Haltemprice and Howden: a failure for the Greens?

No surprises in the Haltemprice and Howden by-election, then, which may not quite have managed to put civil liberties on the political map to the extent that some would have hoped but has at least introduced the political commentariat to two previously unknown towns near Hull.

David Davis has got his expected walkover on a low turnout, with two out of three registered voters staying at home. He can now savour what must be the biggest majority (in percentage terms) in the country, albeit one that guarantees a huge swing against him at the general election. None of the loonies managed to save their deposits, although Miss Great Britain on 521 votes (5.21 per cent) must be mightily pleased at beating anti-rape campaigner Jill Saward on 492 votes (2.07 per cent) and the Official Monster Raving Loony candidate, Mad-Cow Girl on 412 (1.73 per cent).

The most disappointed candidate, however – apart from independents Tony Farnon and Norman Scarth, who couldn’t even get all of the ten people who nominated them to cast their votes in their favour – must be the English Democrat, Joanne Robinson. She called for a recount after losing second place to the Greens by just 44 votes.

The Green Party candidate, Shan Oakes, polled 1,758 votes (7.40 per cent, which the party is claiming as a by-election record). In any normal by-election in England, fighting candidates from all three major parties, that would have been a creditable result. In Haltemprice and Howden, it’s a poor performance – barely beating a fringe nationalist group and doing no better than the combined vote of the various loony candidates.

In the absence of the major parties, but with the presence of the national media, all desperate for a fresh and different angle on the campaign, this was an unparallelled opportunity to present the Greens as 'the real civil liberties candidate', as the party's slogan had it. That opportunity was missed.

I wrote last month that ‘anything less than several thousand votes and second place will have to be marked down as a failure’ for the Greens. I see no reason to change that assessment now.

How to make £10,000 by this time tomorrow

Got a spare million? Want to make a quick £10,000 by this time tomorrow? Betfair.com, which describes itself as ‘the world’s biggest betting community’ with 15 million bets placed daily, is offering odds of 1/100 on David Davis winning the Haltemprice and Howden by-election. Since Davis is as near as you get to a dead cert winner (in fact he’d still win if he was dead), that’s got to be worth a flutter. It’s certainly better than the miserable 14/1 that Paddy Power quoted on a Green Party victory, which is about as likely as Port Vale winning the 2009 FA Cup, for which SkyBet is currently offering 3000/1.

Note to the kind of people who are taken in by ‘get-rich-quick’ email scams, chain letters and that sort of thing: There is a catch to this scheme. First, you need a million quid to bet with. And second, Betfair uses a ‘matching-bet’ system, which means you’d only win the full whack if enough people bet against Davis winning. Still, the world is full of fools, so who knows, your luck could be in.

Green takes on grey in Haltemprice and Howden

I’ve always had a soft spot for people who are prepared to put their money where their mouths are. So even when I didn’t agree with a lot of what was coming out of their mouths, I had a degree of respect for the Militants who would refuse to take more than a worker’s wage on the few occasions that they got themselves elected.

Now the Green Party candidate in the Haltemprice and Howden by-election has made a similar pledge in promising that she will donate half of her MP’s salary to her party in the unlikely event of her beating David Davis on 10 July. Shan Oakes, who has lived in the East Riding of Yorkshire since 1975, is billing herself as ‘the real civil liberties candidate’ as well as challenging Davis on the Iraq war, global capitalism and the lack of a bus service from Howden station.

Despite a total of 26 candidates, ranging from the Mad Cow-Girl standing for the Official Monster Raving Loony Party to one-time Green Party speaker David Icke standing for the Absolute Nutters Alliance, Oakes is the only alternative to David Davis who stands any realistic chance of putting in a credible performance. Anything less than several thousand votes and second place will have to be marked down as a failure.

David Davis's militant tendency

'Libertarians from the left and right sometimes meet in the middle against an authoritarian state,' declared Tony Benn in announcing his support for David Davis in his Haltemprice and Howden by-election defence of civil liberties. Now, judging by a photo in the first email from the 'David Davis for Freedom' campaign, the former shadow home secretary has enlisted another left-wing icon in the fight against NuLab tyranny: the clenched fist salute.

Apart from the fact that they look a little less angry and a little more clean cut, this could be the Militant Tendency circa 1985. What does Davis have in store for us next? A weekly newspaper and a general strike?

David Davis no longer just for whitey

I see that David Davis is no longer merely seeking 'freedom for whitey', as Recess Monkey, Pickled Politics and others put it when he launched his by-election website. His newly-revised website logo (top pic) includes at least one non-whitey, depending on your definition, and what looks like it could be Iain Dale (second from left). Sadly, however, his support seems to have halved since the original version (bottom pic).

Doing it for the Sun

What to make of David Davis’s decision to resign as an MP and shadow home secretary and fight a by-election on the sole issue of the government’s plans for 42-day detention without charge? Whatever it is, it certainly isn’t ‘a very courageous and brave decision’, as his discomfited party leader, David Cameron, felt compelled to describe it yesterday. Standing for election in Baghdad Central would be brave, canvassing support from the voters of Kabul would be courageous. Resigning and standing again in a safe Tory seat when none of the other major parties is going to oppose you, and the government is among the least popular since polling began, requires about as much bottle as the man who invented milk cartons.

And now Kelvin MacKenzie is stepping in where the real politicians supposedly fear to tread. The former Sun editor, who says he is ‘90 per cent certain’ to stand against Davis, brings a surreal touch to the proceedings with his declaration that there are two reasons why he’ll do it: ‘One is that the Sun is very, very hostile to David Davis because of his 28-day stand, and the Sun has always been up for 42 days, or perhaps even 420 days, frankly. And secondly this is a bizarre cost to the taxpayer.’

Well, the cost of the election in Davis’s constituency was £95,520 in 2005 – or rather less than the £135,600 it cost to keep the average MP in pay and expenses last year. Not to be sniffed at, but it’s hardly going to break the budget. And anyway, standing in an election as a protest against the cost of that election hardly has the ring of logical consistency about it.

So that leaves the improbable spectacle of one of the most right-wing editors of a British newspaper in living memory campaigning for 42-day detention (or 420 days, since he doesn’t seem to mind) against a diehard Tory fighting on a civil liberties’ platform. If that’s not bizarre enough, Davis appears to have the support of around three-quarters of Conservative Party members for his stand but is opposed on the issue by almost three-quarters of the electorate at large. A similar proportion seem to hate Gordon Brown and his government more than they support 42-day detention, though. So Davis should still win comfortably, despite the intervention of MacKenzie and the Sun, even though he’ll probably not convince a majority of voters that he’s right on the single issue that he says he's fighting on.

This has more of the appearance of an emotional spasm than clever tactics - in which respect it could turn out to be a big mistake for Davis, the Tories and civil libertarians alike. But it should give the Sun something to spout about for a few weeks later this summer and it will be entertaining to see the sort of knots that the rest of the Tory commentariat get themselves into in trying to reconcile their dislike for Gordon Brown and the government with their instinctive support for anything hardline and illiberal.

POSTSCRIPT Reverse ferret: MacKenzie and the Sun bottled it. Rupert Murdoch likes nothing better than a winner and Davis is bound to win. Cowardy custard by Obsolete is a good account of what happened.