Election fever

Hooray, it's election night. I can't stay up to watch it, since I've got to start work early tomorrow so that I can leave early and then trek down to the distant wilderness that is Ebbw Vale tomorrow evening, but I'm still very enthusiastic about the fact that it's election night.

As I've mentioned before, this is the first general election where I've been in a constituency where my vote could plausibly make any difference, so I've been quite gripped by all the twists and turns of this campaign. I'll be sorry when it's over with. In 1997, I was living in East Lindsey, under the dominion of Sir Peter Tapsell, who'd been Conservative MP for the rural wilds of Lincolnshire since long before I was born, and who is still MP there now (although boundary changes mean he's now MP for "Louth and Horncastle" instead). He'll be Father of the House when Parliament reconvenes, now that the even more ancient Alan Williams has retired. At eighty years old, he knows he can say and do whatever he likes, and still be guaranteed well over fifty percent of the votes in his constituency, so expect to see him continue to vote with his excessively right-wing conscience against any modern Conservative policies that come his way.

In 2001, I was in Boston (with Skegness), where it was thought for a while that Labour might take the seat from the traditional Conservative majority (Sir Richard Body, who everyone either voted for or would-have-voted-for-if-only-he-wasn't-a-Tory was retiring, and the new candidate was very young). But then their campaigning, which consisted of driving a loudspeaker van around the towns and villages constantly blaring "Vote Labour! Vote Labour!" made everyone hate them, and the yuppie-ish new Conservative Mark Simmonds won it easily enough.

By 2005, I'd moved to a safe Labour seat for a change - in Derby South, nobody really liked Margaret Beckett, but it was understood that everyone would be voting for her anyway. And indeed they did. Politics can be strange.

This one, though, I still don't know who'll win. Probably the Conservatives. But we'll see tomorrow morning.