We’re struggling to think of anything. County Council elections have none of the obvious glamour of the national contest, the stakes are lower and – let’s face it – nobody knows what they do (quick, make a list of five things that your county council is responsible for! No Googling! See?).

Click here to go straight to the bit about Radlett, the Watling electoral division and Caroline Clapper, our councillor.

Who are the candidates we can vote for here in Radlett?

But, this time around, there is expected to be some drama. Drama, of course, provided by yellow-corduroy man of the people Nigel Farage: principle bringer of chaos in British politics for almost twenty years. So we won’t just ignore this contest as we usually do (seriously, we’ve been previewing elections here for over ten years and we’ve never done a county council election).

So here’s a short overview of the contest, starting with the national picture and then zooming in to Hertfordshire and to the Watling division in which we live.

What are we voting for?

Elections are taking place in 14 county councils, eight unitary authorities and one metropolitan district (also the people of the Isles of Scilly are voting – but they have their own, very odd system). Nine councils currently busy with ‘unitarisation‘ programmes have been allowed to put their elections back a year. Here in Radlett (in the Watling electoral division – they’re not called ‘wards’ in county elections) we’re voting to send one county councillor to Hertford to represent us: nothing else. We’re not voting for borough or parish councillors (and there’s no unitary mayor in our area so that’s not relevant). More about all that below.

Reform rampant?

Of the 25 county and unitary councils holding elections, 16 have a Conservative majority and, of the six where there is no overall majority, three have Conservative leaders and three Liberal Democrats. Labour controls only one. Consequently, although the headlines on 2 May will probably be all about Reform’s surge, the actual electoral damage will be suffered almost exclusively by the Conservatives. Nigel Farage is still going around disingenuously predicting 200 seats for his party but the polling tells another story. This fancy MRP poll, conducted by Electoral Calculus for the Telegraph, suggests 697 seats for Reform, which is more than then expect for the Tories. Ouch.

The postponement of elections in nine areas may or may not have the side benefit of letting incumbent parties in those authorities off the hook with regard to the swing to Reform – but it’s quite possible they’ve just deferred the inevitable and that electorates will punish them when the elections do happen. The Electoral Calculus poll supports this idea and puts Reform comfortably ahead of the Tories in the councils where elections have been postponed. The government and the authorities who’ve opted for postponement claim only the most innocent, bureaucratic motives but, let’s face it, electors are pissed off that they’re not getting their chance to vote this year and are unlikely to have forgetten in a year’s time.

Looking further ahead – to the next general election – liberal, anti-polarisation think tank More In Common, using a similar MRP statistical method, suggests essentially a three-way tie between Labour, the Conservatives and Reform, with Reform narrowly winning. Dramatically, in their projection, in 285 Parliamentary seats the winner would secure less than a third of the vote – finally demolishing the protective wall provided for the main parties by the first-past-the-post system. Double ouch.

And here?

In Hertfordshire, after the last local elections in 2021, things looked like this:

In the four years since that vote the kind of drift that you see between elections has caused four councillors (one Conservative, two Liberal Democrats and one Labour) to drop their party affiliation and become independents. One Tory switched to Reform last month and will cheekily be standing for that party next week. Another complicating factor for the Tories here is that almost a third of their councillors are standing down this time around, including some cabinet members.

Obviously, a swing to Reform large enough to displace the Tories in Hertfordshire would be a real political earthquake but it’s worth noting that the Tories in the county currently have fewer seats than at any time since 2001 (there have been boundary changes since then but they’re not significant). Likewise Labour, which in 1993 actually took 30 council seats in Hertfordshire (three more than the Tories at that election) has been reduced in recent years to a pretty pathetic six councillors. With Liberal Democrats and Greens also expecting a surge at this election, both major parties are more vulnerable than they’ve ever been in Hertfordshire.

Watling along

We don’t know much about where our readers come from. Our web hosting company gives us some confusing data that suggests that about a third of you are in China (if you are one of our Chinese readers, please leave a comment. We’d honestly love to know what you’re doing here).

