Simon Hughes declares 1000 supporters but does he have them?

3.26.19pm GMT Tue 31st Jan 2006

Simon Hughes

Simon Hughes' campaign is 'delighted' to announce that his campaign is the first to hit the 1000 mark of people publicly declaring their support for my leadership bid. I had a look at the list and even from my quick glance it appears that he doesn't.

Just looking at names from the West Midlands, ie those I know best, show there people not supporting Simon, all three backing Sir Menzies and two of whom are helping who have supported Simon in the past but not this time and have NOT given permission for Simon to use their names! There are also several duplications between Councillors and non-Councillors, there are two people with 'made-up' names where there forename is merged with their local party (I suspect these have just mis-registered).

So has the Simon Campaign been over-zealous with assuming people are still supporting Simon, guessed or something else?

Of course in politics there are a lot of lies, misrepresentations and statistics. Yesterday the Huhne campaign claimed to have more Council Leaders than the other campaigns combined, it turns out there actually have less than Sir. Menzies and one more than Simon, however I believe the Ming and Simon sites did not have these published at the time - the moral of the story is do not make public statements of numbers if you are not 100%