Saturday 23 April
The office email isn't working. It's one of those that works by magic, rather expensive magic - just a red card stuck in the side of a laptop, and apparently we have exceeded our magic allowance. I ring up and raise the limit and it starts working again, after several hours of good emailing time have been lost.
Offers of help on the ground have started to come in - great. However, there are so many messages of support that we might not be able to reply to them all till after this is over; sorry. All donations and offers of help will be acknowledged though.
Beautiful weather - have looked out my own white suit and washed it. Martin, you may have a rival.
It looks like the Mail on Sunday has got hold of the Attorney General's Advice, the thirteen page one; should be interesting. Maybe Labour isn't going to get away with the Basil Fawlty defence after all....
Reply to amusing, but no doubt ill-intentioned, letter in Friday's Guardian suggesting that we are a well-resourced team of smooth outsiders bent on vandalising democracy by throwing money at the campaign in Sedgefield.
What we're bent on is grabbing democracy back from the man who has misled the electorate and sent the country to war without a mandate and without legal justification. As for being well-financed, we have had donations large and small (and yes, it is often the small ones which are most moving, like the twenty pounds from the pensioner whose father made the banners for the Jarrow march) but there is a strict limit on what each candidate can spend, and we do not have the privilege of national advertising, centrally produced materials, party organisation, visits from ministers and shadow ministers and the general daily news coverage that the political parties get.
We also have a lot of donations from Labour members and habitual Labour voters who are finding it hard to give up - I suggest they read John Pilger in the current New Statesman; aversion therapy.
- ©Reg Keys, 2005 -