But, in the meantime, we’re going to assume you live and vote in the Watling electoral division in Hertfordshire. It’s a pretty big area, stretching all the way from the London border in Edgware to the edge of St Albans and taking in the whole of Radlett, Aldenham, Letchmore Heath, Elstree and a chunk of Borehamwood (we’re also excited in a childish way to note that Watling has its own airport).

Each council electoral division returns one candidate elected by the first-past-the-post system. Since 2009 Watling has been electing Conservative Caroline Clapper. And we mean really electing. Her vote share at the last election in 2021 was 75%. She polled six times more votes than her nearest rival, from Labour. This is the kind of impregnable voteshare that Conservatives enjoy all over the home counties, of course but you’ll notice one important absence from this table of results from the 2021 election: Reform UK. Is Caroline Clapper losing any sleep to a Reform challenge now that they’re on the ballot here in Watling? No she’s not. But is her party, at the county and the national level? Yes they are.

Clapper is a popular and effective councillor. She’s visible and involved and anyone who’s ever had cause to ask her to help with a local issue will confirm that she works hard and takes her job seriously. She’s a cabinet member with an interest in education and chairs the council’s Education, Libraries & Lifelong Learning Cabinet Panel. She’s also a Hertsmere councillor and was a member of the cabinet there until Labour took over in 2023. She’s been a parish councillor in the past too. She lives in Bushey and is married to Michael, a mortgage broker and former vape entrepreneur. They have three children.

Then there’s the money

Councillors in Britain are not typically paid for the job but do claim ‘allowances’ and they can be pretty generous, in fact a senior councillor’s allowances will usually add up to something resembling an ordinary wage. There’s nothing secret about this, of course, but we’ve always thought it ought to be better known that a councillor can essentially make a living from representing you locally. Should they actually be paid a wage for this pretty onerous job? We think you could make a pretty good argument for professionalising local politics – for turning it into an actual job. Is this likely to happen any time soon? No. So, in the meantime, councillors will continue to vote themselves generous allowances to make up for it.

Adding together Caroline Clapper’s allowances from Hertfordshire (£36,159 in 2024-25) and Hertsmere (£8022.28 – most recent published numbers are for the year 2023-24) brings her income to a pretty tidy total of £44,181.28, substantially more than the average wage in the UK and higher even than the average for relatively prosperous Hertfordshire (and this represents a drop in income for our county councillor – if her party had retained control of Hertsmere in 2023 – and Clapper her cabinet post – she’d have made more than £55,000 from here work as a councillor in the most recent year). But she is a busy woman and has other roles – she’s a non-executive director of council-owned Elstree Studios, for instance, where her Hertfordshire and Hertsmere colleague Morris Bright is chairman (for this she was paid £1,194 in the year to April 2024).

She’s an ambitious politician. She probably thinks she’s paid her local political dues and we suspect she won’t be stuck at this level for much longer. She stood for Parliament in 2024, coming fourth – behind Reform and the Workers Party of Britain – against Labour’s winner Liam Byrne in Birmingham Hodge Hill and Solihull North.

A total of 14 parties have put up candidates in Hertfordshire and there are five standing in the Watling division: Caroline Clapper for the Tories, Gus Channer for Reform, Stuart Howard for the LibDems, Satvinder Singh Juss for Labour and Cheryl Stungo for the Greens. Clapper is by far the most experienced politician on that list. Her Reform opponent is a college teacher and a former Royal Engineer who apparently got into trouble with his employer for taking a sick day and then showing up to a Reform media event with Nigel Farage. Oops. This is his first election – we assume he’ll be wiser next time.

Although we’re pretty sure she’s expecting to be put under some pressure from the Reform insurgency next week we’re certain that Caroline Clapper will still be county councillor for the Watling division on Friday.

• What we do around here mainly is whinge about our Parliamentary representative Oliver Dowden. Bookmark this page for our coverage of your MP or follow this RSS feed.
• We’ve also recently developed an interest in an enormous proposed development in Hertsmere – the DC01UK data centre that will, it is claimed, be Europe’s largest and will be built in South Mimms, if the developers and Hertsmere Borough Council have their way. Bookmark this page for our various deep dives into the project.
• This post about the history of elections in Hertsmere is about as close to definitive as you’ll get – all the elections, all the results, all the candidates. We keep this freely-accessible spreadsheet of election results up-to-date too.

