WHEN an “interest” in electoral reform becomes an all-consuming, mindless obsession, take cover.

My latest email from Vote For A Change contains this nonsense:

Tom,

What rhymes with “hypocrite”?

Ed Balls is trying to convince Gordon Brown to take back the promise of a referendum on electoral reform being put in to law before this spring’s election.

Bad, right? It gets worse: Balls recognises our system’s broken. He is in favour of change. He’s just not willing to work for it, because he’s afraid a referendum will hurt Labour’s electoral chances.

We’ve got to bring the message home to Balls: we won’t stand for his obstruction of the reform we so badly need.

So we’re putting up a billboard in Balls’ Normanton constituency, telling him exactly what we think of his opposition to a referendum. And we need your help to come up with a slogan for it.

Your slogan idea can be rhyming, pithy, cutting, or earnest – all your brilliant ideas are welcome.

Willie Sullivan

The email comes from Willie Sullivan, who is not only a former employee of the Scottish Labour Party, but is also a serving Labour councillor in Fife. The only reason this strange organisation could be erecting a billboard in Normanton at this time is to try to cause Ed Balls some electoral difficulties – as revenge, I assume, for his eminently sensible position on electoral reform. So a Labour councillor is actively campaigning to undermine a Labour cabinet minister in his own constituency in the run-up to a general election just because the cabinet minister in question has a slightly greater sense of proportion on a particular policy issue than does Vote For A Change. A Labour councillor publicly calling a Cabinet minister a hypocrite? What the hell’s going on?

Maybe I can answer my own question.

LibDems tend to be able to support electoral reform without looking any more wild-eyed and crazed than usual, because it’s just one of their many wild-eyed and crazy policies. It’s just part of the furniture in CrazyTown, Bonkersshire, so no-one pays very much attention; everyone expects you to support it if you’re a LibDem – in fact, you would be deemed rather odd if you didn’t.

In the Labour Party, however, support for electoral reform is very much a minority sport, so those who feel deeply about it tend to be on the obsessive wing of the party. Pretty soon, everything else (growing the economy, improving pensions, the health service, schools, childcare, that sort of thing) becomes unimportant compared with the One Great Truth. And I’ll give you a beautiful example of that.

In the run-up to the 1992 election, David Cairns, now the MP for Inverclyde, had a conversation with a woman whose name I shall not divulge – let’s simply refer to her as “Mad Mrs McMad”. She was lecturing David on the evils of the corrupt first-past-the-post system which resulted, she claimed, in Labour not even bothering to campaign in “safe” Tory seats. It even resulted, Mrs McMad continued indignantly, in Labour putting up black candidates in places like Wimbledon! (Kingsley Abrams stood for Labour in Wimbledon in 1992.)

So focussed was Mrs McMad on her own pet obsession that she failed to have any self-awareness of her own ignorance and racism. I doubt if she remains a member of my party today. I hope not, anyway.

But that’s what happens when you start to believe that an issue, rather than your party, is the most important thing. Willie Sullivan is a Labour councillor, not because he’s Willie Sullivan, but because he had the words “Labour Party” next to his name. I hope he remembers that before he starts trying to undermine Labour MPs about to fight a crucial election.

Because victory in that election is a hell of a lot more important to the people Willie claims to represent than his silly little policy ever will be.