Another bizarre election, two in a row. First Makerfield and then Clacton-on-Sea. Nothing to do with the government as such, nothing to do with the constituency, just voting for the sake of voting, so it seems.

Andy Burnham and Nigel Farage both had their own ideas, and both won quite comfortably.
What was so extraordinary about Clacton was that there were 34 candidates, a political record within itself.

I suppose we shouldn’t complain too much, three of them were from the Loony Party, first time ever any party has fielded three candidates in the same election. We wanted Gold, Silver ‘and’ Bronze, to outdo the England Football team. Do you think we came anywhere near our ‘Goal’, no we didn’t. Nick the Incredible Flying Brick got 28 votes coming 22nd, but still beating 12 others, Howling ‘Laud Hope got 18 votes beating 9 others, Baron Von Thunderclap got 15 votes still beating 6. If you added all our votes together we would have had 61 which would have put us 15th, in the top half of 34.
Percentage wise, that could probably be our best result ever. Problem was the First and Second collared all the big votes between them, leaving the rest of us ‘Nobodies’ to fight for the rest. Of them there were 21 Independents, mostly local people who had a following of their own, which didn’t help us very much.

Nevertheless we enjoyed our selves, made lots of new friends, especially John and Stuart, two local members who helped us a lot.
I was there for 10 days using the ‘Moon and Starfish’ as my Campaign HQ and meeting place with the kind permission of Sir Tim Martin. Talk of another By-election in Clacton maybe, if things pan out that way, if so we shall be there.
Special thanks to all our party members who made the trip to Clacton
Just a high note to finish on, this was the 38th time that I have stood in a parliamentary election, consequently I now hold the record for the person who has stood the most times for a single party in Westminster.
See you all in September at the Party Conference in Belper 24-25-26!
Howling ‘Laud’ Hope Loony Party Leader.