North Down is a peculiar parliamentary constituency even by Northern Ireland’s rather odd standards. It is currently (since 2005) the only seat held by the Ulster Unionist Party, in the shape of Lady Sylvia Hermon; from 1995 to 2001 it was the only seat held by Bob McCartney’s UK Unionist Party; and from 1980 to 1995 it was the only seat held by Sir James Kilfedder’s Ulster Popular Unionist Party.

But while Kilfedder and McCartney were effectively one-man-bands with the occasional sidekick, the Ulster Unionist Party is the former party of government for the half-century of Stormont rule. It has now fallen on hard times, and lost five of its six Westminster seats in 2005 (Lady Hermon being the sole survivor). In the 2007 election from the Northern Ireland Assembly, the party came fourth in terms of first preferences, winning 18 of 108 seats with less than 15% of the vote.

Since early 2008, the UUP has been exploring closer links with Britain’s Conservative Party, who are pretty much certain to win the British election due next year. The history here is that the UUP were in fact organically part of the British Tories until the early 1970s. They then broke off that relationship. In the late 1980s, local Conservative associations were set up in Northern Ireland, and over the next few years came close to but never quite made a crebible electoral breakthrough. Their strongest area was North Down: Conservative candidates got a quarter of the votes cast for North Down’s borough council in 1989, and their local leader got 32% in the 1992 Westminster election.

Over the next few years the Northern Ireland Tories crashed and burned. The long slow death of John Major’s government and the early Blair years were not good times for the Conservative brand anywhere in the UK. After 1992 the Conservatives failed to score above 1.3% in any election, getting a handful of councillors each time.

However, this is probably a better time to be associated with the Conservative brand, given the party’s ascendancy in the mainland polls. The UUP’s veteran MEP Jim Nicholson stood in this year’s European elections with Conservative support, and actually posted a mild increase in his vote share from 2004 – 17.1% rather than 16.6%. The UUP, whose Assembly team is shockingly middle-aged and male, clearly hopes for some revitalisation from the Conservatives.

This will come at a cost. Lady Hermon, the party’s sole sitting MP, has made it clear that she is Labour in sympathy and will have nothing whatever to do with the Conservatives. The Tories in North Down, meanwhile, have selected as their candidate one Ian Parsley, who recently defected from the Alliance Party after having been their candidate in June’s European election. The DUP are waiting in the wings with Peter Weir, who was at one point in his career the UUP’s candidate for the seat (before being deselected in Lady Hermon’s favour, and subsequently defecting to the DUP). Latest reports, which may be based on no more than reading the numbers, have her considering a run as an independent, possibly with Alliance support (though I am not aware of internal Alliance thinking on that option).

So, who will win? The votes in the 2005 Westminster election, with changes from 2001 (when Alliance didn’t stand) were:

Sylvia Hermon (UUP) 16,268 (50.4% -5.6%)
Peter Weir (DUP) 11,324 (35.1%)
Alliance 2,451 (7.6%)
SDLP 1,009 (3.1% -0.3%)
Conservative 822 (2.5% +0.3%)
Independent 211 (0.7%)
Sinn Fein 205 (0.6% -0.2%)

But in the local council election on the same day, it was a different picture (NB fractional votes here because there is one electoral district equally divided between North down and a neighbouring constituency):

DUP 11,034 (34.3%)
UUP 7,343.5 (22.8%)
Alliance 4,958 (15.4%)
Independents 3,180 (9.9%)
Green 2,639 (8.2%)
Women’s Coalition 738 (2.3%)
UKUP 734 (2.3%)
PUP 651 (2.0%)
SDLP 526 (1.6%)
Conservative 353 (1.1%)

We can take it that half of those who voted Alliance at the local election, and most of those who supported the independent, Green and Women’s Coalition candidates, backed Lady Hermon for Westminster. The results of the 2007 Assembly election were pretty similar to those of the 2005 local election (changes here from the 2002 Assembly votes):