This is it. The big one. The last of our four guides to the parties standing in Hertsmere at the next general election, whenever that is. We’ve done the fringe parties, the Liberals and Labour so now it’s time to tackle the incumbents, the 800-pound gorillas of Hertsmere politics, the Conservative Party, winners in Hertsmere since the constituency was created, for the 1983 general election – the ‘Falklands election’. The Tories have never even come close to losing here, not even in 1997, when Labour won the largest number of Parliamentary seats in history and squeezed the margin in Hertsmere to six percent.

The history of the Tories in Hertsmere is essentially the history of the contituency so you’ll want to read our electoral history of Hertsmere, which covers the whole period since 1983 and its three MPs – including the ignominious departure of Margaret Thatcher’s favourite Cecil Parkinson in 1983 and of his successor James Clappison, dumped by the party for fast-track SPAD Oliver Dowden in 2015.

You might think that Hertsmere is one of those home counties contituencies that’s been approximately Tory since the battle of Hastings, or the end of the ice age. And you wouldn’t be wrong. A single county-wide constituency was first created over seven hundred years ago, in 1294, and it persisted until 1885. The Hertfordshire constituency returned – for most of that period – three MPs (the principal towns in the county also returned their own MPs). Before the franchise was expanded in the late 19th Century the electorate was tiny – In 1868, about 9,000 men in Hertfordshire (landowners and later the ‘ten-pound men‘) could vote. The first time they got a chance to vote for a candidate identified as a Tory was in 1727. He was a Jacobite noble called Charles Caesar, who was also Treasurer of the Navy. Between then and the seat’s final abolition in 1885 Tories dominated, with the occasional blip of Whig control. Between then and 1983 Radlett has bounced around between the constituencies of Watford, South West Hertfordshire and South Hertfordshire.

The odds

In a sea of disastrous polling data from the Sunak period, we’ve seen only one projection that suggests the Tories could lose in Hertsmere – and it’s a doozy. It’s the February 2023 MRP poll from the highly-reliable polling company Electoral Calculus. It gives Labour 509 seats and the Conservative Party 45. In this scenario the Tories aren’t even the official opposition. LOL.

We know that even the slightly less extreme polling that’s been done since then has been causing panic bordering on hysteria in corridors and bars and meeting rooms in the SW1 area. Such an enormous swing is obviously unlikely and the most recent MRP polling gives Dowden a 1997-sized lead here in Hertsmere. That would bring Labour’s candidate Josh Tapper to within 3,000 votes of Oliver Dowden. We’ve noted before that Tapper must be praying the Gogglebox factor can get him a bit closer.

Crown, church and land

They don’t call the Conservative Party the most successful political party in the world for nothing. This 300 year-old institution, which began life in the ferment after the English Civil War, is so wired into the constitution of middle England – especially rural and landowning England – that it seems almost to be part of the landscape.

The party’s various re-inventions, especially in the period since the industrial revolution, have seen it identified with business (which had previously been the domain of the Whigs), with the urban middle class and, much more recently, with working class voters, for whom the Tories came to stand for ambition, home ownership and the prospect of a better life for their children.

The fact that this last electoral coalition – the one assembled by Margaret Thatcher in the early 1980s that has seen the party running the country for 32 of the last 45 years – seems finally to be collapsing, in the wake of 15 years of flat wages, growing inequality and diminishing expectations – would, for any ordinary party, presumably mean the end. For the Tories it almost certainly means another re-invention – the Conservative Party is evidently indestructible and will still be with us on the other side of whatever apocalypse awaits us. Like cockroaches and the plague.

Our present Prime Minister – according to a polling firm one of the least popular party leaders in history – has made several increasingly desperate attempts at his own re-invention in the last year or two and, in his most recent effort, is trying to position his party as the ‘national security party’ or the party of geopolitical dread. It’s too early to say whether this relaunch will stick, of course, although the bookies aren’t convinced. At Radlett Wire we have a simple rule of thumb: when the Prime Minister puts a lectern outside Number 10 and makes a speech about nuclear annihilation it’s probably not his country’s security he’s worried about but his own.

