The path between Halifax cut and Bourne Park is in a shocking state of repair, partly due to the fact that no one is quite sure of who owns it.  The right of way is not certain either.  Ben Gummer asked a question on the right of way last week:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport whether Network Rail plans to make formal arrangements for public access to the footpath it owns between Bourne park and Halifax road in respect of its location on Sustrans National Cycle Route 1.

The reply from Theresa Villiers, the Minister of State for Railways was quite bland:

This is an operational matter for Network Rail as the owner and operator of the national rail network. My hon. Friend should contact Network Rail’s acting chief executive at the following address for a response to his question:

Peter Henderson

Acting Chief Executive

Network Rail

Kings Place

90 York Way

London, N1 9AG.

I am told the Network Rail are in fact looking at this now, although there is an ownership issue.

The odd thing is that in the last government the minister for railways was none other than Chris Mole.  I know that Philip Smart has been looking into this issue as well, but either never thought that Chris Mole would be interested or Chris Mole simply was not interested in such a small matter that affected “little people”.  After all according to Freedom of Information requests he had no meetings with the executives of National Express East Anglia during his time in the Ministry of Transport, and that inaction affected thousands of his constituents – many of them on a daily basis.

(When Ben Gummer did his cycle around Ipswich I made sure that the cycle Ipswich people put the route through that path, even though it is not one of the marked roads, so now he knows first hand how shockingly bad it is).

So John Cook the defeated candidate for Norwich North is back in his old stomping ground of Ipswich, as I predicted he would be before the election. It’s not online but he’s been doing some good old fashioned stirring about the fact that Ben Gummer’s office although functioning (I’ve had some dealings with them) does not yet have a shopfront office, like the Labour MP for Rochdale.

I also understand from a Labour mole (no, not that Mole) that he is now the agent for Ipswich.

Surely his first love was Norwich North? For the life of me I can’t understand why a failed Parliamentary candidate would hang around a constituency without a nominated candidate where the incumbent majority is just over half of his old constituency. That’s a real puzzler. Maybe Chris Mole, David Ellesmere or Bryony Rudkin would be able to answer this? I bet they love a bit of competition.

How would you fancy a Norwich season ticket holder as your next MP?

I predicted that the no-one likes us, we don’t care attitude of Ipswich Labour would mean that some of them would swing behind Ed Balls, and look here both Chris Mole and John Cook (the ex-agent here, and an important player still in the Ipswich Labour Party) are backing the Conservative’s best hope.

While it’s understandable why Chris Mole would back a public school boy who’s keen to hide his privileged background, it’s a bit of a puzzle with John Cook. John Cook attacked his Tory opponent in Norwich North for hesitating if asked whether she would have been tempted by New Labour in 1997. “She talks a good script, but I don’t know where her politics are coming from.” He added: “I couldn’t ever have been anything other than Labour.”

Now that’s not in itself a wrong thing, although it could explain why they seem to be having an uphill struggle in Ipswich at the moment, but Ed Balls was something “other than Labour” and in fact was a member of the Conservatives when at University, in the middle of the 1980s. He may have claimed in that article to have ridden both horses (politically) but that’s hardly tribal Labour.

Was this overlooked because John Cook is a Norwich season ticket holder and so is Ed Balls? And you wonder why those two lost when Labour candidates with lower majorities in 2005 won.

From Kevan Lim:

Unfortunately your figures are wrong. The tory vote was 17543 as you say, but the labour vote was 16764. Thats significantly more than Chris Mole’s vote. However my main point was the lib vote variation between parlamentary and borough. So I don’t think you can say my point was wrong. Allowing for the switch by some labour and tory voters to fringe like green,bnp and ukip, their were numbers of labour and lib who voted for ben gummer and then went back to their usual political choice for the borough.

Kevan Lim is right and I’ve missed out Labour’s 912 votes in Bixley. This means that Labour actually scored 16,764 votes in the Borough which was 472 votes more than Chris Mole. This was about 3% of their borough vote and between a quarter and a fifth of Ben Gummer’s margin. I still think that this shows that there was not that much split ticket voting, although Kevan disagrees, arguing that the UKIP (and perhaps BNP) votes probably went to the Tories in the borough and so masking the Labour votes that went to Ben and back to Labour in the borough.

The collapse of the Liberal parliamentary vote is very important, and on that I don’t disagree with Kevan Lim. Their disastrous choice of Mark Dyson needs to be quickly acknowledged by the Liberal Democrats in Ipswich. There have been stories that he was getting rather tetchy with volunteers, these and other stories show that he needed to have some grounding in grass roots politics before going for being a Parliamentary candidate. I think a couple of stints of running for (Wandsworth) council should stop him making rookie mistakes. He’s clearly not a stupid man and seems quite well intentioned, but politics does not suit him and parachuting in to another seat won’t suit him either. Also, some electorates take kindly to carpet baggers, but not Ipswich.

I suspect a lot of the Liberal vote split between both Ben and Chris Mole as although Ben Gummer is probably the most Liberal Democrat friendly of the two candidates and there is a history of co-operation on the town, many Liberal Democratic voters are still anti-Tory. This will probably change with the economic climate, but the realisation of how bad things are has not really hit home yet.

However the psychological point that Chris Mole scored less well than his borough colleagues is very important, and could harm him in any reselection battle.

