the sandals are off

Whether you had a good or a bad result yesterday, here’s a chuckle for Lib Dems everywhere.

We embrace technology in Wycombe, so my wife was trained on inputting telling numbers into EARS on polling day. Tellers were equipped with mobile phones to text numbers back from our target polling stations.

At about 6.30pm, one of our activists, Richard, took over on a polling station. My agent gave my wife his mobile number and she sent a message to ‘Richard’ saying ’send me numbers as you get them. Unfortunately, the mobile number was wrong – but coincidentally someone called Richard.

Wrong Richard was intrigued by the request and began texting random numbers to my wife, which she duly entered into EARS.

My EARS data had been going badly all day, predicting the defeat which I eventually suffered – but it did seem to be improving as the evening wore on! So we went into full blown ‘knock up’ mode. We were all chasing around my ward dragging reluctant voters out to my lost cause.

Just now we discovered our error!

Another embarrassment for me was that as a result of this last minute push, I dragged some poor unfortunate with a slipped disc hobbling into a polling station. It turned out he wasn’t on the electoral roll!

Still, it wasn’t all bad. Our frenzied activity in this ward drew the Tory knock-up machine into action – and while they piled up votes they didn’t need we easily took our other target ward from them on the other side of town.

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