DUP 10,469 (34.1%, +10.6%)
UUP 7,280 (23.7%, -8.4%)
Alliance 3,131 (10.2%, +1.6%)
Green 2,839 (9.2%, +6.9%)
UKUP 1,806 (5.9%, -5.7%)
Inds 1,317 (4.3%)
Ind U 1,129 (3.7%, +0.2%)
SDLP 1,115 (3.6%, -1.3%)
Conservative 864 (2.8%, +1.2%)
SF 390 (1.3%, +0.4%)
PUP 367 (1.2%, +0.2%)

It’s pretty clear then that the DUP’s core vote in recent elections is 34%, and the UUP’s is 23% if Hermon is not on the ballot. It’s also clear that habitual Alliance and Green voters will be likely to peel off and support Hermon whether or not their own parties are standing; this is less true, but less important, for the SDLP and Sinn Fein. UKUP’s 5.9% in 2007 can be taken as a likely indicator of strength for Jim Allister’s hardline TUV if they choose to stand. We can also assume that the Conservative votes will all go to the joint UUP/conservative candidate if there is one.

On this basis, I think I can make the following set of predictions:

1. If Hermon is endorsed as the UUP candidate, whether or not jointly with the Conservatives, she is very likely to retain the seat.
2. If she stands as an independent, she has a pretty good chance as well. This rises to a near certainty if she is formally or informally endorsed by Alliance and the Greens. Without such an endorsement, she will need to repeat her record of pulling in non-UUP votes and also persuade at least half of the UUP’s habitual voters to abandon their party’s official candidate and support her, in order to beat the DUP who one assumes will have support in the mid-30s. If the UUP officially supports Ian Parsley, who will then be a Conservative running with UUP support, this will not be too difficult a task.
3. If Lady Hermon decides not to contest the seat at all, then it is more open. However it is pretty clear from the numbers that the DUP are ahead of the field.

This has been much discussed on Slugger O’Toole, especially here. (I see one SDLP supporter thinks that with a sufficiently split Unionist vote, the Stoops might have a chance. Bless.)

• reading_gibbon: Chapter VIII: Of the state of Persia after the restoration of the monarchy by Artaxerxes
  there are some remarkable instances, in which Zoroaster lays aside the prophet, assumes the legislator, and discovers a liberal concern for private and public happiness, seldom to be found among the grovelling or visionary schemes of superstition
  (tags: gibbon)

Long and tedious book about the disastrous Christmas celebrations of an elderly couple and their three adult children. Was probably meant to be funny in places, but I did not laugh.

October Books 12) King of Terror, by Keith Topping

I am relieved to report that King of Terror is the best Doctor Who book I have read by Keith Topping. This is faint praise, because I really did not like either Byzantium! or Ghost Ship. The prose style seemed a bit more under control here, though it still isn’t a very good book: lots of gratuitous violence, rather improbable scenes not quite involving sex (separately) for Tegan and Turlough, and peculiar unexplained irrelevancies like the Doctor’s dislike of the CIA, and Tegan’s future marriage to the rock-star son of Ian and Barbara. One to skip.

October Books 13) Imperial Moon, by Christopher Bulis

This is a different matter. Bulis has made some effort to get to grips with the Victorian boys’ adventure genre, and here we have a British expedition landing on the Moon in 1878, seen off by the Queen herself (and thus inspiring my question about steampunk the other day). There’s also a slightly contrived but not too horrible subplot of the Tardis crew crossing their own timeline, and Bulis even finds two useful things for Kamelion to do (which is two more than ever happened on television). I didn’t quite swallow the ultimate reveal about the aliens or the Doctor’s trigger-happy way of dealing with the problem, but it is at least a decent effort.

October Books 14) Superior Beings, by Nick Walters

I think this is my first book by Walters, whose Wikipedia page describes him as the author of many Doctor Who novels (where “many” apparently means “four”). He has done rather well on characterising Peri as young, vulnerable, and actually interested in botany; she is pursued as sexual prey by one non-human and then as literal prey by the nasties when they show up. The nasties are engaged on a mad religious quest as well as killing and eating passers-by, and the Doctor inevitably has to put a stop to it. It is a decent enough novel but I could have survived without quite so many scenes of brutal dismemberment, and also there was the odd annoying editorial slip.