The candidate

We remain, as we have essentially since his election in 2015, deeply impressed by Oliver Dowden. He’s an intriguing figure. Not charismatic, not possessed of any apparent vision or of a distinctive political identity, nor even of deep roots in the Tory party. He is, in his party’s terms, an outsider, but his tenacity and his political instincts have kept him in or near the action since his first election – through one of the most turbulent periods in his party’s (and the Parliament’s) history. He’s a pragmatist – entering politics via David Cameron’s upbeat, socially-liberal, modernising regime, when CCHQ was like the marketing department of a Plc – and he had no difficulty subsquently lodging himself in the government of each successor Prime Minister. Only Liz Truss could find no use for him.

As we said in an earlier post here, when the s**t hits the fan he’s always ready:

For a second-tier politician, Dowden’s always been pretty close to the action (once a Number 10 staffer, always a Number 10 staffer). He was first to endorse Johnson to replace Theresa May but also first to resign as Johnson’s final crisis began. Joining #TeamRishi was another low-key masterstroke for our operator, although his return to the front bench was delayed by that weird 49-day Liz Truss thing, during which Dowden was very much on the outside…

From How does Hertsmere vote? Radlett Wire, updated 19 January 2024

We’ve sometimes called Dowden a bagman here. We don’t mean this disdainfully. The bagman is vital to a successful political party. Some politicians are far too grand for this kind of thing but Dowden is always quite happy, as the moment requires, to get his hands dirty, to dispose of a body, to endorse even the silliest talking points – privet hedges, woke roadsigns, hoarding stolen artefacts – scolding Netflix and calling for Gary Lineker‘s dismissal on the regular. He’ll step up in defense of the indefensible on the Sunday morning programmes without complaint and he’ll take on the emptiest, gestural nonsense with gusto. For a while during the wave of industrial unrest of 2022 and 2023 he was put in charge of Rishi Sunak’s ‘Winter of Discontent taskforce’. We amused ourselves here trying to find any further trace of activity from the taskforce. None materialised. It was never more than an announcement – the kind of entirely hollow politics you need a strong stomach to pursue with enthusiasm. Dowden has a strong stomach.

Classic teflon

Oliver Dowden is as close to clean hands as you’ll get in the contemporary Conservative party, so-far unblemished by scandal. And even when he really ought to have got into trouble he’s somehow squeaked through, untouched. It was Dowden who appointed Boris Johnson’s friend and loan-arranger to be Chair of the BBC. Dowden who was in charge of propriety and ethics when the party was accused of covering up a rape. He’s never been close to the big money but he was one of ten Tory MPs who took paid jobs with party donors during 2022 and for some reason accepted a payment from the hedge fund that bankrolled Liz Truss’s experiment with credibility too.

Local hero

Dowden comes from up the road and went to a school a lot of Hertsmere kids attend. He knows the area and has been a diligent constituency representative. In our experience, he (almost always) answers letters from constituents (your mileage may vary). He’s never, as far as we know, phoned an elderly constituent in the middle of the night asking for money to give to ‘bad people’ and we’re pretty sure he doesn’t own a property portfolio. He’s always ready to make a speech about a car park next to a bin. For all this, as his constituents, we should be grateful.

There will be constituents who question his absolute committment to local concerns, though. The rail freight terminal on the old Radlett aerodrome land is one of those giant projects that will always present a problem for a government minister. He very much wants to be identified with the electors who are going to have an enormous warehouse blocking out their view or a busy new access road keeping them awake.

It’s a delicate business, though. Dowden has felt able to participate in the dispute but has reserved his full-throated criticism for the actions of the local authority, Hertfordshire County Council in this case, who say they were obliged to sell the land for the development. It’s always much easier for an MP to criticise the council than to criticise his own government or a major business that may well be a party donor.

We feel for Dowden on this. He doesn’t want to be seen too vocally opposing a development that will bring work to the area at a time when everyone’s fulminating about the sclerotic planning system. The sheer scale of the development and its likely impact on the households affected makes it hard to ignore for a local MP, though.

He’s ready

Dowden has been reselected by his local party (they do this sort of thing informally in the Conservative Party) but, as far as we know, he hasn’t actually lodged his nomination papers with the local authority so there’s still a slim chance he’ll run for the hills. We doubt it, though.

