Candidates, candidates, candidates...

I've been rather busy worrying about candidates lately. How to get them, what to do with them once you've found them and stopping them from doing something that would be bad for internal party democracy, all this and more has crossed my metaphorical desk in recent days. And of course, I've been one myself from time to time recently. My personal record this autumn? Elections contested five, elections won five. I'm not smug, no, not at all...

Yesterday saw me at a meeting of our Regional Candidates Committee, nailing down the final details of our GLA selection rules and introducing a proposal for debate. I'll save you the details on that, although the matter will now go before the Regional Executive for further discussion and, hopefully, adoption. We're making progress in terms of selections for parliamentary candidates in London, having had to wait until the boundary changes were concluded and the May elections put to bed. A number of interesting seats are now well on the way to selecting candidates, and I suspect that we'll be in pretty good shape by the Spring.

Today was English Council and the big debate was over the timetable for selecting our European Parliamentary candidates. Traditionally, we have selected all of the English candidates at once, which makes for a heavy workload but prevents the Party from becoming trapped in an endless cycle of internal campaigning. There were apparently some qualms about the lack of consultation, but I'm puzzled as to what the impact of that consultation would have been.

In 1998, the selection process ran across the Local Elections that year, and there were some who felt that having something like 100 key camapigners running around whole European Regions trying to attract personal support at the height of local campaigns was probably a bad idea. In 2002, we started rather later in the year, and Christmas rather got in the way (I ended up having to approve the manifestos from a hotel room in Buenos Aires - should I be that surprised that my marriage failed within twelve months?). Best of all, candidates got to campaign when nights were at their shortest and the weather at its worst, hardly conducive to meeting members on their doorsteps.

This time, we have attempted to avoid both of these pitfalls, and came up with a timetable which achieved all of that, met the apparent needs of the Campaigns Department, and could be delivered by Membership Services. You can't please everybody though, and some people do feel that they should be consulted, no matter how relevant they might be to the process, or whether or not by doing so, others might feel that they've been put at a disadvantage.

I am minded to propose that we actually start making proposals for selection timetables further in advance. Withthe exception of Westminster elections, all other major elections are on fixed-term cycles, and we could make provisional plans which might allow people to plan better. If a General Election were to be called, those plans can be flexible enough to be altered at short notice, and most people would understand if we did that, as long as we were willing to explain ourselves at the time of doing so. We also need to be better at communicating with stakeholders, something that my fellow members of English Candidates Committee seem enthusiastic about. Something for 2007 perhaps...