One moment Mr Davis!
One of the worst offences a broadcast journalist can commit is to get the name of a political candidate wrong in a broadcast. It happened to one of my Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ colleagues many years ago, and his career never really recovered. And I live in fear it will happen to me one day, too.
Yet the error is a lot worse, surely, if you are the returning officer in a Parliamentary election, and you get a candidate's name wrong on the actual ballot paper.
For that's what happened in last Thursday's by-election in Haltemprice and Howden, where the returning officer must be squirming with embarrassment. He misspelt the name of the independent candidate Walter Sweeney, the former Conservative MP for Vale of Glamorgan who was campaigning on a platform calling for a referendum on Britain's membership of the EU (and resigned from the Tory Party in order to do so). Instead of Sweeney, the ballot paper said "Sweeny" without the final "e".
I would have thought that Mr Sweeney would have a good case for arguing that the contest should be rerun, that if people had only known he was THE Walter Sweeney (with three "e"s) then he would have polled a lot more than 238 votes (just under one per cent) and might have saved his deposit. His argument might not have got very far, but it might have been worth making, and would have caused quite a stir. At the very least he could have demanded his Β£500 deposit back.
When I raised the spelling of Mr Sweeney's name with a senior local council official at the count last Thursday evening, he went away and checked with the returning officer. The official came back to tell me: "It's correct. It's the correct spelling." When I pressed him, he was most emphatic that everything was in order.
Strange, I thought, when the candidate's name seemed to be spelt "Sweeney" everywhere else. Perhaps, I thought, his name was officially spelt "Sweeny" on his birth certificate, or maybe it was just an alternative spelling that he uses sometimes. Unfortunately Walter Sweeney wasn't around whilst I was at the count, so I let the matter drop. So Newsnight viewers were deprived of a mini-scoop, and the Haltemprice returning officer was spared much embarrassment.
But today a spokeswoman for East Yorkshire Council admitted that yes, they had indeed made a mistake. But, they told me, Mr Sweeney has not complained. At least not yet. And since he's now gone on holiday for the next few days, I think we can assume he won't be disputing the result.
But I would have thought that common decency would dictate that East Yorkshire should pay him his Β£500.
I'm Michael Crick, and I'm Newsnight's political editor. My guiding rule is that in any story there's usually something the politicians would prefer the world not to know. My job is to find that out. Follow me on
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