I wouldn’t really recommend any of these three to someone other than a Doctor Who completist, and would not really recommend King of Terror to anyone at all.

The word “indigent” does not mean “native species”, it means “poor”. You were thinking of “indigenous”.

I got my jabs for my Africa trip eleven days ago, and they warned me at the hospital that I might suffer a reaction from the yellow fever one within five to ten days. Sure enough, I was groggy all last week and totally knocked out for most of Tuesday. By yesterday, though, I thought I was over it.

However I came home yesterday with a severe pain in the left biceps. Not quite where the tetanus / polio jab went in, but within a few centimetres, and I seem to remember a similar reaction to tetanus jabs before. Saw the doctor this morning who diagnosed an inflammation of the muscle (which is really a symptom rather than a condition) and prescribed industrial-strength ibuprofen. Am rather fed up with all this.

Oh dear…

The place I will be staying in the first week of November is visible on Google Earth, with photographs, at 4°50’25” N, 31°37’5″ E – reassuring to see what it looks like, though I guess the photos won’t convey the temperature.

I am thinking about which Doctor Who stories fit into the steampunk sub-genre – indeed, some of them are elderly enough to have helped inspire it. Come to think of it, the whole concept of the programme, in which the leading actor, born in the reign of Edward VII was made up to look ten years older and in control of technology centuries further advanced, is part of the cultural mix from which steampunk emerged.

One has to be careful not to just include any story with a 19th-century or early 20th-century setting. There is nothing in the least steampunkish about The Gunfighters or Timelash, for instance, despite the supposed 19th-century setting of thee one and the presence of the young H.G. Wells in the other (and one would have to stretch a long way to include Pyramids of Mars or Black Orchid). But I think it’s pretty clear that the following could be considered at least a little steampunk:

Evil of the Daleks – Victorian inventor produces time machine – what more could you want?

Talons of Weng Chiang – granted that the technology itself is not indigenous to the 19th century, but the attitude to Asian people certainly is. (And the recent Big Finish sequel, The Mahogany Murders, is definitely steampunk.)

Enlightenment – the sailing ships may be from all parts of history, and the centre of historical gravity probably nearer the 18th than 19th century, but really, I look at it and I say “steampunk!”

Tooth and Claw – rather than The Unquiet Dead, even though they both have 19th-century settings, because T&C has Queen Victoria and a telescope rather than ghosts and leaking gas.

(Imagine if The Red Fort had ever been made…)

Various thoughts about audios and books, but I’ll pause here.

• BBC NEWS | Europe | Movie star plays Georgian leader
  Andy Garcia to play Saakashvili in big-budget Holywood movie about last year’s war filmed in Tbilisi. Meanwhile Emir Kusturica will be in South Ossetia, directing a film taking the other point of view. I am not making this up.
  (tags: caucasus war films)

The author is a researcher for the Stephen Fry quiz show QI, and the book basically reads like an extended set of QI rounds about funny words in foreign languages, all mildly amusing. I spotted one spelling error – the excellent Serbian word inat is given as iant – and there may be others, but I will not be consumed by vengeful spite over it; also I imagine there is room for interpretation of some of the definitions, such as the 10 Albanian ways of describing a moustache, which to be do not seem very different from the ways we describe different moustaches in English.

Going back to spelling, I was a bit dubious of the example given of a word with five consecutive consonants – cmrlj which is Slovenian for bumble-bee – first off, “lj” is a single letter in Slovenian and second I think the “r” is basically functioning as a vowel there. (If you are trying to say it to yourself, remember that “c” is pronounced “ts”.) However there is no doubting the authenticity of the Dutch word with eight consecutive consonants, angstschreeuw – linguists may cry out in fear and horror that “ch” is a single phoneme, but it is spelt with two letters. (Again, if you are trying to say that to yourself, remember that “s” and “ch” are pronounced distinctly in Dutch, unlike in German.)

Like the TV programme it is based on, the book is a little too pleased with its own cleverness, but fun all the same.

And thank you for everything!

