As some readers will have spotted already, Stoa-favourite Tim Collins x-MP has recently failed to be adopted as the prospective parliamentary candidate for Gillingham and Rainham.
Indeed, it was a selection exercise of keen interest to this blog, as Stoa pantomime-villain Liz Truss failed to be selected from the shortlist, too.
But instead they plumped for some turncoat called Rehman Chishti.
It’s been a frustrating year for Tim Collins Watching over here at the Virtual Stoa. He’s kept a very low profile since the voters of the South Lakes area decided that they’d rather not be represented by him in Parliament, thank you very much, and I’ve basically had no idea what, if anything, he’s been doing with himself since then.
Now there’s a chap called Tim Montgomerie, who thinks more highly of Iain Duncan Smith than most people do, and who runs the Conservative Home blog. He’s been performing a service to the nation by publishing the names of people on Mr Cameron’s A-List of priority Tory candidates for parliament, names that, apparently, Tory Central Office would prefer be kept secret.
There was general rejoicing, obviously at the inclusion of Tim Collins on the A-List (an A-List without TC x-MP CBE would naturally discredit itself). But even more excitingly, he’s also posted a long, long comment the same page, explaining why he thinks he lost: tactical voting, “big money”, postal voting anomalies and statistical fluke. And let’s hope this is just the start of his career of blog-commenting.
UPDATE [6.40pm]: On reflection, I think the title of this post should have been, Tim Collins: I Blame Quakers.
We don’t hear much about Tim Collins CBE x-MP in the media much these days, which is a shame as I’d be curious to find out how he’s adjusting to Life After Parliament. But there are still occasional references to be found to his brief, shining political career, this one in today’s Independent on Sunday (boo, boo, you’re supposed to pay for it) making a claim I hadn’t heard before. Here’s Alan Watkins, who makes the familiar point associating sex scandals with Tories and Liberals and money scandals with Labour politicians, and who then goes on:
In the 1990s, true, there was a shift in the terms of trade. The Tories started to go in for both. It was not wholly of John Major’s making. I heard his Back to Basics speech at the party conference and read it several times afterwards. It did not contain a single reference to sexual intercourse, whether expressly or by implication. It was all about reading, writing and arithmetic.The sex bit was inserted by Mr Tim Collins, then the prime minister’s spin merchant, who was asked by journalists whether the speech meant that Mr Major expected the highest personal standards from his ministers. Mr Collins replied that that was indeed what it meant. The trouble started from there.
If that’s true, then Tories must think TC, etc, has a lot to answer for, and the rest of us must thank him for services to the gaiety of the nation.
Alright, I give up. What has happened to Tim Collins CBE x-MP since losing his seat at the election? Google’s no bloody good, as it just serves up billions of pages about Colonel Tim Collins, but I’m not interested in him.
Over here, with a very fine photograph.
UPDATE [11.30pm]: This is almost too exciting: from the Daily Pilot:
NEWPORT BEACH — The harbor commission voted Wednesday to suspend the mooring permit for a barge used to raise white sea bass in Newport Harbor.During the same meeting, the board voted to move forward with new rules designed to discourage sea lions from living in the harbor. The commission considered ordinances that would make it illegal to feed wild animals, such as sea lions and to discard items, especially fish remains, into the harbor.
Harbor resources supervisor Chris Miller said the commission favored additional provisions to the rules pertaining to fishing vessels. Harbor commissioners Tim Collins, Seymour Beek and Ralph Rodheim are set to meet next week to fine tune the ordinances before they are considered by the City Council…
I was wondering whether he’d get a proper job.
Over here.
Tim Collins (or the person who does his e-campaigning) has finally taken down his website at timcollins.co.uk, which just displays a blank page if you try to load it. With regret, therefore, I’m removing the link from the “in the bin” section of the sidebar, now that this particular page is, well, in the bin.
Please use the comments to point me towards any other Tory websites which might entertain or instruct. The WiddyWeb claims that it’s displaying a pic of AW MP in a Popemobile, though it’s not clear to me that she really has a Popemobile there, or what variety of Popemobile she’s in. (I think Ratzinger introduced a new kind for his enthronement ceremonies earlier in the year.)
From the North-West Evening Mail:
The Party in Westmorland and Lonsdale is embarking on the task of choosing a prospective parliamentary candidate in a bid to win back the marginal seat at the next opportunity.They believe former MP Tim Collins will not put himself forward to stand again in the seat which covers most of the South Lakeland area…
My goodness.
I’m expecting quite a bit of extra traffic over the next few days, for the odd reason that the Virtual Stoa is third on a google search for “Richard Whiteley” + “obituary”.
