Election Daily: Hot takes

36 days to go

NO MORE FRESH PRINCE

IT’S a busy life for Ali Hassan-Ali who last week was angrily busting out of the Tory party, for whom he was meant to be standing as a council election candidate in West Hampstead.

This week, the new Labour member could be found giving an important hot take on Will Smith’s Oscars slap of Chris Rock. It was important, naturally, for Good Morning Britain to have a former police officer to give some context. We learned during the segment that if we watch any further Will Smith films we risk “condoning violence” and Mr Ali Hassan-Ali insists the actor needs to be “reprimanded”, showing he still has the old Met lingo in there somewhere.

A Fresh Prince boycott will mean we can no longer watch and rewatch former Labour councillor Thomas Neumark’s stand-up comedy routine intro riffing on the theme tune.

OK, go on then:

BIG NEWS! NO MORE LABOUR LEAFLETS

ARE we going to see Labour fight the election without the most basic but brutally effective tool of all time? The leaflet?

It has, after all, been suggested to members in Fortune Green that you can hardly be pro-the-environment and then stuff a million bits of paper through people’s letterboxes.

In this ward, the party is up against the Lib Dems and a recent email circular to Labour members explains: ”The Lib Dems are bombarding with leaflets – so much for their concern for the environment – but we are making personal contact, listening and talking to people on the doorstep and in the street.”

As Labour prides itself on its own concern to create a greener borough, then presumably we won’t see any more leaflet bombardments from them in the run-up to May 5.

…hangonaminute:

MEDAL BEFORE ELECTION

LOTS of talk about what can and can’t be done at the Town Hall, and what can and can’t be said at next week’s bonus full council meeting, now that is the pre-election period has begun; essentially no publicly-paid officers can facilitate anything which promotes a party or an individual. It’s feet up in the council press office, then. (Only joking, guys…)

But surely then there must be a fine for the Queen and the Royal Family who called Labour councillor Jonathan Simpson to Windsor to pick up his MBE during the final run-in. Don’t they know there is an election on? You can’t be handing out medals in the pre-election period.

Congrats Cllr Simpson, btw. You can read why he got it in the CNJ here.

WE WANT DINNERS AT DINNER TIME

A WARNING from over the borough boundary comes in the form of an interesting interview with Alice Perry, the lively Labour councillor standing down in Islington after eight years. She tells the Islington Tribune that changes are needed to make it easier for a more diverse range of people to be elected, and to make it easier to be a parent and a local councillor.

She estimates you need at least 20 hours a week of free time just to be a backbencher; tbh I don’t know how you can do that with a full time job and a couple of kids… (and maybe also have JUST FIVE MINUTES to sit on a park bench and wonder when all the noise will stop).

“One of the jokes about being a councillor is you end up eating your dinners at midnight – I’m looking forward to eating my dinner at dinner time,” Cllr Perry explains.  “When I first got elected, Sarah Hayward, then the leader of Camden Council, said: ‘congratulations, you’ve put your life through the shredder.’ I didn’t realise how much work it was going to be.”

There you go, new faces, in 36 days time you may just be about to dunk your normal life into a shredder.