My Lords, I am often grateful I was never an election agent. I fought five elections and was once approached and asked if I would work as an agent for an early election. I am eternally grateful that I did not accept, because I did not begin to understand the complications and responsibilities of the task then. I have learned some of them since, but life has got a great deal more complicated over the last 50 or 60 years as the technology of elections and the power of the national parties, compared with the local parties, have shifted quite radically.
When I read this clause, I was struck by the word “only”, which appears repeatedly. That was the word I wanted to challenge. For example, it says that
“facilities are made use of on behalf of a candidate only if their use on behalf of the candidate is directed”.
Why does “only” keep recurring in various different contexts? It is clearly intended to weaken the possibility that the candidate could, in any way, be regarded as responsible. That worries me. Any good lawyer would be able to unpick the candidate being responsible under most circumstances for what the national party had done within his or her constituency. We well know, from the case to which this clause relates, that the national parties as a whole have come to engage in specific constituencies to target them and to spend a great deal of money from the national level in them. I suspect that candidates are always aware of this, but they may not always have wished to encourage it.