Jennifer's 1992 Election Result
1992 General Election in Numbers
The alternate timeline result takes into account Jennifer's victory in Bristol North West and the Conservatives holding on to Athershaw North and, narrowly, Athershaw South. Otherwise, the results everywhere else are assumed to be the same in both timelines.
Two Timelines, Almost the Same Result
Naysmith lost by forty-five votes in the real timeline, Jennifer won by forty-five in ours. Forty-five votes in an election where close on sixty thousand people cast a ballot is less than 0.1% of the total vote; less than one vote in a thousand. It’s margins of error stuff. Not that anyone, in either timeline, doubts that the final result accurately reflects the number of votes cast for each candidate. Rather it is the cumulative effect of many little changes of fate that contribute to each individual's decision on who to vote for or whether they will vote at all. The difference in the outcome of the two elections, therefore, could be put down to all the tiny fluctuations in the fabric of reality that didn't balance themselves out in quite the same way across the timelines.
However, this simple explanation ignores the fact that Naysmith and Jennifer, for all their superficial similarities, are two very different individuals and that, in fact, there are much deeper divisions between the timelines than could be reconciled on this occasion - the true point at which the timelines began to decouple and irrevocably diverge.
Factors that Made No Difference
Just Another Hopeful Candidate
Naysmith and Jennifer have similar backgrounds and experiences to draw upon, both are intelligent and well educated. As political operators both are confident and competent but no more; neither is the type of person able to turn an electorate with a smile and a few vapid sound bites.
Competent Election Teams
We are working from the assumption that, in real life, Naysmith and his election team were competent operators who covered all the bases when it came to running an effective campaign within the resources available to them. Both teams, we will assume, had much the same resources to draw upon in terms of professional organizers drafted in from the wider labour and trade union community as well as local volunteers, many of whom, we must assume, were the same people with the same skills and experiences in both timelines. Both teams will have had their shortcomings and made mistakes, even if they were not necessarily the same in both cases but what differences there were will have balanced out, as they should.
All this, of course, ignores what Colette and Victoria brought to the campaign, but more of that later...
Local Candidates
There is a perception that local candidates (that is, candidates with roots in the local area) are more popular with the electorate than those who mysteriously appear on the scene without any obvious connection to the area they are hoping to represent.
Whilst this may be true, in some circumstances, it is unlikely to have been a factor here. Naysmith may have been born and educated in Scotland but, by 1992, had been in Bristol for twenty years. He first stood in public elections in 1979, only a year after Jennifer’s election to the City Council and was elected himself to the council in 1981. Both, therefore, had solid credentials as a “local” candidate and were well established on the local political scene by the time of the 1992 General Election.
No doubt Naysmith is fiercely proud of his Scottish heritage but no more so than Jennifer is of her roots in Yorkshire.
Logical Argument Doesn't Cut It
Being a mathematician, Jennifer is well versed in building an argument from demonstrable facts and rigorous deductive reasoning. This is not a strategy that works well against political opponents who base their arguments on ill founded prejudices and vile populism; it's a classic case of taking a knife to a gun fight. Being a scientist himself, Naysmith would have had to cope with that same disadvantage himself.
Factors that Played Against Jennifer
Jason Calhoun
Jason Calhoun, Jennifer’s election agent and campaign organizer, was certainly a shrewd operator who (at least on the face of it) had been around the block a few times when it came to running election campaigns. The assumption that he always had Jennifer’s best interests at heart, however, would not be a sound one.
Red Jennifer
And not in reference to the colour of her hair.
Jennifer is a somewhat controversial figure, politically, who does not keep her opinions to herself nor is she often inclined to sanitize them for public consumption. On numerous issues such as the environment, nuclear disarmament, trade unions, LGBT rights, abortion, immigration (the list goes on) her views would, correctly, be regarded as left of centre but are more often portrayed by others as “hard left” and, sometimes, even within the pre-Blairite Labour Party, viewed as dangerous and unpopular. While she carries it well, and generates a lot of support amongst a younger and more progressive audience, it is not, necessarily, what you want when success depends upon winning the hearts and minds of a largely conservative (with a small “c”) suburban electorate. Jennifer, however, will not pander to populism and she takes a stubborn pride in being the type of politician the Daily Mail loves to hate.
The Role of Michael Cocks
By way of illustration of how the “Red Jennifer” effect could have manifested itself, we might usefully here examine the possible role of Michael Cocks in the 1992 campaign.
Cocks had been the MP for Bristol South from 1970 until 1987, during which time he had come to prominence as the Government Chief Whip under the Premiership of James Callaghan and, in particular, during the turbulent period after the Labour Government had lost its overall majority in the House of Commons. Now whether as a result of his experiences as Chief Whip or merely because of his innate political views, he became a vociferous critic of the Labour Party’s left wing. This may have gone down well with many in the party but amongst the activists in his own constituency, Bristol South, not so much and, by 1985, they had seen enough. They deselected him and replaced him as candidate for the next election with left-winger Dawn Primarolo.
To his credit, perhaps, he remained loyal to the Labour Party (his disappointment mitigated, maybe, by being made a life peer after leaving the House of Commons) even if that loyalty did not extend as far as Primarolo and the local party in Bristol South, and it is evident (from one of those eye witness reports that I suggested earlier we would never find) that, in the real timeline, he was actively involved in the 1992 General Election campaign in Jennifer’s constituency, Bristol North West.