As a government minister he’ll evidently be able to draw on significant resources from his party during his campaign but Hertsmere is such a safe seat that it’s unlikely we’ll see many of the top brass here during the campaign. If he’s lucky he’ll be able to call on his friends at South Hertfordshire Business Club again, though. This is a club with no web site, no staff, no premises, no accounts and, apparently, no members (looks like it might share an address with the St Albans Conservative Association, though). According to the Electoral Commission the club gave £82,741.09 to Dowden’s office between 2017 and 2022, making use of a loophole that allows ‘unincorporated associations’ to give up to £25,000 per year to a political party or campaign without saying where the money comes from. Dowden’s not the only MP using this method of accessing anonymous money. There are a number of these secretive organisations, with names like The Portcullis Club and the Magna Carta Club (that one’s given £150,000 to Michael Gove since 2009). Interestingly, they seem to exist only to give money to Conservative politicians and campaigns. Details of the Dowden donations in this spreadsheet.

• Dowden suffers from a very contemporary political problem. He’s from a nominally working-class background but he speaks and acts quite posh. The same problem afflicts Keir Starmer. But the iron rule is that neither will ever, no matter how much they protest, be accepted as working class. They both really ought to give up trying.
• Oliver Dowden has had a few goes at the despatch box depping for the boss lately. We can’t say we’ve ever managed to get through a whole session. It’s too much. Watching him labour awkwardly through his scripted jokes is far too painful, like the nasty bit in a nature documentary about seals and killer whales.
• It turns out that the dreadful Cecil Parkinson affair has not yet, over forty years on, been forgotten. A new documentary is in the works.
• Here’s our big spreadsheet with all the Hertsmere election results going back to 1983 – the only place you’ll find all this information in one place (and we recently added Hertfordshire PCC results going back to 2012 for extra excitement).
• We group together all our Oliver Dowden posts with the #DowdenLog tag and you can subscribe to these posts in an RSS reader if that’s your thing.
• You can keep up with what Oliver Dowden does in Parliament at TheyWorkForYou and you can set up an email alert there too, should you be sad enough.
• We’re on Twitter/X and Facebook and you can follow this blog in the fediverse. Search for @blog@radlettwire.co.uk in your fediverse client (e.g. Mastodon)

On Thursday 2 May there are local elections in many parts of England. It honestly seems a bit unfair that just down the road in London they’ve got all the excitement of a Mayoral election. In fact, there are elections in about a third of English councils (107 out of 317), also in 14 unitary authorities, 28 metropolitan boroughs and 34 district councils (details from the Institute for Government). Not here, though. Sorry.

But we do get to vote for something, right?

Here in Radlett we get to vote for a Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC). Absolutely the most boring election possible, right? Few people bother to vote in Police Commissioner elections. At the last PCC election in Hertfordshire, in 2021, the turnout was a fairly respectable 37%, a bit more than half the turnout at the 2019 general election in Hertsmere (70.6%), but that was because the election was on the same day as local authority elections. Turnout will be much lower this time. We can’t believe we’re even typing this. It’s so boring.

The whole idea of a Police and Crime Commissioner is a very recent one – the first ones were elected in 2012. The Conservative government (this is the same government whose legislators are currently sending dick pics to strangers and allegedly getting dogs drunk) said that they wanted to put local policing under democratic control but most people think they wanted to introduce explicitly political PCCs because it would give them an advantage. And they weren’t wrong. In 2021 (a year late because of the pandemic), 76.9% of Police Commissioners elected in England and Wales were Conservatives. The model, of course, is the American system, where many more local officials are elected – from dog catchers to District Attorneys to Chiefs of Police. What’s less clear is how useful they’ve been here in England and Wales. We think it would be safe to say that the jury’s still out.

What does a Police and Crime Commissioner actually do?

