There’s an old cricketing term about ‘playing things with a straight bat’ which I think could be used to describe the way we approached the hustings over the last few weeks, and I’m pleased to report that overall, we were generally very content with the way that things went on a balmy, humid, packed Monday evening at Merton Arts Space in Wimbledon Library on 24 June.
Check out our YouTube channel to see our recording of the event!
Perhaps a cricketing analogy is not such a good example given the England team’s defeat in the T20 competition yesterday? The only apposite football one I can think of is ‘doing a Panenka’ which refers to the cheeky Czechoslovak player who first chipped a penalty down the centre at the Euros in 1976. Of course, that might now prove our national team’s undoing if the latter-day Slovaks now beat England in this year’s Euros on Sunday. On penalties naturally…
But enough of the daft sporting references. Going back to the event itself we were generally quite happy with the way things went on Monday. It was a huge amount of effort to set up in a very short time and I am grateful to the work of my fellow trustees Kirsty, Jackie and Karl for supporting me with it (and Kirsty and Jackie on the night), as well as to our part time member of staff, Natalie, and Tim, our web developer, who helped behind the scenes before and afterwards.
I was also very grateful for the help of a couple of friends, Steve and Roger who helped on the night plus others suggested to us: Rob (from Walk and Talk who was recommended by my new lodger), Jacob, who is the son of the local Counter Terrorism officer, Matt (who I met in the lead up to preparing for the event) and Mark (Kirsty’s husband).
In addition, I am indebted to Diana Sterck (CEO at Sustainable Merton) who agreed to facilitate the session for us and her colleague Amy who assisted with promoting it and was there on the night to help along with Danila and Amy’s sister Hayley. Diana has previous experience of running hustings and her calm authority on the stage with all the candidates getting them to stick to time, more or less, and assisting beforehand with the selection of the questions – we had 70 submitted online via our registration process – was also critical to its overall success.
As well as Merton TV, we are also grateful to John Merriman for supplying some back up audio recording equipment and staff at Wimbledon Library for hosting the event. As with any event there will be some lessons learned, some of which I may return to another time. We struggled with the mics provided on the night, with only one working properly, which the candidates shared harmoniously. We had a back-up system provided by Karl but decided not to call on it.
And of course, we are also grateful for the public of the Wimbledon constituency who registered and came along on a sticky night to hear our local candidates speak and those locals who also queued patiently outside hoping for spaces on the night. We stuck to the format set out in last week’s blog, which meant not taking questions from the floor, given the number of candidates.
Finally, I want to put on record my thanks to the eight candidates attending for their conduct (sadly one had to drop out due to a family bereavement). We had people standing from across the political spectrum each of whom had supporters in the room. At a time when you read so much about discord across the world, it is gratifying to witness democracy in action, conducted in a civilised manner. We all have our different opinions on things, and I am no different to others in that regard, but sometimes playing it honestly down the centre can actually work!