Education and Welfare 1984/85 Campaign Manifesto, University of Keele Students’ Union, March 1984

I was a reluctant candidate for the union sabbatical post of Education and Welfare officer. I thought I had done a grand Machiavellian job of ensuring that the 1984/85 committee would be just fine. The last piece of the jigsaw, in my mind, was to persuade Bobbie Scully to run for Education and Welfare.

Unfortunately, Bobbie was quietly more Machiavellian than me (the fact that she was studying politics as well as law probably helped), so I found the tables turned and I somehow succumbed to peer pressure to run myself.

Here is the manifesto, now in pieces but thus scan-able in three parts.

It is not easy to fool WordPress into more or less presenting the thing as it looked. I probably could make it look a bit better, but for now the above presentation will have to do.

Intriguingly, in similar context, I believe my manifesto was the first ever union manifesto to be word-processed. Hence the bold lettering etc. It was a devil of a job using the University mainframe’s text editor software. If my diary is to be believed, we spent serious chunks of four or five days to get this seemingly trivial job done; it was a non-trivial task back then.

My friend and campaign manager Malcolm Cornelius deserves all the credit for the idea and the hard yards to get the job done. I believe that Malcolm went on to a glorious career in IT consulting; perhaps his work on my manifesto was an important staging-post in his career.

Here’s the supplementary manifesto, which was similarly word-processed and formed part of that multi-day task. Another innovation was the use of DL size for these supplementaries. People tended to go for A5 two-sided and ration their allocation of one ream of A4 accordingly. I thought that DL, yielding 1,500 rather than 1,000 leaflets, was a good idea.

At some stage, I’ll pull some memories and diary notes together on the election campaign itself. Suffice it to say at this stage that the campaign succeeded and I was elected.