Between Two Stools

The unsurprising news that Councillor Mrs Teresa Murray has been selected as Labour's candidate to fight to retain the Rochester and Strood parliamentary seat leaves me in two opposing frames of mind.

This seat, by the way, is the new name (and changed shape) for what has been known as Medway, and which the Conservatives came very close to taking from Labour in the 2005 General Election. With the boundary changes, which take a chunk of Labour voters out of the constituency and replace them by a host of Conservative voters in my ward, this seat seems destined to come over to the Conservatives -- and rightly so!

Gillingham and Rainham will in all probability do the same, though Chatham and Aylesford (who have had the exact reverse effect from the boundary changes -- importing Labour voters while losing my ward to Rochester and Strood) will be a much tougher nut to crack. They are lucky in having the excellent Tracey Crouch as their Conservative candidate, so we could yet make it a hat-trick.

Okay, so what's the dilemma over Rochester & Strood?

Well, if -- as expected -- we take this seat, justice will have been served and we should have a really good Member of Parliament. Not that Bob Marshall-Andrews was all that bad, actually, but he was still in the "wrong" party, and is going anyway -- hence Teresa Murray standing there.

The downside is that we shall still have to put up with Cllr Mrs Murray on Medway Council -- one of the nastiest and most malevolent and self-serving people I have ever met in my life -- and that would obviously not be good for Medway. In particular, that has been one of the reasons why Labour are (as I wrote only yesterday) the "incredible shrinking party" on Medway, the only party group to consistently lose share of the seats since Medway Unitary came into being around ten years ago.

Bad councillors turn the voting public away from them (and this is despite superficial signs such as personal election results!) especially when truths come to public notice and can no longer credibly be denied. I've seen this happen a few times, and Labour members have lost their seats as a result.

What Medway Council needs (and I've said this before) is a better quality of opposition, and we'll never really get that while the likes of Mrs Murray are still on the Council. Therefore I'd much rather be rid of her.

The ideal answer would have been for her to have been selected for a different seat -- say, a safe Labour seat elsewhere in the country. My sources tell me this is what Paul Clark (Gillingham) will be doing, rather than suffer the humiliation of a defeat here.

So, you see my problem: in the new scenario, after this announcement of candidature, what will be the better outcome in Rochester and Strood at the next General Election? I have a third possibility in mind, but am keeping that under my hat for now...