My main point still stands however – The decision makers in Ipswich Labour Party really seem to have seen this election as a fight to win the borough through concentrating effort in the marginal seats. To an outside observer this seems mad when there was a strong expectation that they could lose the Parliamentary seat, reflected in the betting markets. This seems like their fatal mistake (and not just because by losing Alexandra, they still are in a minority). Was it because they just didn’t believe the polls and the betting figures or did they just not think that saving the seat was that important – at least in the short term?

That’s not a question for me, I’ve no interest in Labour’s future electoral success. I suspect that those Labour supporting readers of this blog (I’ll exclude Kevan Lim, who has a clear grasp of what’s happened) either are too loyal, scared or nice to see what their local leadership has done.

One of the odder points of the campaign was how the Labour Party did not seem to be piling up their vote in their safe seats but doing just enough to win their council seats. Would it have been easier to find voters on the Gainsborough Estate or in Whitehouse? This is particularly pertinent for Whitehouse as it is not even in the Ipswich constituency, but in North Ipswich. Why was Whitehouse a priority?

So was this a failure of the Ipswich Labour Party or a deliberate choice to concentrate on winning control of the council and letting Chris Mole take his own chances? We’ll probably never find out. Some of the activists certainly won’t.

If it did do this were they were following a strategy that I had suggested about six months ago. National opposition is good for rebuilding a party as is control of a council. Chris Mole has enemies in the Ipswich Labour Party.

As much as I would never wish to stoke up suspicions and infighting within the Ipswich Labour Party (who were totally behind Chris Mole as the 30% of activists who stayed to listen to his concession speech at the count showed), it’s obviously not the sort of thing that David Ellesmere or any other senior councillor would do. After all what would they have to gain apart from a nomination for a normally Labour seat?

Leader of a local Labour council has always been a good way to get the Labour nomination in Ipswich.

And I've still got my job, Chris.

Chris Mole showed how little influence he has in government by the fact that he couldn’t stop Gordon Brown coming round to lose him a couple of hundred votes.

We got a couple of temporary correspondents to crash into the Gordon Brown visit to Ipswich. They had to pretend to be Labour activists from Islington to get in, so much for Gordon Brown meeting ordinary people.

There were about one hundred Labour activists from all around Suffolk and Essex. After all they didn’t bat an eyelid when you had people claiming to be from North London.

They overheard one councillor with a pony tail quietly telling one of his friends that he’d never seen such a hostile reaction on the doorstep “but I thought we’d won in 1992 so what do I know?” What indeed, Sandy, what indeed.

The questions were the intelligent and tough questions that you would have expected from Labour activists. “What are your favourite achievements” and “Why do we not hear about our achievements on the doorstep”. Michael Crick was laughing and passing sarcastic comments on the inanity of the questions.

Gordon cracked a joke. Referring to the presence of Duncan Banatyne, the dragon, he said “if you have any questions on business or the economy, just ask Duncan”. None of the Labour activists laughed. It’s the way you tell ‘em Gordon.

Any way they’ve got a good picture of Gordon, Chris Mole and Chris Mole’s tie (oh dear) that when I get hold of it I may push it a few more times before election day.

What does Sandy Martin know, Chris? Not a lot, Gordon.

UPDATE: Ipswich Spy have a report of the event.

I reproduce a report from about a week ago of Chris Mole’s reaction to Ben Gummer’s twenty or thirty activists at Ipswich Station:

Spotted this morning at 7.35am at Ipswich Railway Station: Chris Mole with just 2 men.They were stood where the buses wait near the signals.

They were not handing out leaflets or any such thing. One of the men with Chris Mole looked like this–My friend described him thus–’ Quote” He looks a gangster–black suit, black goggles, bald, ponytailed, grey haired. Someone who is 50 but likes to think he is still 25′. Unquote. They sort of looked embarassed!

Who could this bald, pony-tailed man who dresses half his age? I’ll give him credit for the hard work, I know it’s not easy leaflet the station in the morning – I only go to the station because the office is in London and I know that there will be a seat on the train.

Pity the other activists couldn’t be roused.

Do I look 25 in this tie?

Perhaps we had all misjudged our Gordon, and bigot means something different. We’ll let Gordon Brown’s candidate in Ipswich explain:

Brown Is Gone On Thursday

Damian Thompson’s excellent blog has a thought provoking juxtapostion. I think some of the best politicians (such as Dennis Healey) simply had the bad luck to be at their peak in the 1970s and so their reputations will always be sullied.

Gordon Brown is a one man seventies throw back. Chris Mole on the other hand with the beard, the carefully hidden public school education (Dulwich College in case you’re asking), the middle class trade union background, the attempts to be prolier than thou….

I don’t think so, but that’s what his department wants me to think.

I put in a Freedom of Information request to the Department for Transport some time ago asking for Meetings and correspondence between Christopher Mole and National Express. They’ve claimed that there were no meetings between Chris Mole (Minister for Railways) and National Express (holders of three rail franchises.

Chris Mole was the Minister for Transport with special responsibility for railways and National Express operates three rail franchises. It is inconceivable that during his time as a minister that he would not have met the management of one of the largest rail operators in the country.

Of course this is nonsense, and I’ve asked for an internal review.

Otherwise what on earth does Chris Mole do with his time? He’s certainly not busy representing Ipswich.