Odd stuff about Britain’s election

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By the time you read this, Britain will have a new government, and if you want details on that you’re in the wrong place. I’m writing this on the day of the election (which is also the day before I post) and I’ll be snoring by the time the results come in.  

So what can I tell you about the election, then? 

Semi-relevant photo: A red flower. A peony in this case, not the red rose that Labour uses as its logo.

Forget the polls . . .  

. . . let’s turn to Etsy for a prediction.

  • Someone was selling a Tory Meltdown Wallchart (Tory is another name for the Conservatives). It divides candidates into ranks from “the inevitable” (bound to lose their seats) to “there is a God” (their loss would be a gift from the universe). 
  • Other people were selling bingo cards–two versions, both intended to help players enjoy Tory losses. The promo on one said, “Even if you lose the game, you win.” One was called Tory Wipeout Bingo.
  • You could also buy assorted games where you gain points by spotting things–a Labour majority of more than 100, say, or any mention of Boris Johnson.

As the votes were being counted, a website, Portillogeddon.com, went live. If Liz Truss lost her seat, a lettuce was programmed to fall from the sky.

The virtual sky, I assume. 

Why a lettuce? Because Truss’s prime minister-ship (Tory, of course–they’ve had 14 years in power) got into trouble so soon that an inspired website trained a camera on a head of lettuce to see if it would outlast her.

It did.

And Portillo? Wiktionary defines a Portillo moment as “an election loss for a prominent politician.” It comes from the surprise 1997 defeat of Conservative defence secretary Michael Portillo, who was even being talked about as a future leader of his party. His opponent was so sure he’d lose that he didn’t write a victory speech.

That was part of a Labour landslide that ended 18 years of Tory rule, and as you may have gathered, a lot of people have been watching for Portillo moments. Labour was expected to win a majority that falls somewhere between huge and groundbreaking, and by now the Conservatives might have succeeded in landing not in second place but in third. It’s going to be an interesting night. I’m going to bed. The news will all be there in the morning.

As for the voting itself . . .

. . . the British press are sworn to silence about the voting until 10 pm. That leaves reporters posting stories about tortoises at polling places, or horses, along with lots of dog photos. The BBC took a quick run through (I assume) its files to come up with odd election day stories, and since I’m going to bed instead of staying up to post details you can find out in more detail on some more sensible site, that leaves me posting odd election day stories. I’m indebted–as I often am–to the BBC.

In 2021, a chicken wandered into a polling station in Lancashire, unaccompanied by any human, voting age or otherwise. It was friendly and it stuck around so long that the people in charge took to saying, “Come in, don’t mind the chicken.”

When they couldn’t trace the owner, a local farm family offered to take it for the time being. That seemed like a good solution. Exit chicken, in the hands of the farmers.

Minutes later, a five-year-old showed up. The chicken was his pet and its name was Matilda.

Cue panic. Had they just given Matilda to heartless, chicken-eating farmers?

Well, no, they hadn’t. They were farmers, definitely, and chicken-eating, possibly. But heartless, no. The farmers put Matilda in a pen with other chickens, although that turned out to be a bad decision. The home-team chickens decided Matilda was what was wrong with their lives and all proceeded to peck her until her family swooped her up, took her home, and gave her a bath.

I’m going to assume that Matilda liked her baths, although I’m making that part up. 

A few hours later–presumably Matilda and her pet boy had recovered by then–the family came back to the polling station to say thanks, bringing chocolates and a tray of eggs. 

*

At a different polling station, a woman dropped her ballot into the box and her engagement ring followed it in. Her £40,000 engagement ring.

Could they open the box, please, so she could have it back?

Well, no, they could not. Ballot boxes stay sealed until the votes are counted, so the woman had to wait until the end of the day, then go where the votes were counted and wait until they got around to her particular box. That gave her all kinds of time to consider the wisdom of getting her ring resized.

Until 15 years ago, ballot boxes were closed with sealing wax, and if the wax got hot enough the wax would smolder, raising the possibility–however remote–that the ballots themselves would catch fire. And, of course, poll workers weren’t allowed to take the wax off. That would invalidate the ballots. 

The BBC says, “Polling station workers couldn’t open the box to put out the potential flames so instead had to find a way to get liquid into the box to put out the fire without causing too much damage to the votes.” 

Into the box? Wasn’t the wax on the outside? Almost surely, since no one’s small enough to seal the box from inside, then slither out. Let’s not worry about it, though. Let’s just enjoy the thought and not lose sleep over the mechanics.   

39 thoughts on “Odd stuff about Britain’s election”

  1. Pingback: Odd stuff about Britain’s election – On Being Incredibly Quiet

  2. It might sound daft, but, before the 1872 Secret Ballot Act, people – the 1867 Reform Act gave the vote to some members of the working-class – were sometimes intimidated by bosses and landlords over how they were going to vote. So keeping ballot boxes secret was a really big thing.

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    • Absolutely. I didn’t mean to sound like that was unimportant. I was just struck by the absurdity of a ballot box threatening to go up in flames. The US has a long and interesting history of ballot boxes being monkeyed with–some are said to have ended up in Lake Michigan, thereby helping to elect John F. Kennedy. Whether it’s true or not I can’t say. It’s credible, thought. Chicago was run by a corrupt political machine. Anyway, thanks for your comment and I had no intention of downplaying the importance of the secret ballot.

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    • If they bring in nothing more than marginal competence, they’ll be a welcome change, but it’s going to be like picking up a card game not when the player you’re taking over from threw all the cards in the air but more like they shredded a fair number and ate two.

