Stoking it up in Stoke Central

All around the country there are constituencies where various ding-dongs are going on. Some odd, some peculiar, most just the usual political sniping and squabbling. In Stoke Central it appears to be a mixture of everything. First, the remnants of New Labour got a guy called Tristram to be the candidate in place of posh Mark Fisher. The phrase "pot calling the kettle" comes to mind and New Labour is deftly trying to be both pot and kettle at the same time. Because the Labour candidate is a friend of Peter Mandelson's this has upset the Stoke Old Labour stalwarts, so the factions are getting fractious. This has led to Gary Elsby, a former secretary or whatever of the local party, to stand as an Independent Labour candidate. He's puffing hard on his bravado pipe and causing a skirmish in town. His use of the word Labour has upset the London lot. Hard to say whether he will succeed in knocking much off the Labour vote or not. If he does, anything could happen. It's a volatile electorate at the moment. More Grand National than a two-horse race.

The BNP is also in a spot of bother, with their former stalwart Alby Walker calling his former comrades a bunch of Nazi revisionists. So he too is talking of standing as an independent. Somehow I don't think he will do as well as Elsby.

All these individual constituency scraps must play havoc with the pollsters and their expensive number crunchers. Where on earth would you put Gary Elsby in the scheme of things? More and more it's becoming 650 mini general elections and not one big one.

In Solihull we've got no worries about Gordon Brown and his ideas. Labour are down in the low tens. This is a contest between two opposition parties, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. So even if Labour won the whole thing we'd still have an opposition MP whichever one won. If the Conservatives win nationally we have the joy of knowing Brown's out, but we could still have a LibDem MP. As I say, each constituency does its own thing.

When all the votes are counted I'm sure it will be the strangest result ever recorded. The electorate appears more in a "plumping for" mood than a "standing up for" mood. It's wide open basically and the pollsters are not really sure about what's happening. That's why I think constituencies like Stoke Central excite the media. They can in turn excite the candidates to engage in a real knockabout election.