I was in a political party. It was one where a woman was the main person and everybody hated her. I think you’ve twigged who she is.
Michael Best
I was in a political party. It was one where a woman was the main person and everybody hated her. I think you’ve twigged who she is. I was in it for quite some time - over 20 years, in fact it could have been 25 years.
I took my mam with me to the count at the Civic Hall, in Leeds – this was in about 1995. I don't know if you're aware, but Leeds is a lot of Labour areas, it’s Labour-run. They always seem to get a lot of votes and they're the people that normally win in Leeds. I was standing for Wortley then. I did pretty well – I came about third. Around Wortley you’ve got the Greens as well, you see.
Afterwards, we went to the Wig & Pen – it was a bar inside a hotel on Wellington Street, and they called it the Wig & Pen. They hired the room there, so that after the election all the Tories could go in it.
We had to buy us own beer, or whatever we drunk. So we went into the bar that they had inside the hotel and we sat down – there was Rosemary, who was in the party, and there was Peter, and me mam was with me. We all sat down on a table and we ended up with a drink in front of us.
The table was quite a big table - I think it was round, and there were some spare seats. So a girl and a lad sat down. They were young - I would guess they were both around 20ish. And with them sitting down, we thought they were high officials of our party, ‘cause they were dressed quite smart and that.
So my mam started doing speeches, and they were very good speeches. And then she kept quiet, and then she did another good speech – it were a very good speech!
And then somehow they moved away – I don’t know where they went, but I assumed that both of them intended to come back. And when they moved away, me mam said to Peter and Rosemary: “Who were them?” – very serious, you know.
And Peter said: “They’re just students.” When we were doing the count, they were coming in the Civic Hall - they were Russians, and they’d come over here to see how we deal with politics and watch how we do it. But she thought “Oh, they’re officials, I better watch…!”