This week’s big news is my selection as the Liberal Democrats’ Candidate for election to the Greater London Assembly (GLA), the body that holds the decisions of the Mayor of London to account. The election is on Thursday 2nd May and I am building my campaign wardrobe as I write. Luckily yellow suits me.

A year ago when I’d just started being the Beckenham constituency rep for Bromley LibDems, I never envisaged standing for any kind of representative body but I find myself launched into minor fame! Over the summer I was encouraged and then strongly encouraged to consider the application process to be a Prospective Parliamentary Candidate (PPC) but I was busy with Puppykins, who was busy turning our lives upside down, and I was so wrung out physically and emotionally that I just couldn’t contemplate any other responsibilities. Yet the encouragement continued and strengthened, and I finally took the candidates’ test online in late October and, having passed that, the assessment day in mid-December. I had this horrible cold at the time so I was quite glad that the assessment was held on Zoom. Not having done paid work for almost twenty years, I’d no experience of this sort of assessment exercise and so was delighted and relieved when I was told that I had got through. I found myself wondering whether people like Gullis or 30p Lee had had to endure such selection rigour. My intention was to help out by joining the available pool of candidates here in Bromley but I was propelled straight into the campaign for the GLA and here I am now as the candidate for the London Boroughs of Bexley and Bromley.

Politics has interested me since I used to go out delivering Labour Party leaflets with my dad and since he explained apartheid to seven year old me when we found that I had bought a can of South African fruit cocktail. I believe that apathy about politics is a sign of extreme privilege: that one is comfortable enough not to care about vulnerable people without a voice; not to care about government corruption and waste of our tax contributions. I don’t understand how people are happy to be manipulated by media billionaires into participating in  divisive culture wars. How do people not care about how politics affects their lives and those of their families and friends, and of people across the world through climate change, for example? So many fought and died for the right to vote and I believe that it’s utterly wrong not to use it, or not to inform oneself of the implications and consequences of one’s vote. This is how Brexit happened. If you’re not interested in politics, what even are you?

It’s already been quite a ride. My head is full of people to contact and WhatsApp groups and strategies for leafletting and canvassing. Realistically it unlikely that this seat will be a LibDem win, although in the words of Mrs PotatoHead, “You never know,”  but I do hope to raise the profile and vote share of the LibDems in our area. The more people we can enthuse to come along and volunteer to help, the more ready we will be to fight any election campaign in the future. I’d like to offer people some hope that there is an alternative to voting for the two big parties who, thanks to the First Past The Post (FPTP) voting system, manage to carve out majorities disproportionate to the number of votes they receive. As a personal goal I want to offer hope that liberalism is out there, as alternative to the bottom-feeding, narrow minded politics of hatred, bigotry and division as spouted by those Reform people.

I’ve already started talking and listening to people who live near me in Shortlands. Next week I’ll be talking to the Bexley party in Sidcup where my mum was a nurse for so many years. I have little experience but I’m learning all the time. Oddly, I have taken inspiration from hockey mom Sarah Palin and the incomprehensible Nadine Dorries because if they can achieve political success, there must be hope for me. Let’s see where this leads.