The resignation of Cllr Diane Park from the Lib Dem Party in Halifax has left a vacancy for a ‘prospective parliamentary candidate’ or, ‘wannabe MP.’ For one brief moment I considered going for it… then the sledgehammer of reality smashed me back down to earth.

Amongst the many reasons why I would make a terrible PPC my personal favourite is this blog. Oh, it’ll take a day or so, but any campaign run by me could be derailed very quickly by finding a few choice quotes. Charlotte Gore wants to axe the welfare state! Charlotte Gore wants to cut spending! Charlotte Gore is pro Business and anti Union! Charlotte Gore wants to legalise drugs! Charlotte Gore thinks the BNP should be allowed on television! That’s just the start of it. There’s enough in this blog to kill any political career one hundred times over.

Then there’s standing for a party currently in 3rd place in a Tory target seat, in a town that’s pretty much in love with the BNP and has, according to Acorn data, about 500 people that would be classed as typical lib dem voters. Hmm. Then there’s the challenge of getting 20,000 people to vote for you in a year’s time. I did some rough maths and worked out I’d need to be pursuading something like 65 a day. I’d need to raise buckets of money and dazzle and beguile lots of people into delivering leaflets for me. I’d need to keep getting in the local paper, too.

Finally, it has to be said, my campaigning skills are terrible and my ability to connect with ‘normal people’ is non-existent. In another world, weirdos like me would get plonked into a safe seat somewhere and told to keep my gob shut for the duration. That’s how democracy works.

So stand? I think not. It’s not for me, this life of trying to appeal to ‘people’. If I did, I’d write a letter and deliver it to every single house in the consituency. The letter would go like this:

Dear Halifax,

I’m looking for someone. It might be you. It might be someone you know. This is someone who’s sick of politicians and sick of mainstream politics. That’s most of us these days, and who could blame us?

The person I’m looking for gets angry that the Government takes £10 billion pounds – more than twice as much as the once mighty HBOS ever earnt before tax – from cigarette duties alone. They get furious that £30 worth of petrol includes £20 of tax… and for what? This person feels ill when they discover the Government is now spending more than the entire British population takes home in wages, and they ask: For what? Where is the money going?

This person looks around and sees a country brought to its knees, surviving only on loans from the rest of the world. This person knows that Halifax’s biggest employer is the council, and it makes this person angry to think that a town that was at the very heart of the industrial revolution could be sunk so low as to survive only on scraps from the Government table. This person thinks we should be better than this.

But that’s not all. The person I’m looking for looks around and sees a country where trainspotters – of all people – are arrested under anti-terrorism laws and where it has become illegal to take photographs of the police. They see a Government determined to censor the internet, to monitor their emails and internet use. They see more and more rules and laws telling people how they should live and behave: Don’t eat. Don’t smoke. Don’t drink. Don’t drive. Don’t say this. Don’t say that. Don’t vote for them. This person thinks Governments are supposed to be servants of the people, not the other way around.

If you see this person, will you pass on a message? I’d be very grateful. The message is this: “You are missed. Please come back.”

Yours Sincerely,

Charlotte Gore

Which, in a nutshell, is exactly why I’ll never be a PPC. You can’t put out something like that without looking like a nutter. Better to publish a smiley picture of yourself, with your name in big bold letters and the slogan, “ONLY THE LIB DEMS CAN WIN HERE” with “CHARLOTTE GORE: WORKING HARD FOR HALIFAX” and leaving it at that. Yes, that’s how you win elections.

Consider me preemptively quit.