What have we got to look forward to should that nice young Mr Cameron get into No.10? More of the same old malfeasance, bad judgement and spin it seems.
Take journo Daniel Finkelstein, the Gold List Tory candidate, Comment Editor for Murdoch’s Times and regular guest on BBC2’s Newnight, who jumped at the invitation to join a panel vetting prospective Conservative parliamentary candidates in one of his local constituencies. Not often a mere pundit gets direct input into the process.
A Tory parliamentary candidate who bombarded his Liberal Democrat rival with hate mail and vandalised the party’s Watford headquarters was facing jail today after admitting more than 70 offences of criminal damage and harassment.
Ian Oakley, 31, of Ryeland Close, West Drayton, north west London, admitted mounting a two year hate campaign against Sal Brinton, who he considered his main rival to defeat the sitting Labour MP.
The Times report of Oakley’s conviction yesterday was prepended with a link to Finkelstein’s blogpost “Ian Oakley, My Part In His Downfall”. Even before the court had found Oakley guilty Finkelstein had his apologia ready and a lame one it is too:
[…]
It is now the fashion to invite journalists to interview applicants in the final round of the seat selection. And I was asked to be the interviewer in Watford.
I asked Oakley and the other candidates questions, one applicant after the other, in front of a meeting of party members. Members were then asked to vote on the candidate they liked best.
Oakley wasn’t intellectually the strongest candidate but I understood why he was selected. He seemed the most experienced of the finalists and the one most obviously ready to be the PPC.
[My emphasis]
When I was asked by friends, I said I thought Watford hadn’t necessarily selected the best future MP but they had chosen the one who seemed most assured, self confident and politically mature. I thought him a very stable, solid choice even if he didn’t do all that much for me.
There wasn’t the smallest sign that he was, well, basically bonkers.
This man is is in the running to be Cameron’s Alistair Campbell. Looks like he’s perfectly qualified.
What interests me about all this is not so much Finkelstein’s future career in wanksterdom as it is this: Oakley’s constituency party members surely must have known, or at least suspected that the man was mentally ill. I find it hard to believe such a vile and vicious misogynist could have hidden it so effectively in his council career even. Yet it appears no one who knew him thought fit to mention it until he was arrested and charged.
That says more to me about the Conservative party’s fitness to rule than any Tory hack’s lame public excuses for his own bad judgement.
