04 October 2008

Brown sidesteps a By-Election

Call off the party folks, the Sunday Herald reports that the Motherwell & Wishaw By-Election is off.

It appears that Jack McConnell will no longer be the High Commissioner to Malawi, and will instead be envoy to Africa. So he'll now be handling UK diplomacy for an entire continent while remaining an MSP. I'm sure the people of Motherwell & Wishaw will be just tickled pink about that.

My Sunday Whip is going to have a new regular line as well: "Jack McConnell was absent" is clearly the new "Margo MacDonald abstained"...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

That's a pity. I don't know if she would have been the candidate, but Marion Fellowes was the SNP candidate in the 2007 elections, and a very good candidate she was; sharp and smart and a woman. She would have made a change from all the baldy headed old men that run Lanarkshire if she had got in.
While i'm on the subject, why the hell was she 8th on the list for central Scotland? She deserves better than that..

Will said...

Julie, I know that she is the Westminster candidate for Motherwell & Wishaw as well.

As to her eighth place, it's understandable: she was a first-time candidate and if you were to ask me to guess where the SNP is largest in Central Scotland, Motherwell wouldn't be my first guess: in an OMOV selection contest, that will have an effect.

Depending on what the regions look like in 2010, I would expect her to be higher up the list.