People who follow this link won’t find an obituary of Richard Whiteley, however, though they will find details of Tim Collins ex-MP CBE’s “Countdown”-themed reception at the House of Commons last year, which may bring them some consolation in this dark hour.
From yesterday’s Independent:
The Tories need to understand the appeal of Jamie Oliver if they are reconnect with voters, Andrew Lansley, a contender for the Conservative leadership, said.Mr Lansley, who is challenging Kenneth Clarke to become the champion of the centre-left in the struggle to stop David Davis, said the Tories were out of touch with ordinary voters and seen as too extreme.
In a sideswipe at his former shadow cabinet colleague, Tim Collins, who held the education portfolio, Mr Lansley said: “When Jamie Oliver captured exactly what millions of parents felt about school food, did they hear us respond?
“Where, in our 10 words, was the recognition that family is the backbone of a strong society?”
What’s all this about “our ten words”? Is this a new BBC policy acknowledging the irrelevance of the Conservative Party which means that Tories only get ten words in which to say what they think, to avoid wasting the time of the rest of us? (How many words do the Lib Dems get?)Given that “the family is the backbone of a strong society” is nine words, to Tories might want to turn their attention now to thinking about how they choose that all-important tenth word, which might be the one to make all the difference.
Slightly less frivolously, I think Lansley’s missing the point here. He thinks that if Tories say bland twaddle like “the family is the backbone of a strong society” again and again and again, and jump on populist bandwagons like the Jamie Oliver School Dinners bandwagon, then the Great British Public will pay attention and Vote Conservative.
I think that’s nonsense.
The reason it was useful for certain Labour front-benchers to say “Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime” obsessively in the mid-1990s was that the Party was trying to challenge a public perception of it as being (rightly or wrongly) soft on crime, and obsessive repetition works pretty well in that particular context. But I don’t think there’s any evidence that people aren’t voting Conservative because they think that the Tories don’t think that the F is the B of an S S (though it would be funny if there were).
And if Shadow Ministers keep saying dull things like “the F is the B of an S S”, the media will tend to ignore them and go back to talking to Jamie Oliver, who created the story in the first place, and who will be much more interesting to talk to.
It’s a striking feature of contemporary politics that the Government generally only gets into difficulties when other people not the Tories cause trouble for them, whether Lord Butler, Jamie Oliver or, most recently, the Parliamentary Ombudsman, and the Tories rarely make any real contribution to accentuating the Government’s difficulties on these occasions.
The exception, I suppose, is David Davis’s removal of Beverley Hughes, through cunning parliamentary manoeuvrings rather than through soundbite politics — and such is the desperate condition of the Tory Party these days that bagging the relatively trivial scalp of a junior minister might be one of the things that propels him to the Party leadership, where, I think we can safely say, he will become the fourth Tory leader in a row not to make it through the door of No. 10.
(Why am I thinking about Andrew Lansley and David Davis? I must have better things to do with my time. Yes: I do. Good.)
I wasn’t really paying attention over the last few days, but here’s a piece from Saturday’s Guardian by historian Tristram Hunt which appears to be mostly about TC CBE ex-MP. It contains some criticism of the great man’s opinions, though, so do give it a wide berth if you’re one of his more sensitive admirers.
(Jamie has more.)
The Times says this in one of its leader columns today:
Grey hair and gravitas win votes; even the bald do better than the cherubic. In last year’s US elections, the candidate perceived as more competent won in 71 per cent of the senate races. And perception often amounts to no more than a subliminal blink at a poster or television image. Does this mean that, without lavish application of a reverse Grecian 2000 formula, David Cameron will never wear the Tory leader’s mantle? Is this why Tim Collins and Stephen Twigg, whose youthful round faces show little careworn sign of etiolated angst, lost their seats?
The answer to this last question, incidentally, is “No, in both cases.”
We have a Tim-Collins-Watch over here, and months later the man loses his seat. It’s replaced by a Laurent-Fabius-Watch, and within days he’s expelled from the Socialists’ executive committee. The Curse of the Stoa hasn’t been this potent since the rugby world cup.
A friend alerts me to this diary piece in yesterday’s Independent:
* The sad death of Patsy Calton, the Liberal Democrat MP for Cheadle, has already set Westminster buzzing with talk of a by-election.One man in the running for the knife-edge poll is Tim Collins, the former Tory frontbencher, who lost his seat (also in the North-West) to the Lib Dems at the general election.
Collins has previously told friends that his preferred route back onto the Conservative benches would not be a by-election, since “he’d prefer to go through a normal selection process”.