• Poles, Politeness and Politics in the age of Twitter – The New Adventures of Stephen Fry
  Stephen Fry apologises to Poland and has interesting thoughts on Twitter and democracy
  (tags: internet)
• What was communism? | open Democracy News Analysis
  (tags: world)

I knew Brendan Bradshaw, genial and intellectual priest and historian, while I was a student at Cambridge – indeed, I asked him to marry me, but unfortunately he wasn’t available on the day. (I will wait while you unscramble that sentence.)

I hadn’t realised how big a contribution this book had been to Irish historical studies. It is a micro-study of one policy area concentrated on a period of a few years and geographically restricted mainly to the core areas of English rule in Ireland. But he puts forward, entirely convincingly, the evidence that the suppression of the Irish monasteries was driven at least as much by local circumstances and leaders as by the demands of Henry VIII, and that in fact it was no big deal – the monasteries had long since lost their way as centres of spiritual leadership, or even providers of public welfare, and had become blocks on economic and political development. The monks were in general easily bought off, and the only demonstration of popular protest against their dissolution was the successful mobilisation of public opinion in Dublin to save Christ Church Cathedral. The policy enabled Henry VIII to pull the Gaelic lords (and the Earl of Desmond) more tightly into his project of transforming Ireland from a Lordship to a Kingdom, with considerable success.

Of course, I’m reading this as background for my own Tudor Ireland project. One James White, the recorder of Waterford, is recorded as having visited Cork in the spring of 1541 in order to help survey and dissolve the monasteries in both city and county. It’s not an uncommon name, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this is the same James White who was my direct ancestor and died of poisoning while visiting London five years later.

• Ask Nicola: trembling with rage
  Woman denied the right to comfort her dying partner because they were a same-sex couple
  (tags: sexandsexualityandgender ushealth)

I am always a bit nervous about returning to books I enjoyed when I was much younger. Will the magic survive? I had fond memories of Farmer’s four-part Riverboat series, despite the very unsatisfactory ending, and the peculiarly anal accuracy of some descriptions (“the mountains were seven miles or 11265 metres high”, if I remember correctly from one of the later books). There is a brilliant central sensawunda concept: all of humanity who ever lived (up to the year 2008, and who survived past the age of seven) are resurrected on the shores of a world-twisting river, apparently as some gigantic social anthropology experiment. Richard Burton (the explorer, not the actor) attempts to find out What Is Really Going On, aided in later volumes by Samuel Clemens / Mark Twain.

Coming back to the first book 25 years after I first read it, I am sorry to say that I found it pretty dire. Farmer is too dazzled by the audacious brilliance of his concept to actually write interesting characters or settings – one early warning is when he writes himself into the book, as Peter Joseph Frigate, to tell us just how interesting Burton is. There are numerous blunders of racial or gender sensitivity, of which the most boringly repetitive is a bizarre fixation with Hermann Göring. Extraordinarily, everyone in the world gets bacon and eggs for breakfast, steak for dinner, and marijuana to smoke in between. And yet nothing is actually resolved in plot terms in the book. I’m afraid that this goes right to the bottom of the Hugo winners on my list, keeping company with They’d Rather Be Right, Hominids, The Gods Themselves and Neuromancer.

(One problem I had with the book which I suspect is not Farmer’s fault – my memory of the original version of the erotic encounter between Burton and Alice Liddell in Chapter 8 was that they explicitly have drug-fuelled sex, but the relevant paragraphs seem to have been cut from my recently acquired 1998 Ballantine edition; is my memory of the 1971 original incorrect? Or is it a peculiar act of censorship by Ballantine/Del Rey?)

Other Hugo nominees that year were The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin, Dragonquest by Anne McCaffrey, Jack of Shadows by Roger Zelazny, and that year’s Nebula winner, A Time of Changes by Robert Silverberg. I don’t think I have read the McCaffrey; the other three are all manifestly better novels than To Your Scattered Bodies Go, but I guess lacked the sensawunda that Hugo voters like.

I haven’t been following this issue lately, so was a bit alarmed to see a tweet from Sophie in’t Veld MEP, saying that while the Liberal in the European Parliament will oppose the “three strikes” law cutting off access to the internet, the Socialists and Christian Democrats are in favour of it. Can anyone point me at the latest on this?