Police and Crime Commissioners are responsible for all of policing in their constabulary areas (in some areas they’re also responsible for the fire service). Crucially they appoint the Chief Constable and hold them to account once in role. In this they’re a bit like the Chairs of other public bodies. The Chair of a school’s governing body, for instance, appoints the headteacher but doesn’t run the school. PCCs don’t make policing decisions. They have a budget and can fund smaller initiatives but they can’t set policy. They’ll usually have a fairly substantial team of civil servants working for them and there’ll be a communications function – explaining what they do to the electors. Sometimes they intervene to discipline the Chief Constable and sometimes this goes horribly wrong. Some police chiefs think PCCs can be arbitrary and domineering and they’re probably not wrong. There’s nothing in the rules to stop an elected Police Commissioner from firing the Chief Constable just to make it look like they’re doing something – especially if there’s an election coming.

In 2022 (we expect there’ll have been a bit of an increase since then), the salary of Hertfordshire’s PCC was £78,400 plus expenses (mainly for travel, by the look of it). This is approximately mid-table for PCCs – some are paid substantially more, some less. The PCC’s deputy Lewis Cocking is paid £33,460. Chief Executive Chris Brace makes £112,350 (plus a car allowance) and there are eight more staff paid more than £58,200. It’s not clear from the accounts how many others work in the Hertfordshire PCC’s office. Details from the Herts PCC web site.

We suspect we’d all be a bit more interested in the business of the Police and Crime Commissioners if there was any evidence that they had improved anything. The Local Government Association, reporting in 2020, says the evidence is uncertain. The PCCs themselves, understandably enough, think they’re doing a great job and, in their 2021 report (PDF) list many positive actions – for instance the Beacon Fraud Hub set up here in Hertfordshire in 2019 that helps fraud victims retrieve money from crims – over a million pounds by the time of the report. We’ve been searching for independent evidence of the usefulness of PCCs. So far no luck. If you know of any, please share it in a comment. Perhaps they just need a few more years.

What the PCCs do seem to have done is given the governance of policing a slightly higher profile. Police Authorities, the somewhat bureaucratic institutions they replaced, had some formal independence but also had a reputation for being ineffective talking shops and most people didn’t even know they existed. Even more boring. In 2016, only 8% of electors could name their PCC, though, and it seems likely that a clear majority of people still wouldn’t be able to. Can you?

Interestingly, Police and Crime Commissioners used to be elected by a kind of proportional representation called the supplementary vote (SV) system, where voters could choose a first and second choice vote. This has been scrapped and you’ll now just pick a single candidate, as you do in ordinary elections.

Who’s who?

Hertfordshire’s current Police and Crime Commissioner, former financial adviser David Lloyd, is one of the longest serving in the country. He’s been in the role since the very first election in 2012. But he’s off to a research job at Birmingham University. The Tory candidate for the role on 2 May will be Jonathan Ash-Edwards, a former council leader. He’ll certainly win. There are also candidates from the Greens, Labour and the Liberal Democrats. Here are your candidates, in alphabetical order. Try not to get too excited.

Your candidates

All the candidates have their own web sites, of course, but the most comprehensive source of information about their various platforms is the official government booklet.

Jonathan Ash-Edwards, Conservative

To be honest, we suspect you could probably have guessed what Jonathan is promising without looking. Let’s look at the headlines: more police, safer streets, lower tax, prevent crime, provide responsive policing, support victims, keep Herts safe and listen to you. Classic combination of vague and unachievable. Lower tax, for instance. If you have any idea how a Police and Crime Commissioner can influence tax rates you should explain in a comment. We particularly like ‘prevent crime’, though. Go Jonathan! Read the whole lot in the official booklet.

Matt Fisher, Green Party

Matt doesn’t have a policy platform at all, as far as we can tell, but he does have the best tie/handkerchief combo by about a mile. Read his biography in the booklet.

Tom Plater, Labour

Tom offers: “…a real plan to tackle crime in our neighbourhoods, by smashing drug crime, combating violence against Women & Girls and reducing anti-social behaviour. We will do this by taking real action. If elected I will put more bobbies on the beat, who know our local communities inside out, with their policing led by the intelligence they gather. I will work with domestic abuse charities to put their workers into 999 call centres to work alongside our brilliant call centre handlers. I will review and improve vetting practises across Hertfordshire Constabulary.“

Again, without wishing to be too cynical, we’re impressed by Tom’s ambition to ‘smash drug crime’ from his nice office in Hertford. More in the booklet.