The marginal Cheadle (maj 4,000) will be tempting, though: it offers a chance for revenge on the party that booted him out of office, and would catapult Collins, a Harry Potter lookalike, into the thick of power-broking over his party’s leadership.
Not meaning to be macabre, etc., but why did the Lib Dems pick these various candidates on the brink of death to fight their seats? Was it just a Midlands/North-West thing, or were they doing it all over the country? Perhaps we’ll find out over the next few weeks and months.
From today’s Guardian, in a piece about what happens to those who lose their seats at election time:
I had hoped to talk to Tim Collins, former shadow education spokesman and the most prominent of the Tories who lost on May 5, but he too has gone to ground. “His defeat was totally unexpected,” says a press spokesman at Conservative campaign HQ. “He has had many requests for interviews, but has declined them all.” Little wonder: Collins is 41, a politician from the cradle, living and breathing the Westminster air. He has not just lost his job; he has lost his oxygen supply.
Has Tim Collins never had a proper job? (The things I still don’t know about this enigmatic man! But, hang on, what did he get his CBE for, if not for something not-entirely-politics-related? He might not be Tim Collins CBE MP anymore, but he is still Tim Collins CBE.)There are signs at Borders bookshop in Oxford advertising a forthcoming appearance by Tim Collins, but, sadly, it’s not the Tim Collins of the Stoa, but another chap with the same name.
And, finally, to complete this alphabetical survey, we come to Westmorland & Lonsdale, where Virtual Stoa favourite Tim Collins failed to beat off a challenge from the Lib Dems and became the only Shadow Cabinet Minister to fall victim to the so-called decapitation so-called strategy. What went wrong? It’s hard to say. Right at the start of the election season I signed up to receive “special messages from Tim” over at timcollins.co.uk, but special messages came there none. So that’s it for the Tim Collins Watch, at least for the time being. If I do manage to find out what he does post-defeat — you know, get a job, or something — I’ll let you all know.
Only seven out of ten in the BBC’s politicians and pop music quiz, I’m afraid.
I haven’t been paying attention for a while, I’m afraid. Apologies for that. So Tim’s redone his front page, finally removing the Hague-era “common sense revolution” iconography.
But what I like most of all, though, is his first campaign pledge:
“I will make sure we stop paying out hundreds of millions for people who abuse our shambolic asylum system, abandon plans to scrap the pound and use the money saved to put an extra 340 police officers in Cumbria’s towns and villages.”
I think that’s lovely.Anyway, you should all scurry over and sign up over there to “show your support for Tim Collins’ campaign”, because, if you do, you’ll receive “special messages from Tim”. I can’t wait.
Tim’s defending a majority of 3,147 in Westmorland and Lonsdale against the Lib Dems, so he’ll need all the encouragement he can get.
In other Tim Collins news, Tim Collins, a big Doctor Who fan, has praised the new series, saying that it’s “fantastic”. And a very disloyal P. Schooling of London has written to the BBC [scroll down for the vox pops] to say, “I am horrified to discover that I have something in common with Tim Collins”.
UPDATE [13.4.05]: Nick Barlow’s watching Mr Collins, too, and doesn’t like what he sees.
Over here.
Well, not today. But recent.
MP VOTES AGAINST 24-HOUR DRINKING IN SOUTH LAKES
Growing concern over the introduction of new licensing laws which will allow an explosion in late night drinking across South Lakeland have been echoed by the area’s local MP Tim Collins who has voted in favour of a special House of Commons Motion to block the changes. For more on this story, click here.
Virtual Stoa fave Tim Collins MP CBE has just become Vice-President of FELLS, “a local green pressure group opposed to a proliferation of windfarms across the Lake District landscape”.
From the office of Tim Collins MP, obviously:
MP GETS ACTION ON VERGE CUTTINGOvergrown hedges and roadside verges in Grange-over-Sands have been cut by the council following action from South Lakes MP Tim Collins.
Mr Collins pressed the council to carry out the work after several local residents complained to the MP that the overgrown hedges and roadside verges were obstructing drivers’ visibility. Commenting, Tim Collins said: “I’m delighted that the problems on Carter Road have been sorted out. The council have promised me that this stretch of Grange will now be maintained on a regular basis.”
He works for you.
If you’ve got any strong political opinions, you might want to head over to the Polling Station at TC’s website, where he’s asking the important question, “What Should the Government Do Next?” As things stand, the Kendal Northern Relief Road is in the lead (seven votes), narrowly beating off a challenge from Improvements to the M6 (four).
And there’s a touching story about how “Christmas has come early” for 9-year old Sophie Hunter, who has won the competition to design Tim’s Christmas card (although, sadly, no picture of the winning design is provided.)
