An Interesting Day

A hundred years since all men and some women got the vote, I was helping out with the 50:50 Ask Her To Stand event at Westminster, trying to encourage women into politics, local and national. There I was at godawful o' clock being prepped on how to register delegates as they arrived, give them their pins, make sure they had a plan to meet their MPs and were in possession of timetables and tickets. The delegates themselves were a marvellous mixture of new suffragettes, keen politicos and shy adventurers. It was all rather excellent.

Then because Fate likes a little joke, a woman appeared before me waving her mobile phone and looking confused.

'My MP sent me here but I'm supposed to ask for Harriet Harman,' she explained. I asked her who her MP was. Of course, it was mine (see previous entry). The devil made me ask her when she had received her invitation from him. 'Last week,' she told me. The person responsible for the invitation was my MP, now to be formally recognised as the lying wanker, but for some reason he wasn't available and she'd be shadowing Harriet Harman instead. But the lying wanker had done this all so late and in such a slapdash manner he hadn't booked her for any of the ticketed events, nor did she have a contact for HH.

Our logistics guy told her she could just walk in to most of the seminars unless they were completely booked out, so all she had to do was check. She didn't seem to believe him, and he spent much of his beleaguered morning talking to other organisers who said the lady was just wandering around lost, not actually going to the seminars even if there were spare places. Whether or not she ever found Harriet Harman I don't know.

When my stint ended I went on to Portcullis House for the seminar that interested me. Portcullis House is over the road and round the corner from Westminster Palace. It looks like a fortress made from chimneys. The seminar started, only to be interrupted by parliamentary business bumping us from one room to another, then being informed we would have to return to one of the committee rooms back in Westminster Palace, through at least 45 minutes of security. I found myself standing outside the HoP as an MP's assistant came down to help fast track the process. This meant walking away from the palace, up Whitehall, down some innocuous looking side street, into a blank building, through more airport security, down through some tunnels with a statue of a lion on one side and a unicorn on the other, as well as a carved dragon in one overhead space, back into Portcullis House, down through more tunnels and a small outside path, and somehow dizzily ending up in the House of Commons. It was all very Alice through the Looking Glass.

Apparently Whitehall is a warren of tunnels. I shouldn't have been surprised, thinking of the Gunpowder Plot, but never knew how extensive they were. We found ourselves wandering through the cloisters and yes, we had our seminar in a committee room, but it had no chance in my head against the mysteries under the streets. There my head stayed for the rest of the night, and there it remains. Not sure I have any political acumen to offer, but if Westminster ever needs an ageing Lara Croft wannabe, they know where to find me.