Sean Prendergast, Liberal Democrats

If anything, Sean‘s platform is even more ambitious than the others’. His priorities are to increase visible community and neighbourhood policing, stop violence against women and girls, solve burglary and vehicle crime and to tackle and prevent antisocial behaviour. We might scoff at the idea that Mister Prendergast will be able to ‘solve vehicle crime’ during his time in office but he’s the most credible challenger to the Conservative candidate. He’s a former Police Community Support Office and PCC candidates from his party have come closest to beating the Tories in Hertfordshire in previous elections. The switch from the supplementary vote (SV) system might reduce his chances of winning, though. Read the booklet for the detail.

We’ve been going on about the official booklet. It’s an A5-sized PDF published by the Secretary of State for the Department of Levelling Up, Housing & Communities, presumably as an aspect of the campaign to get people interested in PCCs. We can confirm that it’s not working. Anyway, in addition to the candidates’ biographies, it also has some general information about the role of Police and Crime Commissioner and a statement by the County’s returning officer. Electors of Radlett, contain yourselves.

• The candidates’ web pages: Jonathan Ash-Edwards, Matt Fisher, Tom Plater, Sean Prendergast.
• Don’t forget your voter ID. You won’t be allowed to vote without it.

None of the candidates secured 50% of the vote in the first round so counting went to a second round, in which Lloyd beat the Labour candidate Kerry Pollard 126,069 votes to 85,854. Chris White, the Liberal candidate, came third, with 38,488 of first round votes. The UKIP candidate, who is a financial adviser to ‘professionals and the comfortably well-off’ in Royston, came dead last.

• Learn more about Police and Crime Commissioners on the Government’s web site.
• There’s a good results page on the BBC News web site.
• The BBC also has a handy guide to what P&CCs actually do.
• David Lloyd’s official Police Commissioner web site.

Tell us what kind of bookshop you’re planning, David. What will it be called?

“We thought long and hard about the name and talked about successful bookshops. They’re all named after their founders so we came up with the name Segrue Books of Radlett. It took some time to get used to a bookshop having our name on it! We put Radlett in the name as we want the bookshop to be part of the community and for the people of Radlett to feel the shop belongs to the village. The shop will have a good range of fiction – mid-market and literary. Non-fiction will range from history and politics through to popular psychology, science and travel. We’ll also stock illustrated books including cookery, design and practical art, plus a good selection of children’s books.”

Radlett’s well within range of Amazon’s same-day delivery service. What makes you think there’s still a place for physical bookshops in 2016?

“Amazon provides an online shopping service that suits some consumers, but there are many book buyers who want to browse in a good bookshop. They want to touch a book and get a feel for it before they buy it. It’s very hard to really get a feel for a book on a screen. The other key to success in bookselling is the way the shop presents its books and gifts, the knowledge of the booksellers and their customer service. We can order almost 500,000 books for next-day delivery too.”

What’s your background? Have you run bookshops before?

“I’ve worked in the industry for 24 years as a sales agent for independent publishers, I supply everyone from Waterstones and WHSmith to museums, galleries and independent bookshops. I advise publishers on packaging of books and cover design. Amanda started life working in the city and for the last 14 years has managed finance for our sales agency. Neither of us have run a bookshop but have the trade experience. We’ll be employing an experienced bookshop manager and booksellers.”

We hear that 30% of your shop will be children’s books. Why are kids’ books so important?

“Children’s books have grown in sales for the last three to four years and the quality goes from strength to strength. Children are continually distracted by screens from phones and tablets to televisions. Books are a beautiful, tactile object that can help focus children’s minds, help calm children and inspire creativity.”

Will your shop reflect your own interests?

Amanda will bring a sense of calm to the shop with her interest in interior design, she has a flair for it. The key to success in bookselling is to build a shop’s stock around the local market, we’ll build the opening stock based on our knowledge of the local area. We’ll buy a small amount of gift product to sell and Amanda and I will do this to suit the taste of the locals.”

There’s the exciting prospect of ‘locally-made cakes’. Tell me more about the café.

