Renditions of Jerusalem sung at hustings events, a talking cooked breakfast, and a mannequin head being paraded around Saint Pancras. These were but some of the campaign tactics adopted by smaller parties and candidates in the recent Holborn and St Pancras by-election.
The election, triggered by Sir Keir Starmer's retirement from politics, saw Labour’s Sagal Abdi-Wali take the seat, denying Zac Polanski from the Greens the pleasure, though they did shave down their majority by some 8,000 votes.
While the big dogs threw buckets of cash into the campaign - one candidate informed me their party was over the £64,190 limit already - smaller parties had to resort to more affordable ways to get people's attention.
By no means a bystander, and by all means a contributor in this elaborate funfair of eccentricity, was Helen Spiby-Vann. The Wirral-born mum and graphic designer decided to stand on behalf of the Christian Peoples Alliance. A veteran campaigner of 11 years, with her highest vote count just past 200, her short campaign on this occasion featured the novel use of a plastic mannequin head in a Perspex box, ceremoniously carried around Camden and St Pancras to educate residents on the story behind the location’s name.
For those of you who don't know (and I didn't), St Pancras was a 14-year-old boy from Phrygia (modern-day Turkey) who was martyred by the Romans in around 300AD for refusing to bow to their gods. His remains are said to have been brought to London (or Londinium) in 595 AD by Augustine, under the orders of Pope Gregory. In life, St Pancras certainly never visited Britannia, and likely never even knew of the wet island’s existence. But such is the British habit of appropriating foreign men of faith and the name has now become synonymous with one of London’s biggest stations.
I was to learn all of this in a crash course a few weeks ago when my professional marketing services were enlisted by Helen to help boost her brand on the campaign trail. While I knew she wanted to educate on St Pancras, I was as taken aback as the next man, when the infamous prosthetic head, with a hairline to make any middle aged man jealous, was unveiled from inside a specially designed crate, that doubled as a plinth, outside of Kentish town station one Friday morning.
To complete this strange pseudo-Catholic, symbolic Pentecostal affair, Sid Cordle, the leader of the CPA, was dressed in a monk’s cassock to represent Augustine. No sooner had the head been set in place on its plinth, a Muslim woman walked past, to which one volunteer, who had clearly not been properly briefed, exclaimed, “The Muslims did this!” Unsurprisingly, a heated discussion ensued, in which Sura 47:4 was quoted a lot. It was only defused when someone comedically pointed out the Romans were to blame, not Muslims, to which the volunteer humbly apologised before squeezing in one more Sura 47:4 reference as the woman walked away. “Have a good day,” she shouted, “and for the record, I don’t want anyone to be beheaded.”
Tragically, as Sid later commented: "While not our experience in the West, many Christians are still being beheaded today all over the world for their faith, mainly at the hands of extremist Muslims."
Speeches over, the plinth was deconstructed and placed in bag to match the monks’ cassocks, which the 70-year-old Sid - a former sub-three-hour marathon runner - was made to carry, in a scene strangely similar to John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, while two others lifted the head on wooden poles and began the solemn parade southward (if indeed six people and a mannequin head can be called a parade). One volunteer with a guitar sang “When the Saints go marching in” most of the way, until her fingertips were raw and her voice nearly lost.
It turns out Helen, who I have subsequently discovered holds two degrees, one in humanities from Hertfordshire Uni and another in fashion and textiles from the Liverpool School of Art, actually designed and built both the plinth (a repurposed dog cage, and the casing for the head). In fact, design, in particular God’s moral design for the world, was a huge part of her campaign.
“When a design works well, it works seamlessly and it's almost like it hasn't been designed,” she declared in her campaign video. “And such it is with God's laws. That's why I have a passion for exalting God's laws.”
In view of this, one policy she was pushing was the reintroduction of the Ten Commandments in school. In all her conversations with local residents, she stated, “I’ve not met one person who isn’t in favour.” Her other policies include tackling family breakdown and its consequences including relieving pressure on housing and addressing youth offending, fatherlessness and “the injustice of single parenting”, of which she has personal experience, and finally the “dispossession of children and abortion”.
