The final humiliation

Labour is to be investigated by the Electoral Commission for being late submitting the receipts for the "Ed Stone."

The party blamed "an administrative error" for failing to meet the deadline after the receipt for the "heavest suicide note in history" - it was noticed that no accounting for the two ton block of stone had been included in their original submission. After a hasty search they found it, but not in time.

I will be surprised if the EC throw the book at them over this one: if we're completely honest most people who've been involved in politics will be thinking "there but for the grace of God go I" in that most of us, even the relatively well organised and resourced, will at some stage have struggled with an Electoral Commission form or nearly made a mistake with one, or at least been afraid of doing so, and the stone represented about £8,000 out of Labour's £12 million national campaign spending.

Nevertheless to get in trouble by failing to account properly for something that helped them lost the election and was described at the time as a "tombstone" for their campaign is a fitting final metaphor for the shambolic campaign Labour ran in 2015 - forgetting to account for something which got you lots of the sort of media coverage which would be seared into their memories (for the wrong reasons), is eight feet tall and weighs two tons does at least appear a bit careless.

One voter said on the Today programme this morning that Labour "couldn't run a bath" and this will not have done anything to correct that impression.

Mind you, if his skill at reshuffles and media management is anything to go by, Jeremy Corbyn looks to be the one person in the Labour party who may yet achieve what would have been useful to them in 2015 but won't be much help now - e.g. making Ed Miliband look competent! 

Comments

Jim said…
I wonder what ever happened to the Ed Stone.
6:48 am
Jim said…
Good old Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EdStone
9:15 am
Chris Whiteside said…
There have been reports in the past few days that the Edstone was destroyed not long after the election

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3410512/Ed-Miliband-s-Ed-Stone-destroyed-party-lost-election.html
2:28 pm
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