Confessions of a rookie politician Hobbling up the driveway, I start on my patter, Liberal Democrat leaflet in hand, when the man barks at me, a ferocity to his voice: “Go! Go!” I’ve just written a book about Alexei Navalny who got murdered in the gulag for standing up for democracy in Russia so I take this badly. Back in the day when I was only a journalist this fellow would have got a lick with the rough edge of my tongue. But that was then and now I am trying to become the LibDem MP for Sutton Coldfield, against the odds, so I stop, say: “OK, then,” and limp back to the pavement. (I’m using a crutch because I fell on black ice in Kyiv last December while delivering crutches with my pal Major James Hewitt. Oh: the irony!) Being a politician is next-level harder than being a hack. The scrutiny is full glare, the fury of people who don’t like your ideas jarring, the rewards uncertain. Also: have you ever slipped a leaflet through a letter box while listening to the Hound of the Baskervilles slaver his chops a few inches from your fingers? And yet it is fascinating and addictive and I feel sad when my two fellow canvassers, thirty and forty years younger than me, said they had had enough for the day. People listen when I say that the Tories have been in power for too long and Labour, in control of bankrupt Birmingham City Council, have shown themselves poor guardians of other people’s money, that there is a third way for the people of Sutton Coldfield. When one lady says she will vote for me and stick a poster in her window, I blow her a kiss and call her “sweetie” which is almost certainly a transgression of election rule 34, 3b. But still: it is cool. I’m standing because Navalny couldn’t. Because my friends in Ukraine are fighting and dying for the idea of democratic freedom. Because I am a proper Paddy Ashdown Liberal and I believe in individual liberty, free speech and poking crocodiles in the eye with a stick. Because for far too long our ruling class has let the monster in the Kremlin get away with murder after murder after murder. Because rich people and rich organisations don’t pay their fair share of tax and our infrastructure in schools and hospitals and rivers is going to hell in a handcart. Because I want to fight for the ordinary, extraordinary people of Sutton Coldfield. The sitting Tory member is squatting on a majority of 19,272. Andrew Mitchell was nicknamed “Thrasher” at Rugby, says Private Eye, a charge he denies in his funny and entertaining book, ­Beyond A Fringe. Mitchell is aka “Mr Plebgate”, a One Nation Tory who fell out with the Downing Street cops in a rather spectacular way. Out of the headlines he has used three tax avoidance schemes. Tax avoidance is not a crime. Killing people is. Mitchell has been a champion of Rwanda from the early 2000s. But his “hero” strongman Paul Kagame is a fascist whose opponents die or vanish. The father of Diane Rwigara was killed in “a car crash”. When she ran against Kagame in a presidential election and said she feared her father had been murdered, nude pictures of her appeared, then she and her mother were locked up for a year. A dozen of her party supporters have disappeared. Mitchell white-washed murder after murder. While on the backbenches, he chaired the All Party Parliamentary Group on Rwanda and received north of £120,000 from SouthBridge, a bank close to the Rwandan regime. That looks like 120,000 conflicts of interest to me. The centre of Sutton Coldfield is dying, the shopping mall full of empty shops; on the edge of town is a massive new Amazon warehouse built on a green field site. I use Amazon but want an internet sales tax of 2% and the money raised should go back to our communities. And we must not asphalt our green and pleasant land. Mitchell’s biggest problem is that in my day people worked hard, bought their own home and had kids. Today’s young people have no such luck and on the doorstep I have met dozens of people who are furious for the Tories for pushing home ownership out of reach or, thanks to Trussonomics, hiking mortgage rates. These people are smiling at me. The other day Ben, one of our local Lib Dems met Mitchell who was trying to get into a taxi Ben had booked. Ben pointed out Mitchell’s mistake. Mitchell replied: “I’ll let you have the taxi if you vote for me.” Ben replied that he was voting for Mr Sweeney. “A vote for the Liberals is a vote for Labour.” Mitchell seemed a little rattled. From the left, there is Rob Pocock, a charming Labour schmoozer of a certain age. Labour controlled Brum City Council went bankrupt to the tune of a £1 billion last year, services got slashed and council tax is going up 21% in two years. Will ten thousand disaffected Tory voters vote for Pocock, a Labour councillor who voted to close libraries but signed a petition to keep them open? We shall see. I have a slim chance of upsetting the apple cart but, time and again, people on the doors say that I am the only candidate who has make it up their driveway. And I have, for now, only one functioning leg. But also the other thing. In Sutton Coldfield, the poshest bit of Brum and a lovely oxymoron, I am exercising my right to stand for the politics I believe in and despite the ferocious man and the Hounds of the Baskervilles and all the other nonsense, our democracy is a thing of beauty.