Received my first and, so far, only bit of election campaign literature through the door a couple of days ago.

A man called Michael Elston standing for GM Mayor.

Nothing too unusual there, surely?

So I took a look inside and... well, it starts off interestingly...

His policies include:

“No More Fines!” - Note the exclamation mark. He reckons he can rescind any type of fine being issued to GM residents.

“No More Bailiffs” - No exclamation mark here. Somehow he’s going to ban bailiffs from all of GM.

“The Right to a Fair Trial” - Getting weirder now... It’s becoming apparent he thinks the Mayor of GM has A LOT of powers.

“No More Corruption” - Seems fair enough, I suppose... Oh wait, this policy is followed by some spurious claims about Labour Party corruption which he, for reasons known only to him, introduces with “Michael Elston believes that” in quotation marks.

The actual allegations aren’t in quotation marks which just makes it all the weirder. He also wants to “remove powers to issue legal notices without due legal process”... I’m no expert but I’ll hazard a guess that, if such powers exist, they are themselves the “due legal process”

Finally: “Free TV Licence” - Seems an interesting way to blow a chunk of the budget but I suppose this is the least off the wall pledge on this page...

But there’s more!

“Involuntary Euthanasia in NHS Hospitals”

This is an odd mix of conspiracy theories, some of them seem to be downplaying COVID, others just accusing doctors of murder?

He also randomly points out a national shortage of IC Beds and ventilators.

His policy with regard to this?

He seems to want to invent the GMC.

Now for the masterpiece that is the A3 poster on the inside.

A fine example of GCSE History homework, I thought. Pictures of famous Mancs and explanations about what they did.

And then I spotted that each of these histories spuriously linked to a policy of some sort.

I won’t go over them all. There’s a lot of vague stuff like “champion Greater Manchester as a centre for the arts”

I will, however, draw your attention to this monstrosity.

It took me about three goes to understand it and I’m still not sure I do.

Huge “Magna Carta” vibes from this guy all round.

Anyway, I hadn’t thought much more about him until my postal vote came through the door today and, plot twist, he’s not even on the ballot!

It turns out he didn’t do the basic checks on his nominations and so his application to stand was rejected. https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/bureaucratic-error-spoils-bury-mans-20385375

So why are the leaflets are still going out?

My guess is he already paid for both printing and delivery costs, neither of which will have been cheap.

You’d assume he could’ve cancelled delivery a few weeks ago but, given everything else here, that might be expecting too much.

Aren’t local elections great?

THE CALENDAR!

Cannot believe I forgot to mention this so thanks to all for pointing it out.

1) We have no weekdays
2) For the life of me, I cannot work out why certain dates are coloured yellow. They’re not weekends or public holidays...