Why, in particular, he fetched up in Bristol North West (other than it not being Bristol South) is not clear. Perhaps he lives in the constituency, perhaps it was a tactical decision seeing as Bristol North West was probably the most winnable of the city’s seats that Labour needed to take or maybe he simply felt more affinity with the political views of the activists there - in the real timeline at least. Whatever the reason, having such an experienced and well known “personality” involved is a boost to any campaign.
But what would he have done in our timeline?
After the 1987 election was over, Cocks made numerous public attacks on those he saw as part of the left-wing conspiracy that had ousted him from his seat in Bristol South, in particular Tony Benn and those associated with him. Jennifer did not escape his vitriolic accusations and, whether or not she had been involved, directly or indirectly, in his deselection, her own subsequent selection as candidate in Bristol North West, ahead of the more moderate Naysmith, only served to cement in his mind the notion that Jennifer was, indeed, part of the hard-left Bennite clique hell bent on seizing control of the Labour Party.
Now whatever Cocks did thereafter we may be assured that he played no part in Jennifer’s campaign and that she saw that as no bad thing. But what if his staying away had discouraged others from taking part or if his animosity towards her ran so deep that he actively discouraged others from supporting her?
The Lesbian Councillor
Jennifer was an openly homosexual candidate. It shouldn't have be an issue, never mind a big one, but this was 1992, remember, although, to an extent, it was an issue rather neutralized by the fact that she has always been open about her sexual orientation and her marriage to Victoria. She had long been known as the "lesbian councillor", an epithet which, like that of "Red Jennifer", had originally been coined as a slur upon her character but which she has well and truly reclaimed as her own. Nevertheless, this was an election which took place at a time when the homophobic Section 28 (of the Local Government Act 1988) was still on the statute book and still enjoyed favour with reactionary sections of the news media. Jennifer, hardly surprisingly, was an outspoken critic of this legislation and there were rumours put about (never substantiated) that Victoria had been one of a group of women who audaciously abseiled onto the floor of the House of Lords to protest the passing of the Act.
Factors that Played in Jennifer's Favour
Victoria Alice Carter
Victoria, Jennifer’s lifelong partner, works hard to maintain her image as a mild-mannered primary school music teacher but, make no mistake, she is the real political thinker of the couple. The two of them do not, necessarily, agree on all matters political and Victoria is, to say the least, sceptical about the Labour Party as a vehicle for change and its direction of travel; sceptical, indeed, about the whole political process. But, for all her public show of disinterest and, in private, her not infrequent displays of dissent, Jennifer has no greater supporter than Victoria.
And it is not just moral support, or even domestic support - as she might put it herself: making sure Jennifer has eaten, has clean clothes to go out in, has a shoulder to cry on, etc. - for Victoria is, in her own, quiet but not insignificant way, active in various campaigning organizations, formal and informal. Favours were owed and favours were called in to an extent that even Jennifer herself could not have guessed at.
The Three Sisters
By 1992 the memory of the three Tyndall sisters, Imogen, Zoe and Madeline, was a faint one and, what influence they had ever had was now largely dissipated. But when they were remembered at all, they were remembered with great fondness. It was a flame that could not be extinguished and Jennifer (Imogen’s granddaughter) was seen by some as the heir of the Tyndall tradition, galvanizing support for Jennifer amongst some older activists and voters in a way that could not have happened in the real timeline.
Colette Galadriel Kirkby
There is a lot to be said about Colette that is (or will be) documented elsewhere. Here we shall only hint at how and why her intervention in Jennifer’s campaign was such a vital one.
Colette’s (largely self appointed) role in Jennifer’s campaign was that of data analyst and information technology specialist. Within the Labour Party nationally there existed a group of people, IT professionals and enthusiasts, who had taken it upon themselves to develop and deliver technological solutions designed to improve campaigning efficiency at a local level. As a member of this group, albeit a peripheral one, Colette had submitted many suggestions and proposals aimed at advancing the projects further. Even those who could see merit in her ideas were sceptical, however, that the party at large was ready to move forward so quickly. Undeterred, of course, Colette pressed on with development of those ideas without the group’s support or knowledge and ran with them heavily during Jennifer’s campaign.
Now the technicalities of how she did what she did are not important; suffice to say it was a mix of demographic profiling, raw canvass returns, historic voting data and anything else she could get her hands on, all woven together with a mix of data aggregation and analysis techniques, psephology, probability theory and a generous dash of game theory thrown in for good measure. Each element, on its own, was not, necessarily, ground breaking; the real magic - if magic it was - lay in how she combined it all to produce meaningful and effective direction to the campaign team together with that chillingly accurate prediction of the final result.
Now, this is fine, as far as it goes, but there still remain some unanswered questions:
Motivation, of course, is something we should not overlook, but we must also not underestimate just how intelligent Colette really is: the time it would take her to read and assimilate new information, to differentiate between what was unimportant from that which required more investigation, might cut the amount of time she would need to master a new subject by an order of magnitude.
And one other factor. Amongst those sceptical of Colette’s ideas about computational psephology was “Lucky” Steve, her counterpart in Athershaw. He went so far as to warn Jennifer to be wary of Colette: “She’s away with the fairies, that one,” he had said. Oh, Steve, if only you knew how right you were. And, assuming he was right, might this be an indication, though she might not have recognized it herself, that she was already starting to slip into a realm where the rules of time do not behave as they do in the realm of mere mortals?
Remember that earlier there was mention of favours being called in?
Kumiko and Natasha
We know that Kumiko and Natasha will interfere with the early lives of both Jennifer and Colette; we know that Kumiko was meddling in events contemporaneous with the election, if not the election itself.
Those two are just the worst; put nothing past them.
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