IT sounds like the start of a rather niche joke, but in fact is an attempt at summarising my top night out in St Peter Port last Wednesday…
During a five-week election campaign that ends tonight when the polls close, something in the region of 40 different events for candidates have taken place at locations across Guernsey as islanders get ready to elect a new States of Deliberation.
Having gone over to see how the neighbouring bailiwick rocks when it comes to elections, and encountered almost a quarter of the 82 people nominated at a meet-the-candidates event earlier in the day, Wednesday night offered something a bit different. For one night only, would-be States Members were offered the opportunity to take to the stage for an open-mic night at the Vault in St Peter Port.
As well as a headliner and MC, neither of whom were on the ballot paper, the Impeachable Comedy Jam featured six candidates, including four Deputies seeking re-election.
There was even a sitting member of the House of Lords on the bill, as Lord Digby Jones performed a brief turn on his adopted island, showing the poise that saw his services demanded by successive UK Prime Ministers. Lord Jones said he had given up political jokes, “as they kept getting elected”, and instead highlighted the difference between a lawyer and a pelican, one of who can’t stick its bill up its… well, you get the picture.
Sarah Hansmann Rouxel, who served as a Deputy from 2016-20 and is seeking another term this time round, is a regular at improv nights at the Vault, and after being coaxed out of her comfort zone to play touch rugby recently, she turned the tables on the person who coaxed her, Deputy Lindsay de Sausmarez.
Deputy de Sausmarez, although anxious in advance that she was just as far outside her “zone”, was confident and even performed a version of Bohemian Rhapsody featuring topical lyrics of her own. There was also a musical turn from Deputy Steve Falla, whose chosen tune Happy Christmas (War is Over) was prefaced by a hope that legal action by John Lennon’s estate wouldn’t ensue.
From guitar to charcoal as artist Ross Le Brun knocked up a caricature of the MC in just five minutes, while Deputy John Gollop, who was first elected in 1997, sparked a few chuckles with some stories from the campaign trail.
Deputy Sasha Kazantseva-Miller was the other candidate called up, delivering some caustic lines about the lamentable efforts made by fellow politicians to pronounce her name. “It’s NOT Kazakhstan,” she advised the audience. Firmly.
Arguably the best lines came from Ms Hansmann Rouxel in addressing Guernsey’s electoral system, which requires all voters to choose 38 candidates from the 82 who have put themselves forward. Island-wide voting would be better described as Infinite Monkey Voting, she said, in that a hypothetical electorate of monkeys would eventually elect a reasonable candidate.
Some voters have taken the election very seriously, turning up at events with spreadsheets to track who would end up as one of their 38 choices – “Tinder for the politically anxious” was how Ms Hansmann Rouxel described it.
Watching from the far end of the bar, nursing a pint of Guinness, several things struck me. Some politicians and candidates will do anything for publicity, but also fair play to those who fronted up here: most people would find the prospect daunting, but none of them bombed.
The hope was to get some of the younger Sarnian voters out and to engage with candidates and the election generally. It was certainly a younger crowd than the earlier, more formal event in a school assembly hall, with an average age I’d estimate at between 35 and 40.
I also kept thinking that I couldn’t imagine such an event taking place in Jersey ahead of our election on 7 June 2026. The events of the next 51 weeks may prove me wrong, but it just seems that Jersey’s politicians might not be as ready to take the risk, fearing they’d be laughed at, not laughed with.
There’d be exceptions, of course, but in general I sense our politicians take themselves a little more seriously.
WHAT about “someone from St Lucia”, as mentioned at the outset?
That was a reference to the head of the electoral observation team headed up by the Hon Alvina Reynolds, a St Lucian politician who is the president of her country’s upper house, the Senate.
Although I don’t believe the observers were actually present at the comedy jam, they were fairly conspicuous at pre-election events and there were also meetings with media representatives, one of which I sat in on.
Electoral systems come in all shapes and sizes, and the contrast between Guernsey and St Lucia is especially stark.
While voters in the bailiwick have to contend with an enormous ballot paper after wading through a 276-page “booklet” – more of a phone directory – of candidate manifestos, St Lucia has 17 electoral districts for its 180,000 population – almost three times Guernsey’s – and elects one MP for each. At the Caribbean island’s most recent election, the largest choice of candidates facing any voter was four.
That’s not to give an instant verdict about one system being better than the other. That would involve a much more in-depth study, and election observers are there to ensure the rules are abided by, however the system has been arrived at.
But it will be interesting to see what the observers – who will produce an interim assessment by the end of this week ahead of a full report due in August – conclude about island-wide voting.
It was mentioned to me, rarely positively, by so many people during a short visit that there’s no way official observers in hi-vis jackets, some of whom will spend more than a week in the island, won’t have picked up on such sentiments very quickly.
