Election campaign day 8: still no opposition candidate

Cabinet on Tuesday morning and some interesting conversations were had that threw some light on possible Labour candidates for Blaydon. The name of Mark Ferguson, former editor of Labour List, was mentioned. So were the names of a couple of Gateshead Labour councillors. And yet again, so was Tony Blair's name. The source for the person to whom I was talking was the BBC, not an internal Labour source. It just wasn't credible to think of Blair as a candidate.

A group member later sent me a link to a Huffington Post story about a Corbyn/Tom Watson/trade union carve up of the 12 seats vacated by Labour MPs. Mark Ferguson had been allocated to Blaydon, claimed the article. All this turned out to be guesswork and speculative forecasting. We ended up with a different result. More about that in a forthcoming post.



Meanwhile, a quarter ton of paper arrived at Cllr John McClurey's shop. My land rover was requisitioned to move some of it to the Lib Dem office in Consett where it will be transformed into a huge number of Focus newsletters over the coming week.