English Council is coming, the turkey's getting fat...

Curious really, that English Council takes place over the Thanksgiving weekend. In years gone by, I would have spent the day slaving over a huge turkey (and, for the record, I'm remarkably good at roasting turkeys - a political skill, I presume). This year, I will worrying about achieving my goal of ensuring that London Region has its full complement of representatives at English Council.

The advantage of being both the Regional Whip and trusted is that I get to nominate the substitutes and I've taken the chance to attempt to rebalance our delegation, initially 16 men and four women. Unfortunately, two of the four women already on the delegation have needed substitutes so I've had little impact thus far.

On the plus side, ten women have run for places this year, so hopefully things will be a little better in 2006. Whether or not I will still be Regional Whip is of course dependent on getting re-elected to the Executive Committee and that could be a bloodbath, as the opposition is pretty strong. Given that most of the people that I've been able to impress this year (why are they impressed?) need to vote themselves back in too, I may struggle but, fingers crossed, I've done enough.

Then, of course, I have to be re-elected as Secretary and Regional Whip at the Executive Committee meeting that follows on 3 December. Which reminds me, I need to construct an agenda...