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  5. Questions remain.
    Is Everybody electable, who wants to become secretary of something ? Can I stand on my soap box, get elected, and then meet the King ? Like any chicken of a certain age ?

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    • You could theoretically get elected from your soapbox, but you’d have to be head of your party first, and then get your party a majority of MPs. And then–well, would you really want to meet the king? Are you sure you wouldn’t rather meet the chicken?

      I heard an interesting interview with a civil servant who’s worked with assorted prime ministers (we’ve had one hell of an assortment lately), and he talked about prime ministers first walking into No. 10 and getting an overwhelming sense of the work they’d just taken on. It’s a real gear-shift from campaigning and doesn’t sound like an enviable moment.

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      • I never was a party person, and will not become one for the rest of my life. I hate marching. But I’d really like to meet Charles.

        It is a stressful job to run a gouvernement, and a nation. Especially when you take it serious.
        There was a fascinating series of photographs, sadly I forgot who took them. Politicians sat for their portrait at the start of the job, and some years later (yes, the rest of the civilised world has politicians who last a few years !). All and any one looked worn, sad, and strangely knowing – the last is my interpretation.

        MAybe becoming head honcho divides wheat from chaff, there is no more escape ; and sooner or later all the fall guys are used up. Unless your name is Trump.

        If someone would pay me, I would do a story about the next Prez, but I’d prefer checking Scotch with the King.

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        • The portraits do sound interesting.

          Personally, I can’t think of anything more boring than meeting the king. Now meeting Larry the Cat, chief mouser at No. 10–that would be worth my time.

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  6. How would the wax seal on a ballot box get hot enough to smolder ? Even on a summer day in the UK, does it rival Phoenix AZ ? Obviously it would have to be heated to seal it, but THAT hot ??

    Your new PM seems less like our ex-president, so that is a good thing for the world. Your nation may become # 1 again, pending the outcome of our upcoming clusterscrew. The world needs all the help it can get !

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    • I’m sitting here on a July morning with a long-sleeve top and a heavy sweatshirt, which is a way of saying that hot days aren’t, in my experience, all that common. So how sealing wax get hot enough to smolder is beyond me, and you make a good point about how hot the seal itself has to be. Dunno. I’m parroting what I read. It does all sound a bit strange, but the BBC’s usually reliable.

      On the other hand…

      I’m not sure what it’ll take to sort the world out just now, but I wouldn’t look to Britain for it. We’ll be doing well to sort out the mess we’ve been left by the last lot.

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        • I can’t get my head around the mechanics of this, but the wax dropping inside the box doesn’t sound likely that the wax could pick itself up and drop into the box.

          All told, I think we’ll have to file smoldering sealing wax under Life’s Mysteries.

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          • You usually seal something with sealing wax, which has a wick. You light the wick and the wax drips onto whatever it is that you’re sealing. It’s possible that it could drip into the box, or that the person doing the sealing could drop the lit bit of the sealing wax into the box. I’m sure the holes used to be wider.

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                • Okay, I turned to the BBC again:

                  “Pontefract was the first town to vote in private when its Liberal MP Hugh Childers was newly appointed as a minister and the rules back then meant he had to win a by-election in order to serve.

                  “Much like today, the voters of the Pontefract by-election were provided with separate booths where they could mark their paper in private and post it into the ballot box.

                  “The boxes were specially made for the occasion and were marked with a wax seal to make sure no one tampered with the votes. Charmingly, the seal was made with a traditional liquorice stamp of a castle and an owl from a local factory where they used them to stamp Pontefract cakes.”
                  https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-34987232

                  There’s a photo of a waxless ballot box. If I’m going to put wax on it, it will be on the side, where the lid meets it.

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  7. So Britain is moving left while the rest of Europe seems to be heading right. And the US seems determined to blow itself up. Maybe I’ll just take a nap until next year when some of this sorts itself out.

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    • Well, we’re emerging from 14 years of the right in control and boy did they wreck the room before they were tossed out. Interestingly, people don’t seem to be embracing Labour (it’s presented itself as so bland under Starmer that there isn’t much to embrace) as accepting it as the only alternative to the Tories. There is a fairly far right party emerging, called Reform. It could still go into a meltdown–it’s really a personality vehicle for one guy–but it’s a trend to watch, and not an encouraging one.

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  9. I had a chicken called Matilda once. As far as I know, she never had any inclination to go to a polling station.

    I did stay up for the results for the first time. If I’d known that the first four hours were going to be so boring, I would probably have gone to bed first, then I wouldn’t have been having a nap when Rishi Sunak conceded defeat.

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  11. In terms of the proportion of the total number of registered voters, this is the least successful winning result since universal adult suffrage in 1929 – barely 20% of the electors voting for the “winners” (sorry, I’m nerdy about this, I keep a spreadsheet and everything). But with such a massive majority, the new government can do just about anything it wants – until something proves impossible/ineffectual, and/or the internal party factions start to cause mischief, that is.

    PS: I think (from the time I was an observer at a count, a long time ago) the seal on a ballot box was actually applied to the ends of the strings that tied the top down. Still doesn’t explain how even the clumsiest clerk could let hot sealing wax drip in.

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    • Well, that’s half the mystery of the sealing wax solved. Many thanks.

      Hawley’s Small and Unscientific Survey reports that many Conservative voters stayed home this time. To quote one of them, “There’s nobody I could vote for.” That does’t account for all the non-voters, but it does for some of them. This election really has shown up the craziness of Britain’s election system. Corbyn (considered an electoral disaster) got nearly as many votes, just in different and not as useful places–and the Conservative votes wasn’t as effectively split.

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