“Amanda’s a tea drinker and has picked Tea Pigs as our supplier for tea, it will be served in pots with tea cups the way tea should be. I’m a coffee drinker and am insistent that you can’t serve coffee unless it is the best coffee. All the staff will be trained as baristas as well as being expert booksellers. Amanda is currently tasting cakes from a number of local bakers that make cakes at home, when we say home-made we mean home-made.”

Will you put on events, readings and meet-the-authors?

“There’s great excitement in the book trade for the shop opening, publishers are always keen to find new bookshops to promote authors. We’ll be looking for author signings and meet-the-author talks. We’ll look to run a bookclub which can also attract authors to meet bookclub members. We’re also looking to run children’s events tied in with authors and activity books. Our 11 year-old son wants to read to children on a Saturday and during the holidays.”

I hear you’ve taken the location of the old Wine Rack. Will you retain the parking spaces in front?

“The parking spaces are owned by the shops along the parade and so the 4 spaces in front of the shop are owned by Segrue Books of Radlett. We love the idea people can park outside, pop in for a coffee and a book and not have to worry about parking.”

You can sign up for email updates about the new bookshop on the Segrue Books web site.

I nipped down to Newberries car park – the one behind Budgen’s – this morning to experience the first day of operation of Radlett’s experimental farmers’ market. About a dozen stalls with a good range of produce – meat, bread, cheese, plants and honey plus a couple of slightly more offbeat products – were all present and the place was quite busy. Stallholders told me they were pleased with the turnout, especially for day one. The market is run by a large specialist firm and the stallholders present were all professionals in this game. I suspect this is the case with most ‘farmers’ markets’ these days. Not the bucolic, self-organising, community-driven ideal you may have been expecting. Peter McCarthy, whose McCarthy’s Country Store pitches up at over thirty markets per month, told me he’d expect the Radlett market to do well.

I had a particularly nice chat with Mr and Mrs Gorski, whose Hertfordshire Honey stall stocked only the product of their own hives in Benington near Stevenage. Consequently I am significantly better-informed about the different types of honey, about the flowering of hazels and willows and about the booming honey market than I was this morning. Ask me anything. Mr Gorski told me they sell everything they produce and thus won’t be needing any further publicity. Hence no photo of Mr Gorski!

As to the produce, I can confirm that the Gorskis’ light honey is delicious and that the sourdough stilton and raisin bread from Redbournbury Watermill is mindblowing with a bit of cheese on it. The market is set to run on the third Sunday of the next two months, so the next one will be on 15th May.

Did you go down to the market? What did you think? Will it be a hit? Or is the location a bit too well-hidden (that’s my concern)? Leave a comment below. Sadly I only had my iPhone on me so the pictures are a bit rubbish – more here, though and Clive Glover has some more pics and some interesting background on the three-month trial on his Radlett blog. And, by the way, there was a terrific Food Programme about the mother of all farmers’ markets – Borough Market – on Radio 4 today. Well worth a listen.

UPDATE: I’ve added details of the campaign’s Twitter account.

The Radlett Centre was full to the doors for last night’s public meeting. And the WING anti-incinerator group‘s formidable package of information and political organisation went down well with the assembled crowd. The campaign has evident clout – what other campaign could attract two local MPs to a public meeting affecting constituents of only one? (correction: a comment points out the the Harper Lane site is actually in the constituency of Anne Main so this is clearly the concern of both MPs). Both spoke strongly against the scheme, questioning the legality of the local authority’s process as well as the usefulness of the scheme and its potential impact on the village. Calls from the floor for disclosure of the contact details of all the Hertfordshire councillors involved in the decision met with raucous approval. As did the suggestion that those of us who buy our electricity from E.ON, the Radlett scheme’s sponsor, should switch to another supplier.

There is much anger about the incinerator – at least amongst those represented in the room. But it’s not clear how much opposition there is in the wider community for a scheme that, if built, will occupy a former aggregate yard a mile from the village. If I were a councillor on the relevant committee I’d have my tin hat at the ready right now.

The WING group has a Facebook page and a blog and is on Twitter. The organisers are cleverly mobilising environmental opposition to incinerators in general for the campaign – there are plenty of useful links on the blog. There doesn’t seem to be a hashtag for the campaign yet but I’m sure one will emerge.