Tag Archives: karen buckley

As a giant fan of Private Eye’s local government column Rotten Boroughs, one of Scrapbook’s absolute favourite blogging perks is bringing provincial foolishness to a wider audience. It was thus most edifying to see this blog’s hatchet job thoughtful critique of Hyndburn Conservative Party gain traction online.

East Lancashire geezer at large and political progeny Conor Pope picked up the baton with this hilarious spoof of Location, Location, Location, which finds Sam Cudworth looking for a suitable property for aspirant Tory MP Karen Buckley. Cudworth’s deadpan delivery of ”This property is available until May the 6th. You probably won’t need it after that” had this blogger rolling in the aisles:

Politico Al Jahom is very welcome to steal posts if his re-titling is as funny as this. Jahom isn’t the first to muse at the intersection between LOLCats and politics so thanks for inspiring this flattering rendering of the Hyndburn Council leader:

A local source been in touch and mentioned that the ever-vain Cllr Britcliffe Googles his own name on a regular basis. A Tory with such awareness of their online profile would be most interested to peruse this blog’s server logs: the “Hyndburn meltdown” post was visited over 20 times from CCHQ IP addresses.

As for Google, there’s nothing like a bit of search engine optimisation:

Hi there, Peter!

The constituency of Hyndburn, Lancashire has been left “without a functioning Conservative Association” after its entire leadership resigned in protest at a selection shortlist forced upon them by Tory high command. The list excluded the Conservative leader of Hyndburn Borough Council, Peter Britcliffe,* who had made no secret of his desire to contest the seat.

With Cameron-loving Karen Buckley barely two days into her role as PPC, Scrapbook can exclusively reveal that the contest has been effectively abandoned by CCHQ after Britcliffe’s supporters threatened to quit the party and fight the election under the banner of “Hyndburn Independent Conservatives”.

The council chief’s attempts to distance himself from the row are most entertaining:

“While I always believe that it is more democratic to allow local party members to have a free hand in the selection of candidates this is not something that I intend to spend time complaining about.”

Quite. Why bother to complain when acolytes are causing a stink on your behalf? Britcliffe’s council deputies Brian Roberts and Peter Clarke were among those to quit their officer positions in the local party along with his sidekick Marlene Haworth.

This is only the latest episode in a string of embarrassing flare-ups involving female Conservative candidates. Liz Truss survived a deselection attempt in South West Norfolk after the Google-hating “Turnip Taliban” finally discovered an affair widely publicised in 2006; Top brass intervened to save candidate Joanne Cash in Westminster North, with an election agent and chairwoman defenestrated in the process.

To the evident frustration of ConservativeHome, Tories in Hyndburn earned the dubious distinction of being the last constituency in England to pick their candidate despite its description in the latest edition of The Almanac of British Politics as a ”classic Labour-Conservative marginal”. It has now emerged that this was the result of convoluted brinkmanship between local members and CCHQ, who were “desperate” to stop Cllr Britcliffe being selected for the third time since 1997.

They’re simply falling over each other to cock things up.

*Those in need of a laugh should head straight to Peter Britcliffe’s personal website, which plays Barry Manilow’s I Write The Songs to all visitors.