount the role of sheer mistaken stupidity. That maybe what has happened here; perhaps coupled here with a sense of obstinate entitlement.
There is however an alternative idea to consider.
Let’s first look at the timeline here:-
The previous MP and recent Conservative candidate, Christopher Davies, pleaded guilty of putting in false expenses in March 2019 and in April he was sentenced.
The Speaker launched the legal petition on the 24th April and the petition was opened on the 9th May and remained open for signatures until the 20th June. It only needed to get 5,303 signatures but in fact got 10,005 signatures. 10,005 petitioners who signed to remove him amounted to 19% of the 53,032 electors in Brecon and Radnorshire.
Mr Davies was re-selected as the Conservative candidate (the re-selection process now requires not only the local party to support the candidate, but more importantly requires the National Nominating Officer of the Conservative Party to sign the candidate’s Nomination Certificate. The National Nominating Officer of the Conservative Party is Victoria Carslake, who was of course an appointment by Theresa May).
The close of nominations in this by-election took place on 5th July and, as I mentioned, the election took place last week on the 1st August.
This timeline alone shows that this by-election can really have absolutely nothing to do with Boris Johnson. The fact that the recently convicted fraudster Conservative candidate still managed to do so well might really show that Boris Johnson, if he had any effect on it at all, very nearly got him re-elected however unsuitable he might be as an MP!
So I return to the question of why would the Conservatives put up a candidate who has not only been recently convicted of fraud on his parliamentary expenses, but also to strong feeling locally about this, triggered this by-election?
Another possibility, other than Conservative stupidity, might be another devious plot by Theresa May and her inner circle.
We now know that Theresa May never sought to negotiate any form of proper Brexit. She never suggested to the EU negotiators that we might leave with ‘No Deal’ and she never attempted to get the United Kingdom a good deal. Her whole effort was to try and tie us up as close to the European Union as possible, which is why she went on, not only lying about what she was doing, but also signing us up to yet further EU commitments, such as the new EU Army.
She also called her General Election not because she wanted to guarantee Brexit, but rather because she wanted to be independent of the Brexiteers and to impose her Agreement on the country.
So I suggest that a possible scenario is that this totally unsuitable Conservative candidate was re-selected in order to lose that seat and so give Remain supporters in the House of Commons yet more clout.
All this was going on whilst Theresa May was trying to and partly succeeding in getting huge further spending commitments which would bind the hands of her successor, which was already most likely to be Boris.
If this is what was actually happening, then this by-election is nothing to do with Boris except in the sense that it was always set up as a trap.
The most laughable suggestion is that this is all the fault of the Brexit Party splitting the vote. This is of course a variant of the old line of the most cynical Establishment vote manipulators that you cannot vote for anybody else other than the Conservatives otherwise you get Labour (or vice or versa if you are a former Labour supporter).
Whilst it is true that the Brexit Party got more than the difference between the Conservative and Liberal Democrat, it does not follow that people who voted Brexit Party would have voted for the Tory convicted fraudster.
Of course all this undemocratic nonsense relies upon the most appallingly undemocratic electoral system, the “First Past the Post” which regularly cheats large numbers of voters out of their preferred outcome.