As a marketing professional, I mused over whether I should cut out what one Irish passer-by called “a dole in a box”, but in the end I figured it would be disingenuous to do so. It was the core element of the campaign, nor was it ineffectual. Two people diverted their plans to find out more, including one Christian woman who actually disembarked her bus early to interview the Pentecostal pilgrims on her phone. Sid Cordle commented that never had they given away so many leaflets, to which I replied, “Perhaps you should wear a monk’s cassock more often.”
Arriving at Camden, the worship leader’s larynx spent, Helen kindly brought everyone lunch before warding off a post-Subway lethargy with an inspirational speech and instructions to hold up the banner and engage the public for a further hour.
In a blend of tourists, the sleeping homeless and do-gooders handing out meals, Helen tested her policies on the public while I snapped and captured.
Regrettably, despite hours editing and polishing photos and videos, as well as advising Helen on the best ways to distribute them on socials, dear Helen only managed to secure 63 votes at the ballot, this comparable to the 12,292 votes achieved by Labour, 8,928 by the Greens, and 87 from Barmy Brunch of the Monster Raving Loony Party. Meanwhile, a fundraiser, which I personally wrote, only raised £5 (which, I confess, was me anyway).
Of course, on the one hand, this could easily be framed as a failure, a depressing attempt at going nowhere. Yet the more time I've spent capturing Helen in action and hearing what her true motivation was, the more my perspective began to change.
To be clear, Helen is a paying customer; what she received for a fee were photos and videos cut for socials. Writing this was NOT part of the service. I do this utterly and entirely of my own volition in order to explain why I found Helen so inspirational and why you should do so too.
If you'd asked me a year ago whether I'd vote CPA, I'd have given you a lengthy answer about how Christians shouldn't be engaging in identity politics, and how there is no single political vision in the New Testament around which all Christians can cohere. “My Kingdom is not of this world.”
While I believe both these points to be true and important, cast against the sickly state of UK politics and the growing Muslim bloc vote, I am growing in the conviction that explicit Christian candidates are not only helpful but necessary, at the very least as evangelists during electoral windows, but potentially, in a short time yet, the only people who can find a middle ground.
Nothing brought this home to me quite like the hustings event I attended on October 5. Beneath Tom Darwood’s Jerusalem, or Barmy Brunch’s outfit, was a kind of chaos one would be foolish to laugh at. Accusations of Holocaust flew one way; antisemitism and Holocaust denial the other. One candidate pushed for justice without compassion, another for compassion without justice. The climate emergency, we were told by the Greens, was the biggest issue facing our nation because three (yes, three) London homes burnt down during recent heatwaves. Others suggested foreign wars were the problem, or Zionist agitators.
The only common ground the candidates shared was the English language, before it was deployed to cut away any space that lay between them. And even this cannot be guaranteed in future elections.
All being watched by a predominantly aged crowd of old white men, perhaps the last generation to even know what a hustings is.
Against this bleak backdrop, Helen’s contributions (available to watch here) were strangely appealing. Able to appeal both to Frank Dobson's socialist legacy and to conservative notions of a nuclear family, she brought a much-needed middle to proceedings, however not a compromised centralism, rather what I can only describe as a panoramic equilibrium.
Responding to the biggest issues we must address in her final speech, she stated:
“So where the Creator affords value to each and every human life, our throwaway culture requires some of us to be thrown away. Literally almost 300,000 rising annually, tiny little humans are flushed away down the toilet … due to the epidemic of unwanted impregnations. The concept that a man would hit and run on a woman is completely antithetical to the way that God has designed couples, man and family, and the human person that we are. Men are designed to be sacrificial stewards of their families. It's a malfunction in our design to take these special gifts of relationships and not be prepared to do it well.”
Politicians are great at bringing problems to your door, but it takes a certain kind of Christian politician to suggest the problem is already in your home, or worse, in your heart. This is what is so commendable about Helen’s stand, not that she articulated the full gospel from beginning to end, but that she changed the axis in the room from left to right, to up to down, and all this on a Thursday night after work. For these I believe Christians need to show her some appreciation.
Of course one needn’t be in an explicitly Christian party in order to do this, but with right and left wing parties embarrassed to earth their morality exclusively in the Bible, the out and out Christian candidate may be the only way forward.
Speaking in front of the huge locked red door of New St Pancras Church, after the hustings, I asked her why she did it.
Her reply has stuck with me: “I want to inspire Christians.”
Maybe she has - I don’t know. All I know is she’s inspired me.
If you want to support Helen’s crowdfunding campaign, you can here.
