Glenda Jackson turns 74 days after Britons cast their ballots on May 6.Ferdaus Shamim
There's a lot of fun to be had in a British election, as long as you like watching candidates fed live into the chipper of the daily news. Here they do like it.
That the British press leaps up snarling at the scent of prey will not surprise Canadians, fresh from the gang-stomp performed on their country by limey scribblers outraged at Canada's insufferable arrogance in planning to win medals at its own Olympics.
It's nothing personal. They hate everybody, and so do their readers. That's how Britain got to be Great, and why the Slapometer is such a hit.
At http://slapometer.com/, you can "vote with the back of your hand," toggling a hairy arm back and forth to cuff the head of whichever party leader you hate most.
The Slapometer keeps a running tab of who's where in the clout parade. Nick Clegg of the third-party Liberal Democrats hardly gets his hair mussed. Once in a while people remember that he has a terrific-looking Spanish wife and belt him one, but that's about it. Conservative Leader David Cameron was swatted around after Thursday's live TV debate because it reminded people that he has a posh accent and looks like a beagle.
But the clear leader is Gordon Brown. Slapometer-wise, people just want to hit the Prime Minister. You wouldn't think he'd need more enemies, so it was puzzling to read in The Times a leak from Mr. Brown's Labour Party that the party elite wanted MPs who are over 65 not to run.
The elders were described by the unnamed source as "walking by-elections" who would presumably embarrass everybody by dropping dead or crumbling into senescence as soon as they took their seats..
'It's outrageous'
In my own central London riding, the newly redrawn and renamed Hampstead and Kilburn, the Labour incumbent is Glenda Jackson, an MP for 18 years who turns 74 three days after the May 6 vote.
Walking by-election? She looked fit enough the other day as she waited for a visitor in an MPs' office building across the street from the House of Commons. Barking a hello, she spun on her heel and stalked off down the hall - a rather tiny figure in trim black pants and a long, plum-coloured sweater, with steam coming out of her ears.
"It's outrageous," fumed Ms. Jackson, sliding in behind her desk in a dim little office with unadorned walls and a view of the roof.
"It's scandalous! Particularly in light of this issue in a party that has campaigned for equality across a wide range of rights, and is still being pushed to extend protection against ageism. For someone from our own party to come out with something like that!"
You can see why they might not mind her leaving. She was a junior government minister for two years, until 1999, but since then has opposed the party leadership on large issues, while at the same time receding from sight.
She voted anti-Iraq war, anti-Trident submarine replacement, anti-anti-terrorism laws, so she's in there somewhere. But as a three-newspaper-a-day, nightly-news-watching constituent for more than seven years, I have found her not to be visible to the naked eye. The watchdog website theyworkforyou.com rates her "well below average among MPs" for the number of debates she has joined and times she has voted.
Raising the subject herself, Ms. Jackson angrily dismissed as nonsense the charge that she is "the laziest MP in London," and the chief of a news bureau at Westminster told me that, although her profile was low, "she may well be an assiduous constituency MP."
She certainly seemed to be, furiously stuffing envelopes as we talked.
In person, she has a chiselled look. Her thin, brown-coloured hair is cut short, and she has narrow, glittering eyes. The titanic movie star who won best-actress Oscars for Women in Love (1970) and A Touch of Class (1973), and whose icy portrayal of Elizabeth I in the BBC hit series Elizabeth R won a pair of Emmys and the ecstatic raves of historians, has not left so much as a snapshot in a frame to distract her stern descendant.
"If she'd gone into politics" first, ex-husband Roy Hodges has said, "she'd have been prime minister. If she'd taken to crime, she'd be Jack the Ripper."
Hampstead is redolent of the old, romantic left. Writers, painters and poets lived in the semi-rural village that lay between the church where landscape painter John Constable is buried and the 790 acres of steep meadows and beech woods known as Hampstead Heath. Today, a poverty-stricken John Keats would not get in the door of the cottage where he fell in love with Fanny Brawne and wrote Ode to a Nightingale. You're more likely to find a banker in the house.
Even so, Hampstead retains an aura of the liberal beau ideal. Michael Foot, a revered Labour lion who died this year, lived in the "village" for decades, and a plaque marks George Orwell's house at the edge of Hampstead Heath.
Ms. Jackson has been criticized for not living in the riding - her home is in Blackheath on the other side of the River Thames - but her partisanship rings with an intensity that harks back to those old Hampstead heroes, and the days before Tony Blair shifted Labour to the centre.
"I've lived under a Conservative administration," she told me in a scalding voice, "and I don't want to see my country go through that again."
But Ms. Jackson may be in trouble. The Highgate part of her old riding, full of people who were young when she was, has been carved off. Replacing it is the poorer, more immigrant demographic of Kilburn, where the streets seem full of people who are young right now.
According to Geoff Martin, editor of the weekly tabloid Willesden & Brent Times, which targets the new part of the riding, Ms. Jackson is trailing her two main contenders. "Both," he says, "are bright young things."
Vote bright and young
But how does this play out? Do people go into a voting booth and say: "Let's see, now. Which one was the bright young thing?" And then vote?
Looks like it.
According to betastic.co.uk, an online gambling guide, the 2010 election has already attracted more betting interest than any previous race, and a glance at the odds shows that bookmakers Betfred, Paddy Power, Ladbrokes and William Hill don't like Ms. Jackson's chances.
Of course, she isn't the only MP that Labour tipsters were trying to unnerve. Austin Mitchell, who is 75 and a 33-year veteran of the Commons, was also on the list. Not what you'd call unsettled by it, though. "It's been said that Parliament has a large proportion of bleeding idiots, so they can represent the bleeding idiots in the population," he says. "It's the same with old people - they're entitled to representation."
Mr. Mitchell can afford to be a card. Paddy Power and Ladbrokes have him an odds-on favourite to hold his seat.
But is he a walking by-election? "It's quite possible," he replies. "I don't feel very well at the moment."
Matthew Hart is a Canadian writer living in London.