James Graham reports that Chamali Fernando, an aspiring Mayoral candidate for the 2012 London elections has apparently resigned her membership of the Liberal Democrats. In some ways, I regret that. I voted for her over Brian Paddick in the selection contest for our nomination last time because, whilst I expected him to win, I wanted Chamali to know that there were those of us who thought that she had real potential. However, what's done is done, and Chamali will doubtless find other theatres for her ambition.
Last November, at the Regional Conference, I was somewhat taken aback by the response given by the Chair, Denys Robinson, in reply to a questioner suggesting that we make the number one candidate on our Regional List for the London Assembly our Mayoral candidate. He stated that none of our three serving Assembly Members wanted to be our Mayoral candidate, and that our only declared aspirant Mayoral candidate (and here he named Chamali), didn't want to be on our Regional List.
Far be it from me to criticise Denys, but I see two problems here. Firstly, promoting a potential Mayoral candidate at a meeting of the Regional Party, if only by inference, potentially sent a message to other potential candidates that she was the 'anointed one' (and boy, doesn't that look stupid now...). Secondly, since when did the views of four people negate the possibility that a particular strategy might not necessarily be harmful to the Party as a whole?
There was perceived to be a chasm between our Mayoral campaign and that for the Assembly, and we need to find a way of linking the two more effectively. It might be that members across London think that the notion of our Mayoral candidate topping the Regional List is a good one, even if I have some personal doubts in terms of appropriateness. So we really need to put the matter to our members and let them tell us what they want us to do in their name.
Given that the number of people influencing our strategy is now just three, and that we're without any apparent aspirant to the position of Liberal Democrat candidate for London Mayor, perhaps we might like to revisit this?
4 comments:
If I were still in London, I'd be pushing hard for this. Strategically it gives us an edge in the fight that we don't currently have and gives our top of list candidate prominence in the campaign they wouldn't otherwise get.
The candidate makes it clear that they want to work for London and will do the best they can for London, and that if elected Mayor the next on the list gets the seat, otherwise they'll be able to constuctively criticise the mayor from a position of knowing what it's like and having prepared for it.
I really dislike directly elected executives, splitting our mayoral candidate off from our GLA campaign hurts us bad, flipping it around would benefit us substantially.
If 'none of them are interested' currently, make them—from what I've seen, both Caroline and Dee would make excellent mayoral candidates; I know less about Mike and the only time I did know about him I wasn't impressed, but a single issue doesn't a judgement make.
The odds of us winning the mayoralty are minimal, we have to campaign taking that into account—the odds increase if we use an established London politician that can spend the next few years campaigning as part of their job anyway.
To take the Mayoralty, we'd first need to be first or second in the Assembly, anything else is a pipedream.
(and I really regret Chamali leaving, I liked her when we met and wish her luck if she's going to the Tories, she's at least genuinely liberal, and I really can't do partisan sniping, not in my nature)
As an amateur website optimiser I also noticed, that the websites of all Assembly candidates didn't link to the website of the Mayoral candidate, and vice versa. It would be more professional to see, that the websites are networking and referring to the other. Also it would be good to see, that the Lib Dems had a website in each London Borough before next elections, and they could also link to the websitea of the Mayoral candidate and the local Assembly candidate, and vice versa. And the same applies to a potential London wide assembly campaign website.
They didn't? Ye gods, that's bad. I'd left by then, but to not have them interlink on the frontpage is really bad practice—one of the first things I did when I took on the Calderdale sites was to do that, and they weren't even active sites.
The party is really behind on its web presence beyond the national site, really need to start moving again on that, we're losing the web savvy demographic that's our core growth base.
There are good arguments for and against having the Mayoral candidate top of the list, but making the deicison on the basis of the views of the current incumbents and one of many potential candidates is barmy.
The party needs to get the dtrategy right, and then we select the candidates, not the other way round.
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