As parties vie for votes with promises they may or may not keep, Tortoise is asking public and not-so-public figures for the one thing they hope for from Britain's next government.
I hope – in the short-term – that the general election campaign continues to deliver plot twists like Sunak’s surprise D-Day disaster and Bobby Ewing-style returns from the dead as we saw with the re-emergence of Nigel Farage… again. I hope in the long-term that the sight of the two leaders Alan Partridging their way around the country doesn’t put off clever people of all “walks of life” from entering politics completely. I believe everyone should put themselves up for election at least once in their life. This is invariably humiliating – it was for me when I tried to become a Euro MP against Brexit in 2019 – but there is no better way of understanding how the democratic sausage is made. And the experience also teaches you to be almost weepily grateful to anyone who puts themselves in the service of the voters, either locally or nationally. We may already be sick of the election we were desperate to have but “not another one” is far, far preferable to “never again”.
